It's still a month to polling day, but the Conservative Party's civil war has already kicked off

From the Guardian this evening:

Jeremy Hunt has warned the Conservatives that elections are won from the centre ground, amid fears that the party could lurch to the right in response to Nigel Farage’s return to frontline politics.

In an interview with the Guardian, the chancellor suggested the party must remain a “broad church” despite concerns that Reform UK could cost the Tories as many as 60 seats at the general election.

It's several years too late, but at least Hunt has said something about his party's rapid journey to a strange planet many light years away. 

But Margaret Thatcher called moderate Tories "wets" for a reason. 

In his Guardian interview, says the paper, Hunt:

hinted that the party could promise to try to “reform” the ECHR instead, rather than withdraw entirely.

“We need to be able to have control of our borders. That has to be decided by elected politicians, accountable to voters through parliament, not by foreign courts,” he said. 

“You’ll need to wait on [the manifesto] but I think what we would all like to see is reform of the ECHR.”

This concedes three-quarters of the Reform case before any debate has begun. He's going to have to fight harder than that if he wants to save a recognisable Conservative Party.

GUEST POST So far this year, 49 councillors have left the Tories and 42 have left Labour

Augustus Carp gives his latest bulletin on councillors who have changed party. Individually, these moves may be insignificant, but the overall totals do show which way the tide is running.

It’s odd the things that political journalists think important, isn’t it? On Saturday evening a somewhat obscure Suffolk MP crosses the floor, and it’s headline news. Meanwhile, nearly 100 councillors have defected since the New Year, and it barely gets a mention in their local paper.

Obviously, the actions of a former health minister have more immediate impact than those of a sometime chair of the highways and byways subcommittee on Slagthorpe Borough Council, but the cumulative effect of numerous small-scale defections might, on balance, be rather more significant.

So far this year there have been net defections of 49 Conservative councillors, 42 Labour, 1 Lib Dem, 5 Greens and 2 Nationalists. The balancing figure is a net increase of 99 'Independents', broadly defined.

There are only 12 examples of councillors defecting directly from one political party to another - five prefiguring Dan Poulter MP and moving from Conservative to Labour, four from Conservative to Lib Dem, one from Lib Dem to Labour and one each from the Conservatives and Labour to the Greens.

My thesis is a simple one: a councillor defecting from a political party means that they will be less likely to vote - and, more importantly, to work - for that party at a general election. Their families and friends might withdraw from the fray as well, and their local knowledge of their ward will be lost to the party they formerly represented.

Does it matter? Well, that depends on how important you think leafleting, canvassing and sitting outside polling stations might be for a parliamentary election. A winning team in a close contest needs to expend thousands of volunteer hours, a process which is very difficult to organise, manage and motivate.

Perhaps that’s why some bright young things would rather try to maximise support and get voters to the polling stations via social media alone, but personally I still think a bit of physical effort is required.

The well-reported mass defections of Labour councillors have continued this year, notably the 10 in Pendle. This action has been replicated on a smaller scale elsewhere, with some Labour defectors expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s position on Gaza and other, undefined, 'leadership issues'.

As a consequence, several new, ostensibly 'Independent' groups have been established in some authorities by ex-Labour councillors. Meanwhile, Reform, the People’s Party and Alba have all attracted new converts, but they remain scarce.

The local election results on Thursday and Friday will no doubt overshadow Mr Poulter’s resignation, and all of those tallied above, but it might not be long before pressures, personalities and politics create fissures in the newly elected council groups.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Reform UK sorry for not knowing York candidate had died

Of course BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award, but the judges drew this paragraph in the report to my attention:

The spokesperson said: "The simple fact is that we have removed upwards of 50 candidates for complete inactivity and I know those who had been removed for disciplinary measures."

This suggests that Reform UK are not going to able to fight much of a ground war come the general election.

The Joy of Six 1207

Gaby Hinsliff reviews Tom Baldwin's biography of Keir Starmer: "The kind of overly simplistic working-boy-made-good stories politicians are coached to tell about themselves on the campaign trail invariably hide complicated subplots, in this case about those who will always be vulnerable or left behind in the most upwardly mobile families. If Keir Starmer still seems frustratingly hard to pigeonhole, maybe that’s ultimately our problem, not his."

"In almost every recent by-election, Reform have underperformed compared to what the Brexit Party's vote share in 2019 and current national voting intention would predict," say Paula Surridge and Sophie Stowers.

"Benefit sanctions imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions have become harsher amid the cost of living crisis, according to newly released government data - with the average penalty lasting a week longer in 2023 than in 2019," reports Chaminda Jayanetti.

Anthony Broxton on how middle-class voters fell out of love with Clement Attlee's Labour Party after 1945.

