Labour’s plot to stop Farage

0:02The Telegraph

0:09Can the Conservatives and Reform do a deal to win the next general election? Nigel Farage is denying any news of the pact, but Jacob Rees-Mogg has the inside scoop. Well, Labour's cancelling elections because it's frightened of reform. It's an attack on democracy. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tominey. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

0:39Jacob, welcome back to The Daily Tea in Tim's absence. Well, thank you for having me again. Lovely to see you. Do you like our decorations? A highly festive bit early, but highly festive. Is it too early? I think it's a little bit early, but that's perhaps for a private house and for an office. Well, what date do you think we should start decking the halls? With boughs of holly, tra-la-la-la-la. Nearer to Christmas Day. Christmas Day? Nearer to, not Christmas Day itself, but perhaps... I need a date from you, Duncan. Three or four days before. When does the Rees-Mogg house start being coated in tinsel?

1:09You'll have to ask Helen now. Have you ever decorated a house for Christmas? When I was a bachelor, I'm afraid my house remained undecorated. You can't carry on like that as a father of six. Now tell me this, because I know you are glued to Megan's documentary on Netflix where she celebrates all things festive. You're looking at me horrified. She hand-stitches, apparently, Advent calendars for her two children with little pockets where she puts in little prezzies and motivational notes, which I'm sure is something that you do regularly, Jacob, with Helena for your six children. Yes, of course.

1:42Motivational notes saying vote conservative. Well, you have to say that to Mary, who is defective to reform. I got given an advent calendar this year, actually, by Helena, who gave me a galaxy advent calendar. So you're happy to have chocolate in your advent calendar? Absolutely. The children usually get two, one with chocolate and one with suitable religious pictures. And I think that's fine. Christmas has to be fun, that we're not Puritans. We're not Calvinists. We're papists and we enjoy the celebrations and the feast days. I had a discussion with my youngest, Lara, about the advent calendars of yesteryear.

2:20And I said to her, would you believe, darling, that there was a day when I was a child where the joy of the advent calendar was seeing the picture? Oh, it's a robin redbreast. Joy to the world. And she said, I'm sorry, without any chocolate. She couldn't believe that we could derive joy simply by opening the window. Well, it's the modern world. So you've been munching on a galaxy one. Can I just say I haven't got an advent calendar at all. I've bought advent calendars for others, folks. I'm just giving a little hint to the gallery here. Haven't received one myself. And I'm quite happy to catch up on four days of chocolate should anyone want to gift me one.

2:58Let's get into the serious matter of right-wing politics in this country, Jacob. It's divided, or is it? Well, being divided is catastrophic. I used to think it was a good thing to do electorally because it helps you win seats. I now think it's our duty. What do I mean? I mean the government is so bad, it's really running the country into the ground, that conservatives and reform people who share 90 % of opinions in common cannot sit back and allow at the next general election a coalition of Labour, the SNP, the Green Nutters and the Palestinian mob potentially to rule this country. It's really, really serious.

3:42A coalition of chaos, if ever there was one. Absolutely right. And this is no longer about individuals and the importance of those individuals. It's about the absolute national interest. And that is that the right has to come together. The right comes together, it wins. If it's divided, it risks allowing, as you say, a coalition of chaos. It's an important duty. Why is there all this, you know, slowly, slowly, catchy monkey nonsense going on? The Financial Times has reported that Nigel Farage, Reform UK's leader, has been going around whispering in donors' ears that of course that they will do a deal with the Tories, having publicly declared they will never do any more deals with the Tories because of the fact that they were burned by standing aside as the Brexit party when Boris Johnson rose to power in 2019.

4:28And frankly, who can blame them? So he's saying one thing publicly and another thing privately because he responded to that FT story saying, sometimes people hear what they want to. After next May, the Conservatives will no longer be a national party. I would never do a deal with a party that I don't trust. No deals, just a reverse takeover. A deal with them as they are would cost us votes. He's just saying two things. Well, I think the position he is in and the position Kevin Bednock's in is akin to that of the government of the Bank of England when the pound is about to be devalued. You cannot say that you're even thinking about it until you do it because by saying you're thinking about it, you're giving away some of your negotiating power.

