Latest news with #DominicCummings
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Conservatives are not yet finished, but they can no longer delay their next reinvention
Listen! Can you hear the death rattle of the world's oldest political party? Of the five most recent opinion polls, one has the Conservatives on 19 per cent, one on 17 and three on 16. It is starting to look as if the Tories might, in Dominic Cummings's curious Durham/Palo Alto idiolect, 'have crossed the event horizon'. Political expiry comes suddenly. France's Gaullists had been the leading party on the Right for half a century when they were displaced by Marine Le Pen. At the last election, they won just eight per cent of the seats. And France's voting system at least allows smaller parties some parliamentary representation. Britain's, by contrast, keeps them out. What if the scales are tipping? What if first-past-the-post, for so long a Conservative prop, has become the party's doom? 'Vote Tory, get Labour,' say Reform supporters, gleefully turning the Conservatives' old argument against them. How might Kemi Badenoch avoid extinction? Hoping that Nigel Farage implodes is not a strategy. The Reform leader has always been an astute tactician and, as the years have passed, he has become tougher and more disciplined. Frankly, though, even if he were caught out in some monstrous scandal, his supporters, Maga-like, would dismiss it as a Deep State smear. In the end, the Conservatives can come back only by playing to their old strengths: sound money, balanced budgets, sustainable growth, economic aspiration. In parallel, they need to cauterise the immigration wound that caused their support to leak away in the first place. Apologising for what went before is a start, but they must also show that they have a plan to secure our frontiers – a plan that goes beyond leaving the ECHR, which both sides have turned into a shibboleth. Labour cretinously likens pulling out to Nazism, as though not wanting prisoners to have the vote were comparable to invading Czechoslovakia. Reform, meanwhile, treats withdrawal as a magic spell that would stop the boats. But quitting the ECHR won't remove our own Left-wing judges who, without the hassle of getting themselves elected, legislate from the bench. In these pages last month, the former Conservative and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell offered a considered plan to deal with immigration, including letting the Lord Chancellor fire activist judges. Whether the Tories opt for his scheme or a different one, they need a convincing programme, not a slogan. You might object that programmes are the last thing they need. The public, you might maintain, is in no mood for detail. Trumpy one-liners beat costed proposals. Voters, you might tell me, want to take their politicians seriously, not literally. That is why Farage, when promising his incredible tax cuts this week, cheerfully declared that 'you can probably argue that at no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought the numbers added up'. You would have a point. We live in an angry and impatient age, when the average time spent on a TikTok video is seven seconds. A chunk of the electorate wants a party that radiates anger about wokery, immigration and failing public services rather than producing plans. Just as Trumpsters never expected Mexico to pay for the wall, and don't seem bothered that it hasn't been built, so Farage calculates that British voters prefer colourful headlines to feasible policies. When he says, for example, that scrapping DEI programmes will save £7 billion (one of his MPs even claimed £35 billion), he does not expect to be taken literally. Most of the organisations that have looked into it, including the heroic TaxPayers' Alliance, find savings only in the tens or, at most, hundreds of millions. But Farage is not trying to balance the budget; he is trying to articulate anger about DEI. He has the advantage of not having been in office, and so not having had the chance to break any promises. Badenoch may have spent her political career fulminating against anti-white racism, the trans madness and identity politics in general. But, however long-standing her convictions, she can always be outbid by the taunt of 'Yeah, well you had 14 years to do something about it'. Can the Tories recover, then? If criticism of their party turns on its past behaviour rather than its present attitudes, is there anything they can do? They have reinvented themselves before. Churchill repudiated Appeasement, Thatcher buried Heathism. Boris Johnson managed to present his as a new government despite taking over between elections. But none of them had to deal with an alternative party of government on the Right. Does Badenoch, I wonder, feel the spectral weight of her predecessors' expectations? Is she haunted by Churchill's shade, his bellicose jaw set in disapproval? Does Salisbury seem to grumble from the depths of his ghostly beard? Is Disraeli's wraith composing a damning quip? And what of the earlier Tories, the country gentlemen who kept the party going through the long decades of its 18th-century proscription, men such as Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (who died in the most on-brand way possible, thrown from his horse while hunting rabbits)? Do they see three-and-a-half centuries of tradition coming to an end? Possibly. But Badenoch should not yet despair. The party of Bolingbroke and Peel