HARRY COLE
It’s vital warring Tory leader candidates don’t forget who the REAL enemy is
The not-so-awesome foursome are in a bubble of their own making
WHICH of the four candidates battling for the Tory crown worries Sir Keir Starmer?
Well, none of them yet.
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“We’ll fear the one that stands up on that podium and talks about housing, the one that talks about not surrendering fiscal competence to us”, says one of the PM’s closest aides.
While immigration is rightly on the agenda here in Birmingham, as the shell of a once-great party gathers to lick its wounds, the Labour strategist has a point.
The not-so-awesome foursome are in a bubble of their own making, where that agenda is almost exclusively about boats, borders and cultural issues around what it means to really be British.
All worthy stuff, even if it does highlight quite how badly the Tories lost their way in power.
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But while failures on immigration were obviously a key reason for the Conservative bloodbath in July, that defeat has many fathers.
Of the four — Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick — no candidate is fully formed.
Foam fingers
But so far only Jenrick seems to be talking about that other major crisis — housing.
And the NHS? Well, none of them seem to have a word to say beyond moaning that Labour inevitably bowed to the unions.
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Yet almost every day, ministers are making unforced errors and are forced to admit another pre-election “fully funded” promise was in fact dodgy maths that relied on soaking the fleeing rich.
After Labour’s own conference last week — which bet the house on kick-starting growth — the pressure now building on the Government ahead of the Budget next month should worry even the calmest of No10 heads.
Tory hopeful Kemi Badenoch blasts ‘excessive’ maternity pay & calls for mums to ‘take responsibility’
It’s become a given that this will be a defining moment of this newbie regime, rapidly increasing the chances of reality-splatting expectations.
Every passing week it is shown that warnings made by the Tories before the election — like the risks of talking Britain into an economic slump and triggering a wallet-drain of the super-rich — are coming true.
But where are the next generation of Tory leaders with their sledgehammers? They are handing out TV Gladiators-style foam fingers, with their names on, to a half-empty hall of die-hard activists instead — you couldn’t ask for a better metaphor.
Or they are on the TV making big-spending promises of their own, without even the basic fag-packet sums.
Had Labour promised three per cent Defence spending and a slew of tax cuts, they would have rightly been accused of plucking from the magic money tree — but it’s apparently all the rage now.
And when Badenoch was briefly coaxed away from her attempt to bring back the Norman Tebbit “cricket test” for migrants, she blundered into suggesting she thought maternity pay for new working mums was “excessive”.
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You can hear the leaflet machines in Labour HQ already going burrrr with that quote.
The whole mood here in Birmingham feels like the Tory Party is more interested in fighting each other and Reform rather than battling the guys now actually running the show.
Whether it’s delusion or denial, the candidates need to snap out of it this week and show us what a genuine alternative to Labour looks like.
As this carnival of navel-gazing drags on, let’s just look at the numbers. There are now 127 Conservative/Labour marginals out there — that’s where the next election will be decided.
Of the 98 seats where Reform came second, 89 of them were second-place finishes to Labour rather than the Tories.
The battleground of 2030 for the Tories will be against Starmer and his party — whose bungled month should give more bullish Conservatives at least a fighting hope they could make this a one-term government. But instead, duff advice is flying in from all corners.
The whole mood here in Birmingham feels like the Tory Party is more interested in fighting each other
Not least from hand-wringing Theresa May, who popped up this weekend with some extremely uncharacteristic chutzpah, to lecture on how to win an election by shifting to the left.
She is urging the new leader to focus more on lost votes to the Liberal Democrats in the posh shire seats (like hers) than the urban working classes who went to Reform.
Yet more than three times the number of Tory voters switched to Reform than the seven per cent that bled to the Liberal Democrats.
But as think-tank Onward’s new Breaking Blue post- mortem report concludes: “Adding together every 2024 Conservative and Reform vote would still only produce 302 seats, 24 short of a majority.”
The Reform bleed needs stemming but that is not enough. The fight has to be taken to Labour in the candidates’ big speeches on Wednesday.
It’s vital the Tories don’t forget who their real enemy is, or they can’t be surprised if voters look elsewhere for their opposition to this Government.
BAD organisation or just someone having a laugh?
Tory frontrunners Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch – who play nicely in public but whose teams have an increasingly fraught relationship – have been allotted suites at the Tory Conference hotel almost next door to each other.
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And it’s playing havoc as the two camps battle each other through paper-thin walls.
Tempers flared in the corridor on Saturday night, a little bird tells me . . .
Sue 'ready to throw in towel'
RUMOURS that bad-headline-magnet Sue Gray was ready to throw in the towel last week after falling out with a slew of Labour aides have proved wide of the mark – so far.
As one who prefers to work in the shadows, Starmer’s Chief of Staff is said to be utterly fed up with being plastered across the front pages, yet remains in post for now.
But it’s far from a happy ship at No10 and that’s before another Whitehall battle has even got going.
The race to be the king – or queen – of the mandarins has taken a twist after the PM let it be known he wants a female Cabinet Secretary to replace departing Simon Case at the turn of the year.
That’s bad news for soft-Brexit guru Sir Olly Robbins, who was until recently eyeing a Whitehall comeback, with Sue’s support.
But I hear he has just taken a massive and very lucrative promotion at spooky business firm Hakluyt so may find himself in golden handcuffs.
That’s good news for Justice permanent secretary Dame Antonia Romeo and Defra’s Tamara Finkelstein.
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