5:10But my guess is that what Nigel wants is a deal which means he would be prime minister in the event of a right-wing coalition winning. I think that's what he would expect and his polling puts him in a strong position to ask for that. That's a very hard thing for the Conservatives to agree to. As regards being a national party over the local elections, well, will there be any? Labour's cancelling elections right, left and centre as it runs away from democracy. Why is it doing that? So we now understand that these are mayoral elections. We have got the local elections in May, but we have to be mindful that the last summer of local elections saw many, many elections cancelled.

5:49At the time, Labour said, oh, what excuse did they give for that? I can't even remember. Well, historically, there have been delays to local elections when a reorganization is going ahead. But normally, except in 1974, I think, it's been in a very small number of areas. So you've had one or two councils that have had reorganizations and they've delayed until after the reorganization is completed. But this has also normally been when there hasn't been a sharp change in the political demographics. Yeah. You're now delaying elections across the country in all sorts of places when the Labour Party's popularity and indeed my own party's popularity is very different from when it was when the last elections took place.

6:31And that's very, very undemocratic. And breaking news just coming in, Jacob. A data investigation by The Telegraph shows that Reform UK would likely have won all four of the mayoralties that have been cancelled. So if you actually map it out, the latest YouGov MRP polling into the proposed boundaries has the party winning most convincingly in Greater Essex with 35 % of the vote, followed by 34 % in Norfolk and Suffolk, 27 % in Hampshire and the Solent. Each of these areas see the Tories' trail in second. So you have to look at that and say that Labour's cancelled them or moved towards delaying them precisely because they fear Farage winning.

7:16They fear Farage winning and a humiliation for the Labour Party. This is deeply suspicious. This is not mere administrative tidiness, as they would like us to believe. This is Labour's frightened of the voters. And indeed, the hierarchy of Labour is frightened of its MPs seeing how badly they're doing, because that, of course, encourages... If, in your own area, you lose very heavily and you're coming in third or fourth place, then, as an MP, you're saying, well, have we got the right leader? So this is a strategy to protect Keir Starmer, it's a strategy to stop reform, and it's a strategy to run away from voters.

7:53And it's really sinister, actually. There is, of course, one very big reason why these elections should not go ahead, and there's no prizes for guessing. But it is, an electoral calculus put out their figures just a couple of hours ago, that reform would have won all four of these contests, and would have won them quite comfortably. The government are basically committing electoral fraud upon the electorate, who had every opportunity to put reform mayors in place. and it just shows the total and utter disdain this country has for liberty, democracy, freedom in this country and everything that we have held dear.

8:36I have to say personally, I increasingly hold the individuals that run this government with absolute and total contempt. Don't you think this is an assault on democracy? Oh, I do indeed. But Labour doesn't like democracy. This is why it's doing the European reset, because it wants to... Yeah, the European reset on top of everything else. So the power goes to, oh, the European Union, for which we don't vote. Labour hates democracy, but this is fundamental socialism. Socialism believes that the interests of the collective allow you to trample on the rights of individuals. They've always believed that.

9:12The man in Whitehall really does know best. A statement by a Labour cabinet minister, not a current one, admittedly. That's how they think you should govern. You should govern for people who don't know what's good for them, because they're a bit thick and you are frightfully clever. And that's what they're doing. They're taking away elections. They're terrified of reform. And this happens in other countries too, that they try and get rid of the right-wing leader and the right-wing parties because they're worried that they'll win. So France has a go at Miss Le Pen. Look at what happened with the Democrats' disgraceful behavior towards Donald Trump.

9:47You go for the person, you go for the party, because you don't actually think the voters can be trusted Conservatives don't do this because actually we think the voters can be trusted even when they don't vote for us. Yes. I mean, the voters were trusted last time and it ended badly for you. It did, but we deserved it. So the voters were right. Yes. When we combine what's been going on with the local elections with the Farrago fiasco and farce that was the budget, just I know you can't really be non-partisan because you're born a Tory, bred a Tory and will always be a Tory. you've always convinced me whenever I ask you about potential defections to reform or whatever.