has weathered worse storms. Commentators declared two-party politics dead when, after the 1962 Orpington by-election, the Liberals surged 20 points in the polls and took a string of other seats. Something similar happened in the early 1980s, when the SDP/Liberal Alliance polled above 50 per cent. The key to electoral success is seriousness. Spending cuts might not poll well, but, at the same time, most people have a sense that countries must live within their means. That sense becomes more pronounced as the effects of excessive tax and spend become palpable. By the next election, the weight of a bloated government will be unbearable. Growth will have dried up and unemployment will be rising. There may have been a bond strike, sparking an immediate budget crisis and occasioning emergency cuts and more tax rises. In any event, the betting must be that the electorate will be keener by then to have adults in charge – serious types who can say no to pressure groups, take unpopular decisions and restore order to our finances. Farage has left that space open. Promising to spend more on benefits might make electoral sense: 89 of the 98 seats where Reform came second last year are Labour held. But it does not position him as a financial saviour when the collapse comes. The Conservatives are not there either, of course. But they could be if they start putting in the work now. Their opposition to unlimited child benefit is a welcome step away from their regrettable support for the winter fuel allowance (every party has now flunked that test). If they show in the next three years that they are prepared to put long-term prosperity over immediate convenience, they might find that they are the choice for an electorate desperate to end economic chaos and return to growth. For that to happen, though, Badenoch needs to focus on the economy – something she has so far been reluctant to do. It is never a popular thing, in the abstract, to be the party of businessmen and bankers; but there are times when voters want hard-faced hommes d'affaires in charge. What if Reform ends up as the dominant party, leaving the Conservatives to fall in behind their one-man band? Even then, it would not be the end of Toryism. Canada's Reform Party swallowed the Tories in 2003; but the merged party eventually ended up being called the Conservative Party of Canada, and dates its foundation, not to 2003, but to 1867. Toryism is not so much a political programme as the expression of certain attributes and instincts: level-headedness, patriotism, tradition, self-reliance, love of order, irony, detachment. There is a reason it has been around for as long as it has; and its song is not yet sung. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Business
- Telegraph
The Conservatives are not yet finished, but they can no longer delay their next reinvention
Listen! Can you hear the death rattle of the world's oldest political party? Of the five most recent opinion polls, one has the Conservatives on 19 per cent, one on 17 and three on 16. It is starting to look as if the Tories might, in Dominic Cummings's curious Durham/Palo Alto dialect, 'have crossed the event horizon'. Political expiry comes suddenly. France's Gaullists had been the leading party on the Right for half a century when they were displaced by Marine Le Pen. At the last election, they won just eight per cent of the seats. And France's voting system at least allows smaller parties some parliamentary representation. Britain's, by contrast, keeps them out. What if the scales are tipping? What if first-past-the-post, for so long a Conservative prop, has become the party's doom? 'Vote Tory, get Labour,' say Reform supporters, gleefully turning the Conservatives' old argument against them. How might Kemi Badenoch avoid extinction? Hoping that Nigel Farage implodes is not a strategy. The Reform leader has always been an astute tactician and, as the years have passed, he has become tougher and more disciplined. Frankly, though, even if he were caught out in some monstrous scandal, his supporters, Maga-like, would dismiss it as a Deep State smear. In the end, the Conservatives can come back only by playing to their old strengths: sound money, balanced budgets, sustainable growth, economic aspiration. In parallel, they need to cauterise the immigration wound that caused their support to leak away in the first place. Apologising for what went before is a start, but they must also show that they have a plan to secure our frontiers – a plan that goes beyond leaving the ECHR, which both sides have turned into a shibboleth. Labour cretinously likens pulling out to Nazism, as though not wanting prisoners to have the vote were comparable to invading Czechoslovakia. Reform, meanwhile, treats withdrawal as a magic spell that would stop the boats. But quitting the ECHR won't remove our own Left-wing judges who, without the hassle of getting themselves elected, legislate from the bench. In these pages last month, the former Conservative and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell offered a considered plan to deal with immigration, including letting the Lord Chancellor fire activist judges. Whether the Tories opt for his scheme or a different one, they need a convincing programme, not a slogan. You might object that programmes are the last thing they need. The public, you might maintain, is in no mood for detail. Trumpy one-liners beat costed proposals. Voters, you might tell