This week, Simon Alexander MP looks on from home as his old party hold their annual conference in Birmingham
I caught Any Questions on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and Isabel Hardman was on it. She works for the Paul Marshall-owned publication that used to be called the Spectator, where she is assistant editor to the Gover; ladies (and fellas!), Michael is single now! He’s going to have a brilliant Conference, and I’ll listen out for him on the airwaves; like lichen, he’s always there, although I didn’t buy him as the PM on that recent Sky TV nonsense. Penny Mordaunt needs to get back into This Place soonish.
I didn’t realise how young Ms Hardman was; she turned 40 in May, and has already written three books. One is about the NHS on the occasion of their 75th birthday, although as per the title it remains Fighting For Life (good luck Dr Cooper). The Natural Health Service extolled the role of the great outdoors in our wellbeing, inspired by Hardman’s mental collapse, but the one I took off the shelf in my office last night was published in 2018 and has the excellent title Why We Get The Wrong Politicians.
What a good thing her immediate boss is Michael Gove, who is such a chatty Cathy that the Dead Ringers impression means that whenever I see or hear him I instantly hear Jon Culshaw’s ‘Govey Govey Govey!!’ Then I remember Govey was best mates with Dominic Cummings and I book a Specsavers appointment. Anyhow, when I put myself forward to the electorate again in 2019, I remembered much of what Ms Hardman had written, and a lot of it came to mind yesterday when I followed coverage of the 2026 Conservative Party conference, which might as well have as its theme song The Only Way Is Up.
That song was a hit in 1988, when Margaret Thatcher was entering the endgame much as how Rishi Sunak presided over the end of the 14 years of Tory rule between 2010 and 2024; or, a better comparison, when John Major’s time as PM petered out in 1997, mired by sleaze and the rise of New Labour. After the 1997 victory for young Call Me Tony, helped by the now disgraced friend of Jeffrey Epstein Peter Mandelson and the current co-host of the leading political podcast Alastair Campbell, the Grand Old Party of British politics elected great leaders and also Iain Duncan Smith to be the figurehead while Yo Blair! was waging war in Iraq. He was also opening Sure Start centres to help kids who would one day go to university; the fact that Blair’s own son has made his fortune fighting against university as the be-all and end-all is an irony not lost on my Writing APPG colleagues.
A few years ago Samuel Earle wrote the most brilliant book Tory Nation, and I periodically dip into it when I pluck it off my shelf of books. His point was that my old party, from whom I resigned during the Covid-19 pandemic which is why I am an independent MP, is born to rule and that any time in opposition is an unfortunate accident. As long as they scream at people that Labour can’t be trusted in the economy, and make us forget the Kwarteng-Truss budget of autumn 2022, they will turn the heads of the electorate.
A long time ago during the Tories’ lost noughties, Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote the book on The Strange Death of Tory England, and followed it up with the tragic pamphlet Bloody Panico in their new wilderness period. The party of Thatcher, Heseltine and Heath is now represented by (it says here) Chris Philp, Andrew Griffith and Tom Tugendhat, respectively Shadow Home Secretary, Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Foreign Secretary.
‘What?! Tug End Hat?’ Vish messaged me when he learned of the reshuffle on Bank Holiday Monday. ‘What did Priti Patel do wrong?!’
‘Where to begin…’ I replied, pleased that someone at CCHQ had made the call to replace Dame Priti, honoured for services to dropping the letter ‘g’, and Sir Mel Stride, a competent but not stellar Shadow Chancellor. Tom, who is ex-Army, has an MPhil from Cambridge and a majority of 11,000 in the seat of Tonbridge and Malling. His dad was the lawyer who represented the Beckhams when Andrew Morton wanted to bring out a warts-and-all book about them, and he also advocated for Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the famous case against Hello! Magazine. But wait, there’s more: he also overturned the superinjunction over former England men’s football captain John Terry, and he literally wrote the book on the media and privacy law.
I was keen to hear what Tommy the Tug (‘toog’) had to say at the party conference, which takes place this week in Birmingham, that bastion of Tory support (not). It’s good that they scheduled it when they did because they have no interest in the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, whose new MP will be decided on Thursday: in the green corner, the former hypnotist who didn’t pay tax on his houseboat; in the red corner, Camden Council’s best available candidate, whose birthplace is really important to Zia Yusuf, whose nickname among some Reform UK plc-ers is unprintable in a family-friendly diary entry. I expect Sagal Abdi-Wali will win by several thousand votes, providing Labour gets its voters out and uses the Burnham boost from last week’s emotive peroration.