10:24But just looking at it as objectively as you can, sort of channeling your inner Erskine May, so to speak, how bad has it been for Rachel Reeves and indeed Keir Starmer to be caught in a lie over the black hole and other aspects of that budget last week? It's deeply embarrassing for them. It's extraordinary that the OBR put out that letter. It's even more interesting that that letter was put out with the approval of the permanent secretary at the Treasury, which indicates the Chancellor has lost the support of officialdom within the Treasury. And you mean the letter pointing out the£4.2 billion surplus?

10:59That's right, and the timeline of what had gone on. So what's your interpretation of those events then, that they wanted to humiliate her and expose her? I think they were very annoyed by the leaks because the leaks made putting together a budget more difficult. What I think has happened is they've looked at how it was done when Blair and Brown were around. And Brown was very good at flying kites, at preparing people, at softening people up. But Brown had the advantage of actually being rather good at it. And this lot are following the same sort of idea, they're just not very competent at it. So the briefings, instead of massaging opinion and being a good form of spin, had a real effect and a detrimental effect on the economy.

11:44And then when this has all come out, they've obviously tried to cover it up and pretend nothing to see her move on. So it's sort of incompetent spinning by people whose default is to pretend they're chess champions. And as Gideon Forks pointed out sometime again now, everyone else is following on that they were economists at the Bank of England, on and on. I'm afraid there is a pattern of untruthfulness. And this time it's bitten them. The chess championship story is astonishing, really. I mean, just aside from whatever one makes of the fallout from the budget, describing her as the women's under 14 chess champion when, in fact, she played in a gen, I think, a unisex championship and came 26th out of 34 is quite the spin on the old CV front, isn't it?

12:34and then photographing her the day before the budget with a chess board. I mean, it's really trying to make the case that this is a very clever woman. Yes. I think she must be very intellectually insecure to feel the need to boost her standing in this way. You don't need to tell people that you're a chess champion. I've never been a chess champion, Jacob, as you well know. I didn't know you could well have been. Listen, I'm OK at Scrabble. Right, yes. And I'm quite good at catchphrase on the telly. but I've never played chess to a professional level at all. Having said that, yes, there is a degree of that but then the radio this morning, we were just sort of reflecting as a team a week on now from the budget, oh, well, your choppy waters have been calmed, everything's all right.

13:19I mean, I seem foolish now in my prediction last week that I thought she wouldn't go the distance. She will go the distance now, won't she? Will she? What distance? Well, I don't know. What distance will she go? The timing of these things is always very difficult to know. But think back to 1992 when you were probably still in your small frocks. I was opening advent calendars just with windows at that stage of my life. Whereas you see I was already into adult life by then, had been for many years, probably centuries. You have Black Wednesday and Norman Lamont is under a lot of pressure. And you can place bets with bookmakers as to how many days he's got left.

13:57And it's all a matter of time. He lasts until the middle of the summer, but then Major gets rid of him because every day it's another story saying, how long is Norman Le Monde surviving? And Norman Le Monde was in fact a highly competent chancellor and a very capable man, knew what he was doing, didn't actually like the ERM policy, but had it foisted on him by Major. And yet his position every day got that little bit weaker and eventually the prime minister has to act. That's where Reeves is. I can't tell you the day, I can't tell you the hour, but her shelf life is rapidly expiring. Why, when Labour are this bad, are we now having to have a conversation about basically which coalition will win at the next general election?

14:44You've mentioned the prospect of this sort of the capitalist axis of evil, some kind of mash up between, as you say, Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, maybe a side order of your party, our party, whoever party it turns out to be come 2029, versus the potential for the Conservatives and reform to do some kind of deal, shady or otherwise, probably cooked up down the road at the Boysdale. We're now leaning into that territory because we've got the left wanting even more socialism, despite the fact that the current socialism that's being offered up is failing and failing us very badly economically.

15:22And then this inability for the right to capitalise. Reform capitalises on Labour's demise, but not the Conservatives. I get that she's got Nigel Farage nipping at her heels. But I'm sorry, Kemi Badenock should be doing better on the back of recent very good PMQ performances and, frankly, a really good rebuttal to the budget. On the budget, she was almost as tough as you are, which is quite... Well, not that tough, but heading in that direction. She channeled her inner Camilla to do that. Bless her heart. And she did very well. I think it's early days in terms of announcing some policy, say stamp duty and so on, and really strong performances in the Commons.