me, want to take their politicians seriously, not literally. That is why Farage, when promising his incredible tax cuts this week, cheerfully declared that 'you can probably argue that at no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought the numbers added up'. You would have a point. We live in an angry and impatient age, when the average time spent on a TikTok video is seven seconds. A chunk of the electorate wants a party that radiates anger about wokery, immigration and failing public services rather than producing plans. Just as Trumpsters never expected Mexico to pay for the wall, and don't seem bothered that it hasn't been built, so Farage calculates that British voters prefer colourful headlines to feasible policies. When he says, for example, that scrapping DEI programmes will save £7 billion (one of his MPs even claimed £35 billion), he does not expect to be taken literally. Most of the organisations that have looked into it, including the heroic TaxPayers' Alliance, find savings only in the tens or, at most, hundreds of millions. But Farage is not trying to balance the budget; he is trying to articulate anger about DEI. He has the advantage of not having been in office, and so not having had the chance to break any promises. Badenoch may have spent her political career fulminating against anti-white racism, the trans madness and identity politics in general. But, however long-standing her convictions, she can always be outbid by the taunt of 'Yeah, well you had 14 years to do something about it'. Can the Tories recover, then? If criticism of their party turns on its past behaviour rather than its present attitudes, is there anything they can do? They have reinvented themselves before. Churchill repudiated Appeasement, Thatcher buried Heathism. Boris Johnson managed to present his as a new government despite taking over between elections. But none of them had to deal with an alternative party of government on the Right. Does Badenoch, I wonder, feel the spectral weight of her predecessors' expectations? Is she haunted by Churchill's shade, his bellicose jaw set in disapproval? Does Salisbury seem to grumble from the depths of his ghostly beard? Is Disraeli's wraith composing a damning quip? And what of the earlier Tories, the country gentlemen who kept the party going through the long decades of its 18th-century proscription, men such as Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (who died in the most on-brand way possible, thrown from his horse while hunting rabbits)? Do they see three-and-a-half centuries of tradition coming to an end? Possibly. But Badenoch should not yet despair. The party of Bolingbroke and Peel has weathered worse storms. Commentators declared two-party politics dead when, after the 1962 Orpington by-election, the Liberals surged 20 points in the polls and took a string of other seats. Something similar happened in the early 1980s, when the SDP/Liberal Alliance polled above 50 per cent. The key to electoral success is seriousness. Spending cuts might not poll well, but, at the same time, most people have a sense that countries must live within their means. That sense becomes more pronounced as the effects of excessive tax and spend become palpable. By the next election, the weight of a bloated government will be unbearable. Growth will have dried up and unemployment will be rising. There may have been a bond strike, sparking an immediate budget crisis and occasioning emergency cuts and more tax rises. In any event, the betting must be that the electorate will be keener by then to have adults in charge – serious types who can say no to pressure groups, take unpopular decisions and restore order to our finances. Farage has left that space open. Promising to spend more on benefits might make electoral sense: 89 of the 98 seats where Reform came second last year are Labour held. But it does not position him as a financial saviour when the collapse comes. The Conservatives are not there either, of course. But they could be if they start putting in the work now. Their opposition to unlimited child benefit is a welcome step away from their regrettable support for the winter fuel allowance (every party has now flunked that test). If they show in the next three years that they are prepared to put long-term prosperity over immediate convenience, they might find that they are the choice for an electorate desperate to end economic chaos and return to growth. For that to happen, though, Badenoch needs to focus on the economy – something she has so far been reluctant to do. It is never a popular thing, in the abstract, to be the party of businessmen and bankers; but there are times when voters want hard-faced hommes d'affaires in charge. What if Reform ends up as the dominant party, leaving the Conservatives to fall in behind their one-man band? Even then, it would not be the end of Toryism. Canada's Reform Party swallowed the Tories in 2003; but the merged party eventually ended up being called the Conservative Party of Canada, and dates its foundation, not to 2003, but to 1867. Toryism is not so much a political programme as the expression of certain attributes and instincts: level-headedness, patriotism, tradition, self-reliance, love of order, irony, detachment. There is a reason it has been around for as long as it has; and its song is not yet sung.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Business
- Spectator
Will the economy save the Tories?
