2025 was a calamity. Labour proved it can’t govern Britain

0:08It was the year that Keir was never here. Angela Rayner lost her job. Call the unions. And Rachel Bill Reeves wept in the Commons. In this special edition of The Daily Tea, we analyse the political year that was, 2025, with Alastair Heath and Annabelle Denham. And they don't hold back. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominy.

0:42Annabelle Denham, Alastair Heath, Welcome back to the Daily Tee studio for what we hope will be a right festive rollick as we go through the political year that has been 2025. Yes. Let's hope it's not a nightmare before Christmas, but rather a wonderful life. I'm not sure that's going to be the case, unfortunately. By the way, can we caveat this? You'll be pleased to know, Alistair, we won't be asking you questions about the royal year because we're doing that with Andrew Lowney a little later. I think we're in fact putting that out tomorrow. So this is just about politics. Yes, yes. Now, when it comes to Labour, should I use the phrase Annus Horribilis?

1:20Yes, yes, yes. Get off the fence, Alistair. You should. We don't want your typical prevarication. We need some honest answers to some honest questions here. Yes, yes. I'm going to moderate my answer and say absolutely, it was a complete calamity this year. And what's very interesting is you had an Annus Mirabilis the year before. Yes. So it's gone from Annus Mirabilis to Annus Horribilis in one year, which is basically the shape of our politics. 2025 was the year the Labour Party imploded on contact with reality and the proof that basically they can't govern Britain and that Britain is in fact ungovernable.

1:53Fortunately, however, the British public do appear to be picking up on this. So a recent poll put Starmer's net approval rating at negative 48 against Kemi's negative 14. And one poll last week put the party, and this is the party of government at 14%. So at least perhaps we can take some solace in the knowledge that they are deeply unpopular for all of the damage they're inflicting on the country. It's interesting that poll came out and suddenly they postponed some key elections that reform would have won. That's right. But we'll get on to Nigel Farage in the moment. But the question is, in the same way that we don't know if Africa knows it's Christmas time, does Keir Starmer know he's desperately unpopular?

2:36Because he's never here. Good question. This year he has made 35 international trips to 27 countries and one British overseas territory. Yes, so he's raced to Washington in February to get to Trump first, like a little kino. Then he went to Canada in June for the G7. Oh, that was the moment he picked up Donald Trump's papers from the floor. Then he went to Washington again in August for peace talks with Zelensky and Trump. He went to India for a trade mission in October. Egypt a few days later for the Gaza peace talks. when he looked a little pathetic again in the shadow of Donald Trump, calling him forward and then rejecting him at the lectern.

3:14Do you remember that? It was really embarrassing. Oh, the prime minister of the UK is here and up he stands thinking he's going to give a speech. And Trump just said, sit back down, mate. And then he was in Brazil for the COP summit, flying there by whatever jet, along with countless others, saving the environment despite their own carbon emissions. And then in South Africa again for the G20 at the end of November. So do we think there's been a sense that he has just tried to avoid domestic calamity? I think it's even worse than that. I think a British prime minister in 2025 who looks at this country should see a country in crisis that requires 24-7 managerial obsession to try and push through reforms and emergency parliamentary sessions and new laws and all that kind of stuff.

3:59But instead, you've got a prime minister who is a talker, not a doer. You've got a lobbyist here, not a manager. You know, Keir Starmer's a lawyer. He's not an executive. And so he's just going on these international trips where he achieves absolutely nothing of real or lasting value, right? Nothing. He just talks. He doesn't really have any power. He's got very little influence these days. Britain, sadly, is in decline on the international stage. But he thinks he's filling his time, you know? And because he's got no real mission, no vision for this country other than just allow the blob to keep doing its thing and all the normal left-wing laws to just be passed.

4:38He just goes on all these international tours. He's abdicated responsibility for changing this country. And I think it just shows how rotten this whole government is. This is the prime minister who famously, infamously, said that he preferred Davos to Westminster. So perhaps we wouldn't have expected anything less. But you do wonder if Yvette Cooper is sat in the Foreign Office wondering what on earth she's there for. because he pays a lot more like a foreign secretary than he does a prime minister. But insofar as a foreign secretary exists to further British interests, Starmer is failing at that as well.

5:11Look at the Chagos betrayal, for instance. Look at the Brexit reset, which ultimately saw us relinquishing some of our hard-fought sovereignty in order for mere technicalities from the EU. And that's only the beginning. Hofstede Starmer has threatened that he wants a closer relationship with the EU. Now, you could say that what he's able to do is engineer quite a cosy relative to other leaders' relationship with Donald Trump, who bizarrely seems to be quite fond of him, a mystery that perplexes much of Westminster. But on every other metric internationally, he's failing just as he is domestically.

5:46When Labour was elected last year, we were still unclear about what it was about. Was it blue Labour? Was it soft left and pretending to be something else? in the course of this year do we now have a definite idea of what philosophy the Labour government has? I don't think the Labour government has a philosophy and actually just specifically on the point of blue Labour a problem that Morris Glassman's outfit might face is an association in people's minds with the Starmer administration when actually their positions in so far as you're able to discern them are quite different so we may have a situation where the Starmer administration crumbles and some of the really good ideas that are coming out of blue labour are sort of thrown away baby out of the bathwater style but no ultimately he's a globalist he's a technocrat he's a former human rights lawyer who believes in the supremacy of international law and that's ultimately his guiding philosophy even though he has quite an important blue labour figure and Morgan McSweeney sat next to him advising him.