16:05The Tory vote seems to be stabilising and beginning to pick up, having been falling consistently since the election, indeed since before the election. Yeah, one poll this week put them level pegging on 19 % with Labour and then reform ahead on about 27%. So at one point they were down to 14%, which looks dire. That's right. So it's slightly improving, but this is very early days. Reform has stopped growing. it seems to have plateaued at around 30 % depending on which poll you take. Some a little bit lower, the 27%, some a little bit higher. But I think Nigel thought a few months ago that reform would burst through 30 % and then head up to 40 % and could do it all by itself.

16:48Yes. I think that looks much less likely now. I was getting angry calls when I said, well, they still don't have enough to form a majority. Yes, we do! The magic number is meant to be 31.5%, But I think that was before the Greens started their ascendancy. And it all depends on where the other votes fall and whether there's tactical voting against you. And there is some evidence that there would be strong tactical voting against Nigel. So they need more than 31.5%. And also, you can't reform the country on under a third of the popular vote. To do what is going to need to be done after the next election needs both a majority in terms of seats and a mandate from the electorate.

17:26And I think things are going to be so bad that that's what people will want. So how does Comey fit into this? Well, she's doing better. The negotiating point for a Conservative with reform surely has to be when they're not going up strongly and we are at least plateauing too, rather than the point at which we're going down and reform is going up. Because then reform thinks, why bother? And that was Nigel's view. But that's how the graphs may turn after next May. If you have an absolute shocker, along with Labour, we're then going to have calls for Kemi Badenock to go, presumably to be replaced by Robert Jenrick, yet more turmoil in the Tories, from which you might not actually recover.

18:06So it's all very well talking about this now. It's a little bit like Rachel Reeves' fate. It could all be decided next May. Next May is going to be very important to all the parties and see whether reform is making the real breakthrough, particularly in Scotland and Wales, that it's hoping to make. see what happens to the Conservative vote. And yes, it will determine what sort of arrangements can be made, I think. And no one will make one before then, though I think it would be quite sensible for local parties to think between reform and the Conservatives where our best interest lies in council elections.

18:40The right aren't as good at tactical voting as the left, though. This is also the trouble. We've never needed to be. No. See, it hasn't really arisen. There's usually just been the Conservative Party. and you go back to 2019 and the Brexit party stands down. You go to 2024 and the Reform Party just thinks the Conservatives are a bunch of losers, so they want us out and they don't think the risk of Stama is as high as it turned out to be. So historically there's only been one party of the right. Tactical voting doesn't arise. It's only in the last couple of elections. In one election it was dealt with by standing down and the other election it was done because it was plague on your house, wasn't it?

19:28I had been making the argument that actually there was a small chink of light for the Conservatives when it came to them reasserting their case for being the most economically competent of all the parties. And I'd made the argument that the way that they back that up with some evidence, because obviously people will rightly turn around and say, well, you said you wanted to bring down taxes and you didn't, And you said you wanted to bring down emigration and you didn't. And actually, you weren't particularly helpful to businesses apart from giving them all that furlough cash and then allowing other dodgy businesses to take fraudulent COVID loans out.

20:00So you've actually muddied the waters on that front. But I said at least Kemi Badenock is attracting huge donations from high rollers and people who are leading businessmen and women in the UK. Their donations were much higher, Q1, Q2 and Q3 of this year. and I had recalled that I'd been to a number of different dinners with some high net worth individuals expecting both old money and new to turn around and say, well, I'm backing Farage because we're just in desperate times. And they were saying, no, we're not because he's untried and untested. We don't know who the chance is going to be. Is it going to be Richard Tice?

20:35Is it going to be Zia Yusuf? They haven't got a history. They haven't done this before. So it's all very well seeing them as campaigners. But what, handling our assets and investments? No, thank you. We now have news that, in fact, reform has trumped all of the other parties literally in the last few weeks by having this giant Q3 donation of nine million quid, Jacob, from a man called Christopher Harbourn, who you'll know better than I has got something to do with cryptocurrency. Yeah, I mean, I don't know him personally, but I know of him. It's a big donation for them, and that's important. And reform is a serious party.