This week Dominic Cummings said the Tories may have 'crossed the event horizon'. He was trying to find a tech bro way of saying the game is up: they're finished as an electoral force and it's only Labour, Reform and the Lib Dems still in play. But might the Tories have one last chance? If they do, that chance will come from the economy. Next week the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, will try to make the case for the Tories being the party of economic responsibility in a keynote speech to the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. 'Our country faces significant and increasing challenges both at home and abroad,' he will say. 'Challenges that will require a far stronger economy if they are to be met. An economy that can only be delivered through a radical rewiring.' This won't be a speech announcing new policies, a Conservative source tells me, but will instead set out 'the direction of travel, in stark contrast to Farage's fantasy economics'.
The Sun
3 days ago
- Business
- The Sun
You can tell PM is scared of Farage…he took jacket off and was in serious mode when he launched latest salvo against him
YOU can always tell when a politician wants us to take them seriously. They take off their jacket and tie, roll up their shirt sleeves and stand in front of an impressively big bit of factory machinery, in the desperate hope that, as they read an autocue in front of cameras, they look more down-to-earth and honest. 6 6 It's a gimmick that rarely convinces voters, but we absolutely KNOW that Sir Keir Starmer was in 'serious mode' when he did just that to launch his latest salvo against Nigel Farage. The Prime Minister, despite having a whopping great majority of 165 MPs and four more years in office before the next general election, appears to be remarkably agitated by the potential threat posed by a man who leads a party with just five MPs. Smell desperation Indeed, barely a speech, or an interview or a PMQs now passes without Keir talking about Nigel. But while the PM pretends to laugh at the Reform leader, often treating him with undisguised contempt, it is obvious to everyone that Starmer is now a VERY worried man. It's not just Reform's first place in the opinion polls that scares Keir, or even the party's victory in the recent local elections and seizing one of Labour's safest seats. It's also the prospect that Farage is seeking advice from proven campaigners including Dominic Cummings. The Vote Leave chief, who led the Brexit vote and the architect of Boris Johnson's 2019 victory, claimed this week that Farage could 'definitely' become Prime Minister at the next election if he follows his advice, saying: 'Reform has been a one-man band, it's been Nigel and an iPhone,' but now it's time to make a proper plan for government. Not surprisingly, Labour are throwing everything they can at Farage but, so far, nothing is sticking. They've tried calling him a far-right bigot, and that didn't work. They dismissed him as a posh public schoolboy and ex-City trader, who doesn't care about ordinary Brits. But that didn't work either. So the latest tactic is to tell us that Reform's numbers don't add up. Starmer dismissed Farage's economic plans — announced to much fanfare on Tuesday — as 'fantasy' policies and 'a mad experiment' that will result in a Liz Truss -style economic meltdown. You can almost smell the desperation coming from Labour as they seek to head off Farage's turquoise army at the pass. 6 Certainly, Farage's pledge to bring back Winter Fuel Payments for all pensioners will be a very popular policy across the political spectrum. And more generous tax breaks for married couples would appeal to many families with young children. But his plan to scrap the two-child benefit cap is a sop too far to the left for many Reform supporters — and probably wouldn't help a single child in poverty. His 'ambition' to raise the personal tax allowance from £12,571 up to £20,000 a year, pulling millions of people on low wages out of tax