Don't get your hopes up for 2029

I can always rely on Allister Heath to provide a concise summary of what I’ve been saying for the last six months or so. His latest piece in the Telegraph is one such example - in which he argues that the odds of a Right-wing reformist government being elected are only 50-50.

This is point I made on Nick Dixon’s Current Thing. The next election looks unreadable at this point. Even with a healthy lead in the voter intention polls, electoral dynamics being what they are, Reform doesn’t have a majority in the bag, and even if it does, it will have limited political capital. Any chance of turning things around in 2029 is slim.

Heath remarks that “Our revival requires an unlikely sequence of events: an early dissolution of Parliament, the election of a Right-wing government with a solid majority, a hostile takeover of the British state and the implementation of a radical programme of change. It would not quite take a miracle, but almost”.

He goes on to say “Reform and the Tories could tear one another to shreds, and let in a Labour-Green-Independent Corbynites-Lib Dem-SNP-Plaid Cymru coalition of chaos: time for a one-way trip to Heathrow. Or imagine a Right-wing government did win, but it was unprepared, suffered a revolt of the Blob and ended the way of Liz Truss”. If the Right wants to win, says Heath, it needs to work much harder. This must start with a dispassionate analysis of the polling, which is ambiguous.

“YouGov, the least positive towards Reform, puts it at 27 per cent and the Tories at 17 per cent, totalling 44 per cent. This implies a small Leftwards shift since 2019. Ipsos, by contrast, puts Reform at 33 per cent and the Tories at 16, totalling 49 per cent for the centre-Right, back to the stunning combined Tory-Ukip result of 2015.

Which is correct? Would Farage win a majority, or would it be a hung parliament? How important will tactical voting be on both sides? What about differential turnout? Nobody knows. It’s not good enough to assume that the Left will be more divided than the Right, or that the Greens will destroy Labour. The Right can’t afford complacency.

Some Tory MPs – I’m told at least five and perhaps even 15 – would refuse to serve in a Reform-led Government, or be so Left-wing as to neuter it from the inside. Then there will be vetting fails: 10-20 Reform MPs will surely quit or be thrown out of the party in short order. To survive for the duration, the centre-Right parties will need to start off with a nominal majority of at least 50.

Winning, though, would just be the first step, says Heath.

The mission would be extraordinarily ambitious: to change Britain as much as Margaret Thatcher and Clement Attlee (minus the socialism) combined, but in just one term, facing drastically different constraints. Attlee benefited from Britain’s war economy, making his statism feel seamless. Thatcher faced vicious opposition from unions and Left-wing intellectuals, but officialdom was still largely loyal to the democratically elected PM of the day. The Tories have to tackle their Left-wing refuseniks and be prepared to work with Farage. Reform needs to launch a 500-day countdown to a general election; the emphasis should be on five Ps – people, planning, policy, purse and pluck. The last two – fundraising and raw politics – will come naturally. The top three are tough.

Populist parties require a counter-elite to implement their agenda, or else they are destroyed on contact with reality. Reform must line up another 30-40 high-quality Cabinet, or senior adviser-level, personalities over the next year, to add to today’s half a dozen or so (the latest highly promising addition is Alan Mendoza, an anti-Putin and anti-Islamist campaigner who will serve as chief adviser on global affairs).

This must come in addition to 400 excellent parliamentary candidates for winnable seats, 350 great nominees to the House of Lords, a couple of hundred high-quality ministerial advisers, and hundreds of other sound appointments to transform the civil service, regulators and agencies. That’s on top of thousands of council candidates.

This is where Heath drifts into the realms of fantasy. Populism doesn’t attract serious people. In fact, it makes for an uneasy alliance of competing cohorts whose differences are irreconcilable - as per the Brexit coalition of 2019. Then, of course, there’s the Farage factor. Farage not only doesn’t attract serious people, he actively repels them. As to “excellent parliamentary candidates for winnable seats” they simply don’t exist, and if they did, they wouldn’t join Reform.