6:50And now Shabana Mahmood we mustn't dismiss the toughening up of rhetoric on immigration. Exactly. Right. So that's the only bits of this government where there's some slight shifts to the right, basically, or some attempt at reaching out to that core part of the British electorate. Generally speaking, 2025 was a year when Labour became openly socialist. Right. It's the year where you had a second massive tax increasing budget in complete defiance to any kind of either explicit or implicit promise made about this government, right? This is now clearly the most left-wing government we've had since the 1970s.

7:25The entire new Labour era is gone, buried, finished, never existed. Yes. We knew that with the rebellion on welfare. Yes, and that was a turning point this year. That was a turning point in June. The rebellion on welfare was a major turning point. Without the rebellion on welfare, in theory, the Chancellor might have got away with not putting up taxes at all in this budget. In truth, she didn't need to put up taxes at all, right? The whole thing was a lie. There was no black hole in the public finances. There was no big OBR move to destroy her numbers. And even with the welfare rebellion, she might just about have been able to save a couple of billion here and there and do a few things to not put up any taxes.

8:03But the welfare rebellion destroyed her centrism, her so-called centrism, her last residue of just being a technocrat who, yes, OK, she massively put up taxes in 2024. It was a scandal, obviously. But that was it. you know, we just had to do this once, all that sort of rhetoric. And there you go, we're going to start saving money on welfare and saving money here and there and stuff. That was destroyed. The Labour Party has basically said, even though we have a massive majority, there's no real majority. This is just a coalition of fighting lefties, you know, rabble of different groups. Starmer doesn't really have a majority.

8:37He has no majority to cut any kind of spending on anything. And his only majority really is to put up taxes, to engage in class warfare, to do that sort of stuff as we saw in this budget which was a horribly left-wing budget following another horribly left-wing budget in 2024 you had warm private schools in 2025 you had the mansion tax and all that kind of stuff this is really a council tax surcharge sorry it's the council tax surcharge yes yes obviously rachel reeves demands a section on her own as a kind of massive personnel problem let let alone the economic calamity that you've just mentioned.

9:14But there were three different issues with three different senior Labour people that we just need to weigh up in terms of which was most damaging. So we had the Angela Rayner debacle. She needed that house. She needed that house. She needed that house. I needed that house. She needed the house and she needed not to pay the stamp duty. Yeah, so she... Oh, money! It's a great deal of money. She underpaid the stamp duty. She resigned in September, but she now looks like she's going to be a thorn in the PM's side next year. She is stronger for having resigned. Having resigned. All right, so fresh from her paddleboard.

9:45That's personnel problem number one. Personnel problem number two is Peter Mandelson and his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who he described as his bestie, yum yum. We'll remember the remarks that were made on the cards. So obviously he's stood down, but I suppose that's a self-contained debacle. And then we have Andy Burnham rising like a phoenix from the flames, the king of the north, trying to kibosh conference, didn't quite come off. But again, he's somebody that could make a reappearance in 2026. We learned, don't we, Annabelle, you and I discussed it earlier in the week in the newsroom that Lucy Powell, the new deputy prime minister, is manoeuvring to find an opportunity post the May elections to chicken run burn into a seat to challenge Starmer.

10:28So of all those three, which is the most problematic for him as he looks to 2026, do we think? I think it's Rainer, because I think there's a high chance he becomes prime minister next to her. So in other words, she's by far the biggest threat to him. Mandelson obviously doesn't matter. Mandelson was a disaster for Labour because it was just a sleaze scandal, the never-ending collapse of everything, and also just made relationships with the Trump administration a bit more difficult. Burnham obviously would be a very big threat to Starmer, but needs to find a seat. And I think that's a much harder endeavour for a number of reasons than some might think.

11:06What's the probability? of Angela Rayner becoming the next Prime Minister before the end of this Parliament? I think it's pretty high. I mean, we've got to mention also that the Prime Minister lost a deputy leadership contest. It was won by the so-called soft left candidate. So he's wounded. He also has problems with West Streeting, who he seems to have accidentally turned into a rival by Keir Starmer's team trying to tell us that West Streeting was on manoeuvres when West Streeting wasn't. But now that you mention it, he may well be. As for Andy Burnham, the possibility of getting into Parliament is quite low.

11:40My problem with Andy Burnham is he has no ambitions to be Prime Minister, but he won't shut up about it. He just sounds like my mate who says I could be Prime Minister. Until you're in Parliament, I can't take much more talk of could Andy Burnham be Prime Minister. He physically can't. No, true. It's absurd. I can't see Andy Burnham getting his seat. We had that very embarrassing episode with Clive Lewis, didn't we, where he went on Politics Live and he said he would be willing to stand aside and then five minutes later said that he wouldn't. Yes, he then denied that to us on Budget Day, by the way, Clive Lewis, saying, oh, well, you know, it was just a hypothetical.

12:13Yes, yes. So who will actually stand aside? Then would Andy Burnham be the chosen candidate? You assume that he would because he's got that recognition. He's almost a household name, but he might still not be selected. If he is selected, he might still lose. So his path to becoming an MP isn't all that obvious at this stage. So to echo what Alistair said, Angela Rayner is definitely the biggest threat. She's the one to what. Starmer has two problems. One is that he hung everything in his premiership upon deliverism. The idea that it's about getting on with the job. And the problem with that is he's not very good at the job.