Anyway, back to the Tories: did you know they have a secret project to take over Britain, timed uncannily to coincide with the time that the PM has to call a general election, come what may? The Policy Exchange so-called think-tank has put together Project 2029, a programme ‘to address head-on the biggest issues facing Britain’, many of them caused by the government in charge between 2010-24. I can’t remember who they were, because Will Smith shone a pen torch in my eye in about 2019.
‘Successive Governments have failed to overcome the country’s challenges. Governments of both hues have squandered their large majorities, unwilling or unable to take the decisive actions needed to properly address the biggest issues of our time. We must learn the lessons: that a failure to plan for Government in advance is fatal and that a Government must have a clear understanding of its desired outcomes.’ Sherlock, you’ve done it again.
‘An effective reforming Government will need three qualities: skill, will and courage.’ But also money from some lovely billionaires, but they can’t say that. ‘It will need a plan (not a diagnosis, but a prognosis) before the election which considers both trade-offs and downsides, a mandate from the electorate, a fiscal plan, a legislative programme and a timescale for achieving it.’ But also money from some lovely billionaires, but they can’t say that.
‘Policy Exchange will use its unique convening power to bridge party divides, bringing together outside insurgents with fresh ideas and dissident insiders with the expertise to turn them into reality, creating the coalition for radical change.’ I know it just sounds like I am repeating myself, but why don’t they mention the people who fund all of this?
Here’s where it sounds like a Telegraph doomster column: ‘The State has been captured by “stakeholder” groups who lobby for sectional interests, not the common good. Powerful Quangos, overmighty courts and overreaching legislation at home and abroad increasingly raise impediments to every aspect of public policy. National debt is at near record levels, with unfavourable fiscal projections and demographics and an increasingly challenging international security backdrop – and yet politicians are unwilling to level with the electorate about the costs of fixing it.’
Have they copied and pasted all that from previous Policy Exchange documents or old Michael Gove speeches? Even Oasis can’t play the hits forever, although that might be a bad analogy. So long as the money they aren’t mentioning appears, Project 2029 highlight six big issues: government reform of the kind the PM is already looking at; human rights and international law, including leaving the ECHR and amending (or better yet repealing) the 2010 Equality Act which Labour passed into law; dealing with the ‘Small Boats Emergency’ which, honest guv, the Conservatives didn’t cause by restricting legal routes to Blighty; preventing the next Grooming Gang scandal and moving away from ‘“two-tier” justice’; ignoring the Net Zero movement; and not exacerbating the effect of mental health issues caused by, I don’t know, policies thought up by Policy Exchange and the rest of them.
Also, build a bonfire and load it with treaties and international bodies, because we’re outside the EU, like Russia and Belarus. Then, adopting a Bond villain voice, they want to ask about ‘the key roles in Government and the public sector in which allies must be placed’. In the very last paragraph of the Project document, the authors say that the work ‘will draw inspiration from international examples but adapted to the UK’s distinctive political, legal and social settlement, in addition to looking to our own historic methods of Government that have been forgotten and distorted over time. Our aim is radicalism, not revolution: restoring, not destroying, the core British institutions of Parliament and Government, while stripping away the ideological expansive conception of domestic and international law that have marred their operation.’
Hear ye billionaires! Stop donating crypto money to the Bendelo-Harborne Party because you’ve been wined and dined by Nick Candy and come back to the true party of Britain. You know you love it. Also, Thatcher!! Even the duly impartial BBC, whose board includes Theresa May’s former spin doctor Robbie Gibb, let Laura Kuenssberg lightly editorialise in her little column this week: ‘Kemi Badenoch is visibly more confident and is aware of the chance in front of her – seemingly unworried about the possible downsides of making an increasingly direct argument to you, eager to stride that mercifully bigger Birmingham stage.’
She sounds like Tom McTague bigging up the PM in the New Statesman (see the last diary entry). Are journalists cheerleaders for a worldview or impartial? Laura the K mentions the opportunistic amnesia which will make LOTO spend time ‘disavowing much of what the Conservatives did in office between 2010 and 2024, when the civil service grew, the tax burden grew, a law was passed to try to combat climate change’ and so on.