21:13Just to point out, that's the biggest donation made by a single individual in history. You could look at, no, I think second, because I think somebody gave a bigger donation to the Liberal Democrats and then Lord Sainsbury left 10 million to the Conservatives in his will. Ah, yes. But by a living donor, I think Harbourn is first on the list. OK. I mean, that's a... It's a big donation. Wow. And important for reform. but the points you were making about reform doesn't have a chancellor it certainly doesn't have 24 cabinet ministers who could sit around with nigel and run the country and this is a real challenge for reform but i'm not unsympathetic to reform as you know they they need to work out what they do on day one because the thing we should all worry about is if nigel were to win gets into downing street and the small boats don't stop quickly and then people say well we tried tories they didn't work, tried labor, they didn't work, and now reform isn't managing to do it.

22:10And to succeed, he needs to wrest the leaves of power from the civil service. But they, when he goes in, will be telling him, here are the nuclear codes, all the exciting things of being prime minister, they will be distracting him. And he won't have people who know what the details of the government machine are, because reform's never had an experience of that. And it takes time to learn. And broadly, we have a system of learning on the job. So that's the real challenge for Nigel. And it's part of the reason I think an arrangement with the Conservatives would be useful, because we do at least know why things were frustrated when we were in office.

22:45Yes. So you have got experience of how it actually works in reality, which is something Baden-Ox constantly reminding Labour of. And also saying to them, you didn't plan. You didn't plan enough in opposition. And you came in and you said you had legislation ready to go. You didn't. You didn't really know what you were doing at all. So that's also important, how the Conservatives and reform plan things. you've got a lot more MPs to work on that than reform has. He's then got that problem with, oh, well, I'm going to just elect a load of peers and they're going to be brought into the cabinet to run things.

23:15That's problematic because they're not democratically elected MPs. Well, even if you put that to one side, and I don't think you should, say Nigel Winsman has 400 MPs, all of whom think that they should probably take over from him as prime minister. They'll all be ambitious. and suddenly you've gone from appointing 90 of your MPs to ministerial posts to 20 because you've got all these clever people in from outside. You've then got a large number of disgruntled people. And if you go all the way back to Walpole, the first prime minister, how do prime ministers control the House of Commons? How do they make sure they have a day-to-day majority?

23:50It's through patronage. And that patronage is a combination of offices, of trade delegations, of titles all of that is how our system operates the House of Commons MPs don't loyally troop through the division lobbies because they are injected with a serum of party loyalty. They do it because I'm joking, this is shocking to me They do it because they think there's something in it for themselves and that may be the threat of losing the whip and therefore deselection and not being an MP it may be that they want some post. And if you take away those posts, management of the House of Commons becomes impossible.

24:29And that's why it's so rarely worked, pointing people to the House of Lords, because the MPs don't like them, so they get no support from them. They're slightly jealous, to put it, that it's crudest. And they don't understand the way the political system works in detail. So they normally fail. Are you, in this situation between reform and the Tories, Qatar. Are you the arch negotiator? Are you having conversations behind closed doors with the blues and the turquoises? No, I'm not. Are you up at the Boysdale? No, no, I'm not. You're more likely to find me lunching in St James' Street rather than in Boysdale.

25:07Well, of course, indeed. I like Boysdale's very much, very nice place. But you might have a role to play just because of your historic links to the Conservatives and you are close to Mr Farage because you both work together on GB News. I bump into Nigel a lot, but I'm not an advisor of his. I'm not a confidant of his. No. I'm a friendly acquaintance of his. Everything I've said about doing a deal, I've said publicly. There's nothing that I'm saying to run to the table. But as time goes on, there will be key figures that will have to broker something between both of these two parties that say publicly that they hate each other but understand privately that they share a great deal in common, not just in their own philosophy and policy but also in their own voters who are shilly-shallying between both camps.

25:51I mean, there's so many people who say, yeah, I've joined Reform, but I'm also a Tory member or I can't quite lose. It's just classic. Even Mary is still a member of the Tory party as well as a member of Reform. That's allowed, is it? Well, I don't know. But on that point, I speak to quite a few conservative associations week in, week out pretty much. And they all want a deal. I'm not 100%, but overwhelmingly, the members of the party that come to events want an arrangement between reform and the Conservative Party. Although I don't think you could say that for all reform, because reform, there's a lot of people in reform that are extremely anti-Tory.