12:48So if there's very little delivery, there's nothing to get elected on. And the second problem is his personality. He can't help that, of course. But I think it's striking that we are 18 months into a government and we know nothing new about this prime minister. Well, except how bad he is. Well, we know that he doesn't dream. He gave that interview away and said he doesn't dream. That's true. We know net less about the Prime Minister. We know he has no fantasies or daydreams. But he's still talking at this stage about his father being a toolmaker. Yes. He's still wheeling that one out. Yeah, but this is the irony.

13:19Can I just say something which we reflected on after we did our whole welfare episode? All of these cabinet ministers that keep on banging on about their working class upbringing and their working parents, let's just stress that, These cabinet ministers who have socially mobilised, Bridget Phillipson, Rachel Reeves, children of Thatcher, by the way, these girls are brought up on council estates and end up at Oxford. Why? Because they grew up under conservatism. There was a key difference between them and the families they're now enabling with their benefit busting budget hikes. their parents worked.

13:54And yet they seem to be content with the situation where they're disincentivising work among the working classes and just giving them ever greater sums of taxpayers' cash. I find it extraordinary. Which brings us nicely to Rachel Reeves and her manifesto. Manifesto. Her manifesto. Now, let's just go through the calamity that she has faced in the last year. February saw the investigation into her career at the Bank of Scotland and the revelations that she lied on her CV. that then spawned the nickname Rachel from accounts or Rachel from complaints. In July, of course, she famously ended up crying at PMQs, which I think we can all agree was a real low.

14:29We've all done it. We've all cried at PMQs. There was the winter fuel U-turn, initially cancelled winter fuel payments for pensioners, then reinstated back in the summer. And then, of course, the November budget fiasco, a leak to the left of her. Kemi Badenock to the right, traducing her at the despatch box. She's surviving for now. Will she survive into next year, Alistair? No. I think 2025 was a disastrous year for both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. One of the many noteworthy points is that the Prime Minister has fully backed Reeves. He basically says he knew everything she was preparing.

15:05He agrees with all her statements. In other words, he agrees with the lies about the OBR and all the rest. They are just one character. and Starmer took control of the budget process in a way that no prime minister in recent history has taken control of a budget process, which was also very interesting. So I think Reeves is incredibly weakened. And I think 2026 will be the year that both of them are elsted, because I think there will be a leadership challenge next year, possibly after the May elections, who knows when. And I think that will be over for them. And we will be on our seventh prime minister in 10 years.

15:39So that's for next year. As to what happened last year, I do think it is staggering how bad the financial situation of our country has become. It beggars belief the scale of the tax increases of the past two years under Rachel Reeves. Right. This is a transformational chancellor, transformational prime minister. This is why I don't really agree when everyone says, you know, Keir Starmer doesn't stand for anything. He doesn't know what he stands for. Obviously, he can't articulate a philosophy. Right. He is sort of a passive person. He's a non-player character. He's not changing history per se, but he's allowing others, others and big forces to change history on his behalf, to re-socialise Britain, to turn us into a European style social democracy and so on and so forth.

16:22We are changing. Right. It's becoming a horrible place for wealth creators to live or base themselves. 2025, we saw a massive exodus of wealthy people. Right. All these sorts of things. Becoming more authoritarian as well, if you look at the digital ID card. And I think the whole authoritarian side is another disastrous, disastrous shift. Again, I think Starmer is an NPC here. He used to claim to believe in civil liberties. In reality, he's a human rights lawyer, not a civil liberties advocate. These are two different things. Human rights lawyers want to weaponise the state to engage in social engineering.

16:52But anyway, the point is, you've got digital IDs, which no one had ever talked about. Suddenly, it wasn't in the manifesto. Suddenly, it's Starmer's big solution to everything, disaster. there's this war on trial by jury basically getting rid of what's left of Magna Carta, historic catastrophe for this country, Magna Carta was one of our great exports to the world when we talk about soft power, trial by jury is right up there, right, that is what we mean by soft power, the Americans have a and so on, so another complete catastrophe the surveillance society, this idea of facial recognition cameras everywhere another catastrophe because basically what you're saying is the onus is to prove that you're allowed to be walking around the street.

17:31The burden of proof has changed. You're basically guilty until proved innocent by the camera, by the AI. These are very sinister things. And Starmer is presiding all over this. He's spending all his time travelling abroad, so he's not really managing anything. But Britain is becoming socialist and authoritarian at record speed, and he has to be blamed for this. Before we get on to reform, just a quick question just on their psyche. So we're kind of agreeing that we think both Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, They're like a dead duo walking. OK, how can Starmer be coping mentally with this? Because he's basically become everything that he pledged to despise when he was leader of the opposition.

18:13He made a name for himself, traducing Boris Johnson, accusing him of being a liar. And he's now been found not just to be gaslighting the public, but as we witnessed with the recent PMQs, actively lying, literally saying untruths about energy bills coming down, teacher numbers going up and all the rest of it. You can debunk the stuff with the government's own figures. And he's a former director of public prosecutions, as he constantly seeks to remind us, who is presiding over the culture that Alistair has just described there, Annabelle. People are saying, oh, will they be pushed out? Surely there's also a chance that one or both of these two say, do you know what, I've had enough of this?