I had already had my breakfast on Sunday before going out the door to put on a pop-up surgery and carry out some constituency obligations (which is much more fun that it sounds) when I turned BBC One on to watch LOTO’s 20-minute chat with the Kuenns. Would it be another shoutathon, as it was when LOTO spoke to Emma Barnett the other week on Today and disgraced herself, or would she actually wait for the point to be made?
It turned out her new catchphrase is ‘I want to grow the economy’, and she has also adopted the old stance of going after scroungers and, in a remix to an old song, those ‘reporting as disabled’. How many are there? Dunno, she said. Dunno doesn’t get you elected, but the first to the bottom wins. Bear in mind she’s been in post two years, only now has she come up with a fun manifesto which, as she told the Sunday Times, she calls ‘Kemistry’ (stop making ‘fetch’ happen, LOTO!). In fact, Vish told me, Kemistry was the name of a drum’n’bass DJ from the 1990s who formed the Metalheadz label with the great Goldie, whose recent three-part series on black musicians and classical music for Radio 3 is on BBC Sounds here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00318hh/episodes/player
The Sunday Times, of course, compared LOTO to Thatcher, because right-leaning political thought always goes, to coin a phrase, back to the seventies (for the Tories it’s 1870s, for Labour the 1970s). But would the woman who took away free school milk grant universal nursery care to all, even to the millionaire parent? And are you not becoming the ‘Nasty Party’? No, we’re the Common Sense Party! Enough already.
After a long day out and about, I tuned into Radio 4’s Westminster Hour hosted by the great Ben Wright, the son of former Labour MP for Cannock Chase Tony, a politics lecturer-turned-lectured about. This week, Ben turned his attention to the opposition, who must have been the scourge of the kitchen table growing up. He welcomed the Deputy Leader of the Tories (it says here) Alex Burghart, another academic, who tried to defend the indefensible as always. I hope he’s enjoying the bollix Bayeux Tapestry that the party has put together to give the right-leaning press something to print in lieu of actual credible policy, most of which it turns out has been purloined from Project 2029.
All is propaganda now, which is why the BBC, for all its faults and headcount reduction aka firing people, is so vital in presenting both sides of an argument. News broke yesterday that Rachel Jupp has taken on the role of Head of BBC News, to which I say: good luck chuck. Ms Jupp will have most of the country gunning for her. Every word on radio and TV, plus everything on the BBC News website, will be scrutinised and diced for bias and prejudice: the lefties will think the language isn’t hard enough, while the righties will think it’s far too hard. It’s an impossible job to rival that of the England manager, and the Head of BBC News can’t win 7-0, as the men’s team did at the weekend. Good luck to Tuchel’s tots tonight at Wembley against Czechia; it’ll come home soon enough.
While I was WFHing yesterday (Parliament goes back on Monday after recess), I turned on Matt Chorley, a very funny man with a very serious role in explaining politics to BBC 5Live listeners between 2-4pm on weekdays. He’s a serial conference attendee – the Tory conference is his 61st of any stripe – and having been poached from propaganda network Times Radio he is now forbidden to have opinions at all. He did bring on his friend Lord Finkelstein, who helped set up Onward, for some lack of balance, although nobody mentioned the role of Policy Exchange, which is another think-tank, in setting up Project 2029. ‘She’s really sure who she is,’ Lord F said, and was echoed by Iain Duncan Smith (‘she knows what she wants’).
‘We’re gonna clear the decks,’ he added of a party who want us all to forget about Johnson, Truss and PPE contracts. Look into the eyes, not around the eyes. I admit that I tuned out when Ric Holden’s partner Kate Ferguson, a Murdoch employee, started talking about ‘Kemi’. Maybe Ms Jupp has more work to do than I thought to level the playing field.
I could have looked at what SovereignTV (GB News, for new readers) had to say about LOTO and the conference, but we know their tune and we know they won’t stop playing it. Smash The Tories is their Wonderwall, Look Back in Anger their…well, you can guess. Chorley loves a tune too, so I was keen to hear which pieces of music he would use to set up his features. He chose Eye of the Tiger for the Shadow Chancellor, and nothing by Kemistry.