altogether, is laughably unaffordable at upwards of £50billion a year. All that said, voters know it's a bit rich for Starmer to criticise Reform for uncosted policies when he himself happily backed Jeremy Corbyn's free-spending manifestos in the 2017 and 2019 elections — and indeed his own manifesto costings in 2024 were a fairytale fiction. Not to mention the small matter of Labour's Net Zero target for 2050 coming with an unaffordable price tag of seemingly more than £1trillion. Fraught with problems Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the Conservatives are getting openly jittery at how Farage, not the Tory's Kemi Badenoch, is increasingly viewed as the official Leader of the Opposition. The local elections proved that Reform is now appealing to both Labour and Tory voters. 6 That presents its own difficulties for Farage because trying to be 'all things to all men' is fraught with problems. Every policy that will appeal to one set of voters may also put off the other side. Yet when the Prime Minister is worried enough about Farage to go on the telly to attack Reform's policies, instead of announcing his own, it shows the upstart party's main man is leading the political agenda, not Keir. The next general election may still be four long years away, but the political rivals' shirt sleeves are well and truly rolled up ready for the fight for No 10. Khan is wrong SADIQ KHAN has called for cannabis possession to be decriminalised, insisting that the current law, which classifies it as a Class B drug, 'cannot be justified'. The Mayor of London claims the law is damaging 'community' relations because black people are more likely than whites to face police stop-and-search for suspected cannabis use. As per usual, Khan is wrong. There's plenty of evidence about the harms caused by regular cannabis use. Decriminalising possession for personal use will simply create even more demand for the organised criminals supplying the drug. We're told that the 'war on drugs' hasn't worked so we may as well give up fighting. Given that people walk freely on the streets smoking weed these days, it has not really been a hard-fought battle. If we are going to decriminalise cannabis because the law isn't being enforced, then why not decriminalise shoplifting or carrying a knife while we are at it? Maybe if we bothered to ENFORCE the law, fewer people would risk breaking it. Luvvies should blame Hamas GARY LINEKER and his celebrity chums Dua Lipa and Benedict Cumberbatch have joined 300 other luvvies to signal their virtue in a letter to the Prime Minister calling on him to 'end the UK's complicity' in Gaza. They demanded that Sir Keir Starmer ban arms sales to Israel and push for humanitarian aid and a ceasefire to save 'the children of Gaza'. 6 6 It is a tragedy that innocent people die in wars but, for some reason, the children killed in Yemen, Syria or Ukraine don't hold as much interest for righteous celebs as those in Gaza. The people complicit in the deaths of innocent children in Gaza are the Hamas terrorist leaders, who have publicly stated that they want Palestinian kids to be martyred and paraded on camera for their cause. That's why their fighters use them as human shields. If Lineker and his grand-standing mates really want to save those kids, they should publicly back Israel's military efforts to defeat Hamas and free ordinary Palestinians from their evil clutches. So don't applaud the likes of Lineker for their moral stance on Gaza. They aren't helping Gazan children, they're just fighting Hamas's propaganda war for them.
Irish Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Independent
Dominic Cummings predicts that Nigel Farage could be UK prime minister by 2029
©Evening Standard Today at 21:30 Nigel Farage could 'definitely' become UK prime minister at the next general election in four years' time, says Dominic Cummings. But the mastermind behind the 2016 Brexit campaign believes Reform UK has to build its pool of talent to get into power in 2029.