18:54Because he must be, no wonder he's not dreaming. I mean, how's this bloke sleeping at night? Well, there's certainly a last days of Rishi vibe coming out of the Starr administration, isn't there, where he seems to be completely resigned to his fate. And Kemi Badenock recently at PM's queues said that even his own MPs are calling him a caretaker PM. However, arguably the most sinister aspect to this Labour government is the fact that these are people who believe so strongly in their own moral probity that even when they're marred in the sleaze and even when it's scandal piled upon scandal they still don't really believe that they've done anything wrong or in so far as they do it's because they believe the means justify the ultimate outcome and that to me is a very dangerous mentality so I can't see Starmer throwing in the towel in fact I think he'll cling on by his fingertips for as long as he possibly can.

19:49This idea that we're going to have a general election in 2027, I think is for the birds. Then again, you speak to the Parliamentary Labour Party, the vast majority, around 60, 70 percent, are absolutely convinced that after the mayor elections, Starmill will be defenestrated. Now, he may not, you may not get a challenger who's able to get 80 MPs behind them, but they might get 50 MPs. And that will be just such a It's a strong show of no confidence in the Prime Minister that he has no choice but to step aside. And I suspect it's very unlikely that if there was a subsequent leadership challenge that Starmer would put himself forward.

20:26I do think that he would ultimately accept that the game is up. Just imagine if he did put himself forward. Just imagine if Rachel Reeves did. I'd just say one thing on Rachel Reeves, which is, of course, a lot of the criticisms of her. She's tried to embarrassingly bat away, accusing those critics of mansplaining and of being sexist towards her. Because this is a woman who came in and her first budget stood up and proudly boasted that she was the first female chancellor. And as though it was inspirational to young girls, they could throw away their dolls and go and bring in a record tax hike of around 40 billion pounds.

21:05and I'm not sure that whilst it may have played well to Labour backbenchers, it's actually landed particularly effectively with the British public. I mean, to the point about her being the first female Chancellor, we've had multiple female Prime Ministers. We live in an era where women are able to ascend to the highest heights of their chosen fields and it isn't really that much of an achievement. It doesn't do much for women's empowerment to blame your own mistakes on your own sex and say that you're a victim of sexism, you know, you're a victim of your own incompetence. And it's only an achievement if she does something with it.

21:38If she got to the end of the parliament and growth had beat forecasts and inflation was down and job vacancies were up and unemployment was down, then she might have been able to say how honoured she was and how proud she was to have been the first female chancellor. But at the moment, all of those metrics have gone in the exact opposite direction. Almost every economic data point has worsened since she entered number 11. There is a risk if you keep saying I'm the first female chancellor that people will think, well, we won't do that again because it's been such a disaster. Let's talk about reform.

22:10I think the year began for reform at Boxing Day last year when they had this contest over how many members they could get. And I was actually with Nigel Farage at a hunt when he hit the magic figure. And Kemi Badenok disputed whether or not the figure was real. And it turned out that it was real. And that was the moment, if you look at the graphs, in which the Tories just begin to plummet and reform begins to take over. And this has been an incredible year for them. They have consistently led in the polls at around 30 percent. They've yet to break that kind of 35 percent barrier. But nonetheless, if an election were held tomorrow, they would probably win it, even if it might be a hung parliament.

22:49And proof of their success was the mayor local elections when they won 677 more councillors and took control of 10 authorities. And, of course, Sarah Pochin won the Runcorn by-election. So a good year in spite of some serious problems. Well, before we get into the problems, again, personnel related, Alistair, have they peaked too soon? Are they levelling out? Can they go to 35 or 40? Yes. I mean, look, the big picture is this was a triumph for reform 2025. It was a massive year for them. This is the year they went from being a small protest party to the dominant opposition in Britain and the party by far ahead of the opinion polls.

23:32Reform is clearly massively ahead in every single opinion poll. It's also the year that they started getting a lot more defections. It's the year that when Nigel Farage makes a statement, he's treated like the leader of the opposition or a leader of the opposition. is it's a year when their policies splash national newspapers and can lead TV bulletins. Things have drastically changed. British politics has been transformed, I think, to a much greater scale than when the SDP was briefly ahead in the polls in the early 1980s. I think this is completely different because we're seeing this in similar things happening in other countries around the West.

24:09So the big picture is this was a very, very good year for reform, a very, very good year for Nigel Farage and a seminal moment in British politics. There has obviously been some issues also. In terms of the pure poll ratings, reform probably peaked a couple of months ago. It's lost a couple of points in the polls, two, three points maybe. Also, the collapse in Conservative support has stopped and the Conservatives have slightly gained in the polls. Nevertheless, the big picture holds, right? this is where we are and as 2026 is about to begin, the big question for reform is can they consolidate this lead next year?

24:46And the challenge for them is immense. The shift from protest group to government in waiting has only barely begun. I think they've made some headway. I think it's wrong to say that reform is no longer a one-party issue, it's no longer a one-person party and so on, But he has a huge distance to go if he wants to become a proper party with a chance of seizing power and actually governing Britain in a successful manner. But it's doing well despite falling out with Elon Musk at the beginning of the year, who feels Nigel Farage is wet or something like that. Despite Rupert Lowe being outside of the party, and that's been an embarrassment.