I do agree that Reform needs a higher calibre of candidate rather than the paper candidates selected for the 2024 election, but there would need to be some kind of overarching strategy in recognition that repairing the functioning of state will require active MPs doing serious work in select committees - and must be selected according to their experience and relevant skills. But that won’t happen. It just won’t.

Heath does note that “It’s the greatest HR task ever to face a political party”. Reform, he says, “will have to poach more top Tory MPs – why the delay? – and headhunt lawyers, chief executives, doctors, scientists and entrepreneurs who are desperate to do their bit to save Britain. The recruits will need to understand the golden rule – Farage is the boss, but he will delegate. If Reform can’t hire the right personnel, it will fail”.

And therein lies the problem. Farage *is* the boss - and he likes his entourage to be loyalists. As such, they tend to be lightweight intellects, generally not very bright, and an extension of his own aversion to detail and seriousness.

The penultimate paragraph is where Heath’s piece falls apart completely.

The next task will be detailed planning for power, focused on decapitating the Blob. Thousands of pages of legislation – as well as orders in council and other changes – will need to be pre-drafted, ready to be rammed through. The Civil Service should have to report to elected politicians on day one. There will need to be a strategy to deal with lawfare, and to ensure Parliament’s supremacy is respected. The process of pulling out of the ECHR and other agreements will need to be started immediately, as will the repeal of key domestic legislation. Relations are likely to break down with the EU, requiring an early renegotiation. Maintaining the confidence of the financial markets will be paramount.

The restorationist agenda is no small feat. Put simply, it is beyond the abilities of the populist right - even with a bit of adult supervision. They need Nick Timothys but they’ll get Lee Andersons.

Moreover, the best thinking on the right falls far short of adequate. We have seen this in the ruminations of Braverman and Wolfson on the matter of ECHR withdrawal. They’ve only looked at it from the legal feasibility angle, without being honest with themselves about the many political obstacles, and all the ways it could go horribly wrong.

This is the precise thinking I’ve been doing over the last year or so, and concluded that, on balance, it really wasn’t worth the bother. I think the answer lies in clever statecraft rather than sweeping grand gestures. But grand gestures are politically popular on the right. Statecraft is a dead art.

Consequently, the right will rush headlong into every ambush and crash into the reality barrier. ECHR exit stands every chance of being derailed over Northern Ireland, particularly if we’re then looking to unpick the EU withdrawal agreement and other instruments of international law.

I still maintain that the immigration problems can be addressed exclusively through domestic reforms. Provisionally, it looked like Shabana Mahmood was serious about this, but it transpired she intends to toughen up the rules for asylum seekers, but to expedite their regularisation - thereby defeating the point. Establishing the principle, though, that refuge is supposed to be temporary is within the scope of the relevant international conventions - and repair of the appeals system is entirely within our gift.

I take the view that if we are to embark on any of what Heath outlines (and I am not convinced of the wisdom) then it will have to wait for a second term. As when Cameron scraped in with coalition in 2010, they will have to build the political capital and the mandate for more ambitious reforms with a clear majority of their own. In their first term, a Reform-Tory coalition will have to prove its basic fitness to hold office. If, though, your entire shtick is that nothing can happen until we leave the ECHR, then you’ll charge into the jaws of death on day one and get yourself into a mess before you even get the chance to make improvements.

Ultimately, this stands to be a repeat of Brexit, where the right is woefully underprepared, fails to anticipate the ambushes, and does not plan accordingly. Consequently, we end up with messy compromises that don’t deliver - ensuring there is no second term and a wild swing to the left.

The other problem is that while populist policies may be popular, they often do not work. Real world complications usually mean they do not net the intended result and governments find they have overpromised. While Zia Yusuf thinks there are billions to be shaved from public spending, he will find this is easier said than done, and that some of the savings he outlines just don’t exist. You can cut the foreign aid budget to zero but then find that you actually need it.

As I have found through my work on the manifestoproject.org, there are solutions to our problems, but it’s going to take investment, vision and precision interventions. If the right is going to get anywhere, it must rise above populist slop. That, though, is not going to happen on Farage’s watch. As such Heath’s pessimistic estimations look to be wildly optimistic.