26:30There are some. We've been let down. I went to the Reform Party conference. Yes, I saw you. And had a very friendly reception. And absolutely, there were some people who were very hostile to the Tories and feel Tories were a disaster. there were quite a lot who were exactly the same people I meet when I'm addressing conservative associations who are just a bit fed up because they thought the Tory party wasn't conservative enough. And therefore, if coming together meant we were conservative enough, that would be the basis, I think, of a deal. Well, there is an advantage if reform keep the conservatives real and the conservatives keep reform from going off the reservation on issues, for instance, scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

27:06Very quickly as well, the other problem for Farage, of course, is we've seen this bubbling up, haven't we, of negative stories. So we've had this whole anti-Semitism and racism allegation that's been levelled against him by predominantly the Guardian and a number of key figures he went to school with, which I think is fair enough. They've got the right to say their own schoolboy memories and he's got the right of reply to them. We then had obvious sort of implications around Russian bribes because of Nathan Gill's imprisonment for 10 years, which probably is fair enough. Although just because Gill's been in prison doesn't mean they're all awash with oligarchs cash.

27:39Well, look at all the money one Labour MP got from China. I mean, you know. Well, there could be a widespread parliamentary investigation into just foreign influence on MPs, and I think that would be welcome. We've got another accusation now suggesting that Tony Bloom, who owns Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, has got a gambling syndicate that implicates George Cottrell, who was Farage's chief of staff, known as Posh George. He's somebody who had previously been found guilty of money laundering. So all I'm saying is let's also be prepared for a lot of buckets of dog mess to be thrown in Nigel Farage's direction by anyone on the left the closer we get to a general election, which could affect his poll rating.

28:20I don't know. I think it won't affect his poll rating, but I think it will definitely be thrown. It's going to be just like Trump. If they can cook up criminal charges, they will cook up criminal charges. They will have him absolutely under the microscope and they will abuse executive authority to go for Nigel if they can because the blob is terrified of him. And so I think it will get worse. Nigel will find it very difficult. There will be a lot of pressure on him. But I think his voters will look at it as Trump's voters looked at it and said this is coming from people who are cheating the system to bring him down.

28:55I think it's important to say this now because if Nigel is prosecuted for something, we need to remember that he's almost certainly going to be a political stitch up that they're trying to do. And it wouldn't surprise me if they tried it. Look at this cancelling of elections. They are using tricks that you never thought would be used in British democracy to do down Nigel and reform. And that's pretty discreditable. And therefore, we need to be prepared for worse. Jacob Rees-Mogg, we need to leave it there. You're going to be back with me because we're going to do a re-smug Christmas special ahead of the festive season.

29:30We're going to find out how Jacob, Helena and the six children celebrate Christmas. Can I call it celebration? It's a religious thing in your household. Of course it's celebration. Celebrating but also being appropriately religious. But religion is a celebration. The birth of Christ. Religion is a celebration. I mean, it's a joyous occasion that the robes are white or gold on Christmas Day because it is joyful. It is joyful. I bet you're not getting your tree from Tesco, who have eradicated the word Christmas from all of their tree marketing, it seems. Very silly of them. No, the tree comes from a local supplier in Somerset.

30:06Oh, so you've got a fresh one in every year? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pine-dropping tree, a proper tree. Proper tree, but I don't think it does a lot of pine-dropping. I think there are special trees that don't. Do you carry that over your shoulder? Do we see you going across the Somerset plain? No, no. It goes on the back of a pickup because it's quite big. Do you get involved in putting the bauble on? No, I'm not trusted with that. Oh, not even putting the angel on top? You're the tallest one in the family, aren't you? No, no, no, no, that's very much the children in Helena do that. Do you buy any of the prezzies?

30:39Oh, yes, yes. In fact, we're ruining... Hang on. Hold that thought. We're going to be discussing all this. All of this, yes. More to come from Jacob Rees-Mogg on the subject of Christmas very soon. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm. Thank you.