25:25Despite rumors of rows within the party. We know Zia Yusuf ended up walking away from the chairmanship after an argument with Sarah Pochin about whether or not the party should be asking questions about banning the burqa. And the year ends with Nigel Farage up to his neck in an anti-Semitism row about his youth. Annabelle, you interviewed him this year. I did. What would you judge is the state of Nigel Farage's mind? Does he feel like he's headed to number 10? And is he happy about that? I think absolutely. he's extremely optimistic about the prospects for reform what I would say is as we all know his greatest strength is campaigning I asked him which part of the job he loved the most and he said it's getting out on the streets and it's meeting people but he's going to need to be more than a campaigner as we learned with Boris Johnson if he's to get into number 10 and actually do something with the power that the British people are entrusting him with if reform are able to get there look they've able to benefit from the complete cratering of support for the Labour Party, Labour government, and the fact that ultimately the Tories weren't ready.

26:29They weren't ready to step in and they weren't ready to really be the official opposition and hold Labour's feet to the fire. And therefore, reform were able to very, very quickly seize that opportunity. But the question is whether, can they, yes, move more from being a protest movement to a government in waiting, which is an absolutely vast challenge. I also interviewed Danny Kruger to talk about some of the work that he's doing. Key defective this year from the Tories. Exactly, sort of an intellectual heavyweight from the Conservative Party. He's got experience of being in government because that's something that reform lacking.

27:03The scale of the challenge for him is absolutely vast, but indeed for Zia Yusuf as head of policy as well. They've got to be bringing in experts. They've got to be bringing in lawyers. They've got to be bringing in military figures. And they've got to do so at a time when, And there aren't maybe that many economists who will necessarily ideologically be on side with what reform are trying to do at the moment. Although I suppose they secured that massive£9 million donation from Christopher Harbourn. They've also had a defection of a Scottish peer, Lord Offord. But where are the Labour defectors?

27:35Well, that's what we're waiting for. I think what you've got now is two gangs in British politics. I think the realignment has stopped in the sense that the working class votes have shifted away from Labour. Labour's lost those. And there's no more supplies in the barrel, effectively. The battle now is between reform and the Tories for the right and between the different left-wing parties for the left. I think the realignment has already happened and there's not much room for it to go. So it's now much more of a zero-sum game, I suspect. So the Tories, ticking up by a couple of points, has actually damaged reform, and vice versa would also be the opposite.

28:14But I think the donation, as you rightly point out, another seminal moment in the year for reform, establishing it as a credible alternative. But I think that the problem that reform have, and that's become apparent over the last few weeks, is that they are weak on the economy. If you look at polling, they are trusting more than the other parties on issues like immigration, but they are falling far behind when it comes to whether they would be a safe pair of hands with the tiller. Now, part of this is their contract with the people that they issued before the last general election. Well, they've now torn that up.

28:45Exactly. I mean, Richard Tice has been somewhat sidelined on economic issues, let's be honest. They call it Richard's Manifesto. Right. And it's barely worth the paper that it was written on. But nevertheless, the Tories are the more trusted party when it comes to the economy. Nobody knows what reform it stands for. On the one hand, they're talking about part nationalising the water industry. On the other, they're talking about fiscal prudence. And they were right to just recently reverse the manifesto promise of massive unfunded tax cuts. nevertheless, they're not really talking about how they're going to significantly cut the size of government, the welfare state, in order to perhaps bring in tax cuts down the line.

29:25So they just don't seem to have an answer to a lot of the problems around our gnawing economic malaise. So that's reform's big challenge, right? If they want to remain the biggest party in British politics in terms of polling, if they want to remain far ahead of the Conservative Party as the main party on the right, they need to fix their offering. They need to bring in far more senior people. There's now probably five, six, seven cabinet level type people in reform. They need to be 20 or 25 by the end of next year or at least going into 2027. So you need defections. You need more recruits. You need a very comprehensive economic and tax policy.

30:02You know, the Tories are still much better when it comes to speaking about economics. They can come and grab the public's attention with things like the stamp duty cut, which announced at Conservative Party Conference. The Conservative Party Conference was a turning point for Kami Badenoch. is when she started fighting back. Her personal ratings have improved quite significantly, much more than her party's ratings. That is a big problem because we've seen this in the past with Conservative leaders. People may quite like the Conservative leader, but they hate the Conservative party. I fear that the toxicity that surrounds the Conservative brand after many, many years of failure will take a very, very big effort to rectify, especially now that you've got the alternative in reform.

30:40But reform needs to continue its quest to professionalise itself, and it must bring in a lot more people, and it must be much more credible when it comes to the detail of economic reforms, tax reform, legal reforms, and all that kind of stuff. We were all at the Reform Party conference when this happened. I'm an insomniac, I'm an insomniac, staring at the ceiling, where you're about to go. That was a talented young lady called Andrea Jenkin, a possible cabinet appointment under reform, singing Insomnia. I've had problems with sleeping this year, and I swear it began with the singing of that song.

