Uncle Rupert's underpants gnomes

Gawain Towler has penned an interesting article outlining Reform's internal professionalisation process. A lot of it reads like managerial bollocks centred on processes rather than actual ideas. But even if we take Towler at his word, there is one small problem. To the not-so-casual observer, there is no outward evidence of this professionalisation. Towler is confusing house-training with professionalisation (two very different things).

Watching Farage publicly undermine his own spokesmen suggests its the same shambles it's always been. Reform can manicure a public image of professionalism, and employ state of the art campaigning methods but it still gives houseroom to the likes of Richard Tice who couldn't be left to run a bath unsupervised. I simply do not believe these people would have the first idea how to fix Britain.

But if that’s true of Reform then it goes double for Restore. What both parties have in common is that they’re both marketing operations but they don’t have a product to sell. The electorate are prospective buyers of a future government, and will be asking themselves if any of these people have what it takes to run a country.

On that score, it doesn’t matter if I agree with 90% of what they say. I simply cannot envisage any of them in government. I don’t don’t think they know what they’re doing, and in fact, I know they don’t know what they’re doing. They give the game away virtually every time they open their mouths. Populists believe that Number Ten is a some sort of signal box where you press buttons and things happen. You simply turn up to work and start barking at civil servants to get things done.

I contrast this with the approach of Badenoch’s Tories. I confess I am not especially enthusiastic about the prospect of Badenoch becoming PM, but it’s clear there’s a structure to her approach. On two major occasions now she has set out her diagnosis and instructed her heavyweights to go away and come up with policy. I think she’s starting off on the wrong premise with her latest hobby horse of integration, but what comes out of her policy process will at least deserve an airing. If even sixty seconds of thought goes into her policies, it’s sixty seconds more than those of Rupert Lowe.

As such, I believe Badenoch could at least put a functioning government together. It might not accomplish even a quarter of what I’d like to see but some progress is better than nothing. Experience counts for something. I’m certainly leaning in the direction of voting for the incumbent Tory for no other reason than to keep a decent constituency MP. I don’t want a Rupert Lowe clone who spends all his time harvesting likes on social media.

I strongly suspect what we’re seeing from Rupert Lowe is little more than displacement activity. He’s harvesting the likes on social media because he simply has no idea what else to do. As I remarked the other day, it’s an exercise in stock pumping. That, though is the easy bit. Restore has had its initial sugar rush, where everyone who engages with politics online has now heard of Lowe’s intentions, and everyone who was going to register their support probably has already. The question now is how that’s converted into something more than a paper tiger.

This is where it could easily fall into the same trap as Reform and Advance, where all the thought goes into marketing strategy or party machinery, while no thought goes into the actual product.

Here it’s worth setting out what the product is. You’re trying to sell voters on the idea that you, and you alone, can fix the country. To do that you need the right people and the right ideas. It’s the whole package you’re selling.

This is why I’m not sold on Reform. Looking at the constituent parts, we have a gaping chasm where policy should be and an organisation that still couldn’t withstand the departure of its leader. Knock Farage out of the game and you’re left with Shifty Yusuf, Richard Tice and a pack of failed Tories. Meanwhile Restore has right wing Jeremy Corbyn and a couple of young academic henchmen. If Uncle Rupe croaks or swans off to sunnier climes, there is no intellectual product and no people left to defend it. Just a collection of the leader’s tweets.

Contrast that with the Tories, where they could kick out Mrs Badenoch after the party conference but they’d still have their collective campaigning works and some passable policy another leader could press home. It goes a long way to explaining why the Tories have lasted as long as they have, and why there are still people around who will defend them. Ultimately this is why I’m not jumping aboard the Restore bandwagon. It’s a big, noisy carnival float but it has no engine to pull it along.