Polly Pullar celebrates the revival of the pine marten: "From a once detested varmint that polarised people’s perceptions, to an ambassador for an ecologically richer Scotland, the pine marten offers a glimpse into what else might be possible with a change in our attitudes."

"For two long decades, Australian rugby has rotted from its head office to its heartland. The once-proud and powerful code is fractured in so many places, in so many ways, few believe it can be rebuilt." Angus Fontaine dissects the crisis in Australian rugby union.

Photo by Dani Kropivnik

News from the Wellingborough front line: Reform candidate finds lots of support in the wrong constituency

At lunchtime today Ben Habib, the Reform candidate in the Wellingborough by-election, tweeted a short video to tell us how well polling day was going for him.

He commented in particular on the number of cars that tooted at his campaign bus as they passed.

Perhaps those cars were trying to tell him something? Because Habib was campaigning in Irthlingborough, which is in the Corby constituency.

I think you have to be logged into Twitter to see an embedded tweet these days, so I've put Habib's tweet at the bottom of this post rather than the top. I hope at least some of you will see it. 

That's Irthlingborough's impressive church above - thanks to Kate Cronin for this story.

Fantastic morning on the campaign trail.

Big chance to send a message to Westminster today, by voting for change — @benhabib6 !

Polling stations are open until 10pm 🕙 🗳️#BackBenHabib 🇬🇧 @reformparty_uk pic.twitter.com/bxwphdCEGU

— Ben Habib for Wellingborough (@BackBrexitBen) February 15, 2024

The Joy of Six 1193

Matthew Pennell uncovers the roots of the Post Office Horizon scandal: "The political origins for Horizon date back to 1994, with the idea of computerising payments and moving away from Girocheques being proposed by Social Security Minister Peter Lilley. It needs to be understood, however, that a brand new IT system for the Post Office and DSS fitted in perfectly with the New Labour ethos of using tech to transform anything and everything."

"The thing is ... this is not a new story. It’s a fairly old one, and in 2019, [Epstein victim Sarah] Ransome told New Yorker writer Connie Bruck that not only did she not have the tapes, but that she invented their existence." Robyn Pennacchia refuses to be excited by the dump of Epstein files.

"It is unclear whether pints were ever available on the shelves of British shops, as opposed to direct supply, and, however supplied, it seems as if they had disappeared well before Britain joined the EU." Those near-mythical pint bottles of champagne are a good symbol of the wholly nonsensical and imaginary idea of sovereignty, itself predicated on a nineteenth century view of Britain and the world, that is shared by Brexit supporters, argues Chris Grey.

Vince Cable warns us not to underestimate the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

A report from Foundation for Common Land describes the results of heritage work carried out with volunteers on the Stiperstones during Autumn 2023. It focussed on Bronze Age cairns in the south of the site and the remains of post-Medieval smallholdings in the north.

Sarah Bertram presents a video obituary of the great JPR Williams.

Lib Dems score best opinion poll rating the 2019 general election

You won't catch Liberal England making too much of a single opinion poll, but it's hard not to be encouraged by Redfield & Wilton Strategies’ latest.

Labour 41% (-4)

Conservative 29% (+1)

Liberal Democrat 16% (+4)

Reform UK 5% (-2)

Green 4% (–)

Scottish National Party 3% (+1)

Other 1% (–)

The figure in brackets is the percentage change since the company's 30 April poll.

This is the Lib Dems highest rating in an opinion poll since the 2019 general election. I can't see exactly when the groundwork for this poll was carried out, but it must have been last week.

As this was a week of great Lib Dem activity and favourable publicity for the party, it would have been a disappointment if we hadn't gone up in the polls,

One swallow doesn't make a silk purse, but this poll may point to the end of an odd period when the Conservative vote has collapsed yet the Lib Dem vote has barely risen.

Reform thinks the Tories are bound to lose the next election

Embed from Getty Images

Richard Tice announced yesterday that his Reform party would put up a candidate in every constituency at the nest general election. 

There will, he said, be no deals with the Conservatives, even where a sitting Tory MP holds similar views to Reform.

From which we can conclude that Tice thinks the Tories will lose that election, with or without intervention from Reform. 

So his best bet of being relevant afterwards is if disappointed Tory members decide they lost because of Reform and then demand that their party moves further to the right to attract Reform voters.

But it's far from clear that, without the issue of Brexit, Reform will be able to attract enough voters for that strategy to work.

And there's another problem. The voters Reform could attract will probably be looking for some protection from the market, whereas the party's leadership wants to give them more market and give it to them good and hard.

If Labour thinks it worth exposing this contradiction, the electorate may be more willing to listen than they were in the Ukip days, even though that party was similarly broken backed.