31:20It did. The rot set in in conference season. Earlier in the summer, I followed Nigel Farage on the campaign trail. I found myself abandoned by the reform party in a village in the middle of Lincolnshire, and I had no way of getting back to a train station. And Andrea very kindly volunteered to drive me to the local station. That's nice. I didn't realise that was an hour away through twisty country lanes. And the lady, she's like the little old lady from Pasadena. She drives quite fast. And I was trying to write on my laptop. So by the time we arrived at the train station, I fell out. I was green, very nauseous.

31:52She gave you a sequined sick bag to vomit into. Ran onto the platform, got onto the train. And who do I find in the carriage with me? Hello. It's Rob Jenrick. Yay. And I thought, oh, no, it's a ticket inspector. that's very good let's end actually on jenric because he's also one to watch in 2026 absolutely will he defect won't he i think that kemi badenock is best to actually bring him closer into her tent i think she should do a reshuffle at the beginning of the year not in may when it you looks panicked do it in january bring him in make him shadow chancellor sorry mel stride you are a friend to this podcast but I feel like you've got the two star players of the Conservatives not really operating well together and they need to change that because there is strength in numbers.

32:41That's my personal opinion. I don't think he will defect but I think he needs to be brought closer into the tent. I think that would be quite a smart tactical move for Kemi as well because if he is wavering, if he is seriously considering defecting to reform and she offers him shadow Chancellor, he'll be presented with a choice. Either he accepts, which makes the defection more difficult, or he doesn't, in which he's sending quite a strong signal to the leader of the opposition that he is considering jumping ship. And give him a few more PMQs. If she's away or the Prime Minister's away and she has to give it to, she has to have somebody deputised for her, let's have him up there.

33:17And also Jenrick versus Reeves. I mean, maybe I'm just speaking as a journalist now, but it could be quite fun. I think that would make sense for Kennedy to do that. At the same time, I think it would make highly, it'd be highly sensible for Nigel Farage to try and recruit Jenrick. Oh, I think he is. Because I think, yes, but I think he should, you know, do everything he can from his perspective, because I think that would derail significantly the Conservative Party. It will complicate a lot of things. It will completely change the internal dynamics of the party too, because you'd have another person on the right leaving the Conservative Party.

33:48I mean, the more people on the right leave the Conservative Party, of course, the more the left potentially might gain within the Conservative Party, which in itself makes everything more complicated, because if ever one day you need a coalition between reform and the Conservative Party, you're going to need enough conservatives who actually support a right-wing government rather than actually be Liberal Democrats in disguise, which has been the problem in the past. Well, she might want to give them that ultimatum. If you're not going to support this mash-up, go to Ed Davey, who we haven't really mentioned in the last year, but never mind.

34:15Coming up next, we're going to be discussing Trump and the BBC.

34:29We've had one full year of the Trump administration and it's been so good, so good, the best ever, best president ever. He's not excluding himself, of course. Alistair, does Trump 2.0 look different to Trump 1.0? Yes, very different. Trump 2.0 is in office and in power, while Trump 1.0 wasn't really in control of anything. You know, he didn't, you know, he kept sacking his cabinet ministers, people kept resigning, you know, everything was going very wrong for him. And now he's very firmly in power. And as a result, the Trump administration is sometimes brilliant, and sometimes disastrous, because that is, you know, Trump, he's extremely good in some areas and very bad in other areas.

35:16I think his conduct in the Middle East has been exemplary, exceptional even. You know, what he did in Iran was remarkable. Agreeing to bomb the Iranian nuclear sites was a historic decision. But I think on Ukraine, he's been incredibly naive and ludicrously soft towards Putin. There was that embarrassing encounter with Zelensky in the White House where he said, you've got no cards. Yes, I mean, that was hideous. So, you know, Trump in some ways has been extremely good. He's been fighting anti-Semitism in America. He's been fighting for many good things. But he's also, you know, presiding over this strange administration where it's almost like a sort of group of people seizing power and then mixing business with politics.

36:00Yeah. Which I find quite difficult, really. Yeah, we had the spectacle of that press conference in September with RFK Jr., the health secretary, and that linking of Tylenol, which is paracetamol in America, with autism in children. It was sort of slightly... of Andrew Wakefield. I think all that RFK has actually accomplished is to take out colouring from children's cereal. That's good. I suppose. After a year. And you remember all the sort of hysteria about him before he was appointed into Trump's administration. I find Trump quite difficult to talk about because on the one hand, he's quite mad and he can be quite vicious and unpleasant, but he has opened up the suffocating consensus of Western politics and shown our leaders to be cardboard cutouts and made us realise that we can do things differently.

36:50Well, the executive orders at the beginning of the year were quite a high for those on the right who have been saying for some time that no, women don't have penises and men probably shouldn't compete in female sports and all the rest of it. So we did have that kind of bonfire of wokeism that has carried on into 2025. Yes. We've also been reminded that he and Americans in general quite like Britain. And I don't think we should knock that. And the royal visit went very well. He got to ride in a carriage with the king. He probably advised him that he wants to get around quicker. He should try a car.

37:21Yes. He brought along Melania in that fantastic UFO hat. Yes. And I think Melania's had a very good year. So has her milliner. But also, to be fair, I think that the Trump speech about the king has benefited the king because you don't see them as natural bedfellows. is a little bit like Trump and Starmer. You think, really? Yes. But that, from a kind of diplomacy point of view, was a real high. And Starmer wanted to take credit for that, but really it was a royal success, not a political one, that, I think. Yes, no, I agree, I agree. But I think the difference is Trump respects the king and is in awe of the British royal family, maybe because of his mother, that sort of thing.

38:00But I think he looks upon Starmer with some kind of pity. and he doesn't want to upset Britain by criticising Starmer, but obviously he doesn't rate Starmer. But Trump and indeed J.D. Vance even more so have been quite critical of aspects of the Starmer. Yes, America's talked a lot about us this year. Let's move on finally then to the other organisation, institution that's not had the best 2025 and that's the BBC. Now obviously that is all of our fault. we've led a right-wing coup Robbie Gibb is hiding in a cupboard somewhere in the Daily Tea studio pulling us like strings on our puppet arms and controlling all this it could actually be that the BBC has had a bad year because the BBC has unfortunately made a series of catastrophic mistakes including, let's just quickly run through them we'll get on to the telegraph scoop about the Trump splicing and everything else in just a moment but let's not forget that in July MasterChef presenter Greg Wallace was sacked after a review, upheld 45 misconduct allegations against him, mostly relating to inappropriate sexual language and humour.

39:09Co-presenter John Turode also axed. We had the ongoing saga of Gary Lineker remaining or not remaining as match of the day host, despite having unfortunately retweeted a anti-Semitic post on X which featured Jews being likened to rats. We had countless accusations of bias when it came to the coverage of Gaza before our esteemed colleague Gordon Rayner ended up with the leaked memo by Michael Prescott based on findings discovered by BBC journalist David Grossman of all of the times in recent times that the BBC has lacked impartiality, not just in his coverage of Trump or Gaza, but also gender critical stories, British colonial history.

39:55even some reports on migrants making it out as if the authorities were in some way racist towards them when they weren't. The Director General Tim Davy did resign as did the CEO of BBC News Deborah Ternus. Alastair, can the BBC turn this around? Can it revive its reputation? I doubt it. I see no real contrition. I see too many people there who are in denial and who believe that the BBC is unbiased and fighting the good fight. In reality I think it's deeply biased. We saw that with the Telegraph scoop, of course. I'll just talk about the Gaza and Israel situation again. I think the BBC is hopelessly and horribly biased against Israel during this entire conflict and helped promote and normalise anti-Semitism all over the world.

40:39I think that was definitely the case with BBC Arabic, but I would go further and say the BBC English service also fell into that trap. So I think it was a shameful episode. I've forgotten one, Alastair. I've forgotten. Death, death to the IDF. Yeah, I mean, that was a catastrophic moment. A broadcast from Glastonbury in the summer by Bob Fillon. Yes, and thanks to that broadcast, you now hear death, death to the IDF at a lot of these demos on the streets of Britain. And obviously, we all know that because every Israeli is supposed to serve in the IDF, death, death to the IDF means death, death to Israelis in general and so on.

41:13So, I mean, these are really bad things. But I think the BBC has become much more biased over the past 30 years. is being taken over by the sort of dominant left-wing culture. It's become part of the culture wars, unfortunately. Now, sometimes they make an effort and sometimes they're not biased and sometimes they produce brilliant journalism or brilliant documentaries and so on. But I think ultimately it's an organisation in decline because it's reliance on the licence fee. And until the BBC itself decides to wean itself from the licence fee, I cannot see its decline ending. I think the bias is a feature, not a bug, of the BBC's current funding model.

41:48Ultimately, you have a public service broadcaster, which is an anachronism in the modern age, which is packed full of people who are ultimately in the employ of the state. How can we be surprised if at the end of the day they have a left wing bias, if they really struggle to be impartial? And over the last couple of decades, you've seen the shift in the mindset of people who are working on BBC News away from presenting facts to things like Donald Trump is objectively, in their minds, an evil man. And therefore, that's their starting point. And everything is laced with the opinions of the people who work in the BBC.

42:24They actually believe that the service they are providing to the British public is to alert them to what they consider to be the facts, but which are actually opinion. They cannot distinguish between the two, which is how you end up in a situation where a choir are invited on to sing happy birthday to the NHS. Yes, the NHS and the BBC, truly a match made in hell. So to echo what Alistair said again, I think the path to redemption involves getting rid of the licence fee and forcing the BBC to stand on its own two feet. And I think there's also an argument for breaking up and having BBC News as a separate operation like you do with other news channels.

43:04I put it to you that this is the year in which the Blairite consensus came to an end. The social democracy that we inherited from the 1990s onwards, particularly in the case of Labour, we've discovered it doesn't work. It can't fix our problems. It can't fix things like welfare. I mean, perhaps the biggest issue of the year has been mental health. Yes. And the rise in people either dropping out of work or kids being treated with it at school. Social democracy has got no answer to that because social democracy is just care and compassion and big hugs. It can't actually say to people, we can't do that anymore.

43:33So it's run out of road because it doesn't work. But also we've discovered people don't like it. People don't actually like Keir Starmer. They don't like Rachel Reads. And they think they're very good people. They think they're great and they can't comprehend. They cannot fathom why people wouldn't like them because they have such good motivations. But the truth is, this has been a year in which social democracy has become very unpopular, but we've seen the rise of the Green Party, rise of reform. People are looking for alternatives to the consensus which has governed them for the last few years.

44:02We thought with the election of Labour, like remember Andrew Marr famously saying the adults were back, that everything seemed peaceful and calm for a while. The opposites turn out to be true. Actually, it's more chaotic than it was and people are not going, I want more consensus and managerialism. I want a change. It's also the idea of competing rights, which we've just denied for years and years between women, for instance, who want safe spaces and trans women who want access to those spaces. You have to make a choice. You have to make a choice and we've just buried our heads in the sand. And Labour still thinks it doesn't have to.

44:34Exactly. It has paused puberty blockers while they go for trial. It hasn't banned them. It's just paused them. The fact is, Britain, as controlled by the Blairite consensus that took control of our institutions in the 1990s, is ungovernable. You cannot govern or fix Britain if you accept the parameters and the ideological barriers constructed by the Blairite paradigm. The 1990s have failed. We have failed. The last 30 years have been a disaster, really. We've gone back into decline. and Keir Starmer is just testing the system, the broken system to destruction. This is why he failed on the rival.

45:12He can't sort out problems, right? You can't sort out problems if you trust international law and if you trust the civil service and if you love the NHS and if you think the answer to everything is just a bit more tax and just a bit more spending and so on. That model is broken. And the Tories were destroyed because they didn't have the courage to break out of that model despite Brexit. Brexit was an attempt to start breaking out of that model or it was thwarted by these sorts of Blairites. And this is where we are. And 2025, as Tim points out, is the year a lot more people suddenly started to realise this model is broken, we need to change, we need another throw at the dice.

45:49If you're on the left, you look at the Greens, right? You think we need some real socialism. If you're on the right, you look at reform or you look at a new Conservative Party. So what's the big battle for 2026 then? Because I remember at the beginning of this year, people were saying there is no right and left anymore, Only right or wrong, they could argue. So is it small statism versus big statism? Is it workers versus shirkers? Is it British citizens versus immigrants? Is it simply the high taxes versus the low taxes? How do we think this next political period is going to be defined? I think we're just going to see a doubling down by the Labour Party.

46:29They're going to think, right, we just got the wrong PM and the wrong Chancellor. We need to get rid of them, bring in a slightly more left-wing, so-called soft left, that's what they call them for some reason, person to run the Labour Party in the country and everything will be hunky-dory. It won't. It will fail just as disastrously. There may be a temporary bounce in the polls, whatever. But the point is, by the end of the year, I suspect that a new prime minister will be quite disliked again by the public. and it's just going to be groundhog day for the Labour Party because they can't break out of this consensus.

46:59They can just put up taxes by another 20 billion, chuck another 20 billion into the welfare state and hope suddenly everything's better. It's not. And on the right, you're going to have to have preparations for government, real preparations for government and for an alternative system, for a restoration to the pre-90s model. I wouldn't call it a revolution, but a very, very substantial change to institutions, to the way Britain is governed and so on. And the big question of the right will be, will the people on the right have the courage to really take on the welfare state, to really take on government spending, maybe even to take on the NHS?

47:36I doubt they'll do that, to be honest. But, you know, the NHS is a disaster, right? It's not working. No one can get it to work, but everyone's too scared to talk about this. So these are the big questions, I think, for 2026. I think it will be the battle between the big characters, by which I mean Nigel Farage and Zach Polanski. Now, at the moment, reform are thinking, and they may well be right, that it's to their advantage if the Greens perform very well, because it forces Labour to shift to the left and that exposes their right flank. And it just means more of the previous traditional Labour voters flocking to reform who are offering to uphold Brexit mixed with sovereignty, lower immigration and perhaps a slightly more interventionist approach on the economy.

48:19And if you look at what the Greens are doing at the moment, yes, they've got a good sort of grassroots and they run certain councils. They're further ahead in a way than reform were 12 months ago. But if you look at what they're doing now, it echoes what Nigel Farage was doing 12 months ago. This is all about significantly improving the membership. It is all about having sort of a charismatic leader, Zach Polanski promising eco-populism, which whatever that means, and will almost certainly be ghastly if it involves total liberalisation of drugs and completely open borders and wealth taxes. But you will see him going into major campaigning mode, hitting the streets just in the way that Nigel Farage has done.

48:57And I wonder whether those two parties will absorb the majority of the political oxygen and the Tories and Labour will be a bit of a sideshow, you know, unless and until you have those crucial moments, such as a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer or indeed possibly to Kemi Bethenok and budgets and those sorts of key moments in the parliamentary calendar. a whole second section where again we failed to mention Ed Davey. Are we missing a trick here, Tim? Could he be the silent assassin of 2026? He pulled out a chainsaw and tried to imitate Malay the other day. Did you see that? He cut a large red ribbon with a chainsaw.

49:36He looked deranged. But you never know. The May elections. Let's just settle on this. The month to watch in 2026 is May. Yes, and we can't predict how it will go. Wales could be a reform win, could be a played win. And if it is a played win, that proves the left is not out. I think the big story this year is we thought politics was going to be all about identity, about Brexit and nation states and borders. But it's really back to being left versus right, isn't it? Yes, capitalism versus socialism. I ended this year poorer. And that's what really matters to me. You know what really moves me? My wallet.

50:10I think we can all agree on this. The one thing that can unite left, right, high tax, low tax or whatever, is that we are all less well off. Yeah. The race to the bottom continues. Alistair Heath, Annabelle Denham. Thank you very much indeed for joining us on this Daily Tea special. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

50:42Thank you.