Is Reform UK becoming a Tory party retirement home?

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast. So we stand at a crossroads. We can either continue down this route of managed decline to weakness and surrender, or we can fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength. I believe that a better Britain is possible. And because I believe that is possible, today I'm announcing that I resign the Conservative whip. That is the former Conservative Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, defecting to Reform UK in a not so surprising Monday Reform press conference. She has become the third sitting Conservative MP to join Nigel Farage's party in little more than a week.

0:56She told the reform crowd that she felt like she'd come home. But what is reform now, if not a dustbin for former failed Conservatives? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:14The News Agents. It's Lewis. It's Emily. And as we're saying there, Soella Braverman has now become the 18th current or former Conservative MP to defect to reform. Perhaps not surprisingly, she is from the right of the party. Perhaps not surprising at all. It has been much speculated about for a while that she might do this. She has been off the reservation, perhaps in every sense, for quite a while now. She's not like Robert Jenrick was sitting within the shadow cabinet. She doesn't have a significant following anymore insofar as she ever did within the Conservative Party. But nonetheless, clearly, as a former Home Secretary and as part of a now quite long string of Tory MPs, either current or former, it is damaging for Kemi Badenok and clearly is something that Nigel Farage is continuing to trumpet.

2:00And as she resigned, we had a reminder from Lib Dem Daisy Cooper that Bravman was, in her words, so bad. She was forced to resign by Truss and also sacked by Rishi Sunak. Let's just get a flavour of how Suella is greeting her new home. Loyalty demands honesty. And honesty compels me to say this today. Britain is indeed broken. She is suffering. She is not well. Immigration is out of control. Our public services are on their knees. People don't feel safe. Our youngsters are leaving the country for better futures elsewhere. We can't even defend ourselves. And our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage.

2:47So, friend of the pronoun, Suella Brotherman there. Interesting that when she is slagging off Britain's brokenness, the brokenness of Britain. There's a big question hanging over it. Like, wait till we find out who did this. I think that is completely right. I think, look, this obviously is highly redolent for reform of Robert Jennerick's defection, Nadim Zahawi's defection, all of these defections from very senior conservatives, former conservatives associated with the last government. There are two big sort of question marks for me about it in terms of reform and for them personally. One is, simply as you say, Emily, Ultimately, they are announcing to the world and to the country, presenting us with a diagnosis that Britain is broken.

3:34As you've already alluded to, there is one clear set of culprits as to how we got to this place. Just by definition, the fact that these people were in office for 14 years, identifying, for example, broken public services, identifying our reduced standing in the world, identifying our now decrepit military. The unaffordability of this country for many of our young, which is not wrong, but it is because of housing policy after housing policy or rather lack of. Absolutely. And what they do is they say, oh, well, look, we've accepted we made some mistakes. But that isn't really adequate because they then do that and try and draw a line.

4:12What they don't do is try and conceptually, intellectually, philosophically present an account as to how they made those mistakes and what they would do differently. And that brings me to my second difference and why I actually think or problem and why I think some of these defections are so problematic, which is why are they defecting? What actually separates them intellectually from the Conservative Party right now or from Kemi Bay Knox Conservative Party? Not very much. It is not like when we've had in the past defections during a parliament when the party itself has profoundly changed. That happened, say, after 1981, when the STP was created.

4:48The Labour Party had moved far to the left. It had become really anti-Europe, anti-NATO. You can understand why the people, people like Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, high-profile defections at that time, did what they did. Because they could credibly say, look, the party has changed substantially. I can't represent it anymore. Likewise, you might have said the same thing after 2015 with Labour MPs and Jeremy Corbyn, or even after 2019 with Boris Johnson. Exactly right. I think after a Brexit vote, which actually divided the Tory party itself as well as the country, then you had a very different set of sort of circumstances in which you would want to be considered conservative or not conservative.

5:21And Boris Johnson went to the country and said Brexit or bust. A profoundly big difference. It is not clear to me at all, and I have not heard an adequate explanation from either Robert Jenrick, Sola Braverman in that speech there, or indeed any of the other sort of big defections, exactly what it is about the Conservative Party, or really the last Conservative government, that they now find so objectionable, other than the fact that it seems to be what they're saying, is that the Conservative Party brand has become so broken and tarnished that it cannot be a credible vehicle to oppose Keir Starmer.

5:53But if that's all that it is, that's pretty flimsy. And secondly, it doesn't grapple with the fact that who broke the Conservative Party brand? Well, it was you. And now you're going to this new vehicle and saying, well, we're going to be different without actually conceptually grappling with what went wrong in the first place, which, to be honest, was you. It's a bit like falling into a disused canal, getting out, sitting on a bench, turning around the person next to you and going, oh, my God, this stinks. Right. Absolutely stinks. And moving to another bench. A, you brought the stench, and B, you're bringing it with you.

6:27And to your point, I think that that is entirely what is missing from this, is the coherence of any argument. Because not one person has said, I really back what Nigel Farage is doing on, I don't know, on public spending or on infrastructure or on solving the housing crisis. Any of the things that they've actually pointed to as being problematic, except for immigration, which, you know, I give them, that's fine. He's been the most hardcore on immigration of all the parties so far. But actually, I think the question is also one for reform, which is if they wanted to be this shiny new populist reinvention, this is what politics looks like in Britain in 2026.

7:13Why are they filling their ranks with failed items, right? Why are they filling their ranks? From one side in particular. Right. With people who have been tried and tested by the electorate and, as we heard, tried and tested by their own leaders. I mean, you know, that's quite a record, isn't it? Forced to resign by Trust and sacked by Rishi Sunak. I mean, the fact that the Tories essentially already kicked her out in name twice, I think doesn't spell something brand new, shiny and exciting for a party that is trying to get into power. No, as the former Labour political aide Theo Bertram tweeted, the reform benches now have more former members of Liz Truss's cabinet than the Conservative front bench does.

7:59Which tells you something also that these aren't just Conservative MPs, but they're provenances from a very particular part of the Conservative Party. And look, Breverman, I don't think it inflicts a sort of damage that Robert Jenner's affection did because she was, as I say, basically in many ways already very detached from the Conservative Party. and she did not enjoy me. She tried to run for leader, didn't really get anywhere. She did not enjoy a significant following within the Tory party. But clearly the problem arises from the fact that yes, I think these defections are a double-edged sword for reform.

8:29Yes, it is true that the danger for them is that they just look like a cast of the dispossessed and the never possessed from the Conservative Party. And it is hard, as we've said on the show before, to run as the anti-system party when you have so many people in your ranks who were the system until quite recently. Quite an interesting contrast as well, just thinking about it with, for example, you know, Farage is close to the MAGA project and obviously wants to base to some extent in the Republican Party what happened with Trump. Very different to what happened with the Republicans. Different system, of course.

8:57But Trump, when he runs, runs right till the end in 2016, still very much in opposition to the traditional Republican ranks. Right. It's only later when he wins and particularly when he wins again that the sort of establishment Republicans really kind of come on side. This is quite a different approach. The obvious advantage to it, though, is that the Conservative Party and reform, I think what is becoming clearer with these defections is there is not going to be an accommodation between them. At the start of the Parliament, there was more speculation that perhaps there would be some sort of parliamentary arrangement or they would divvy up seats or whatever it happens to be.

9:29That feels more and more impossible. Therefore, one or other must win over the other. It is a battle for survival. It is a battle to speak on behalf of the right in British politics. Therefore, if you are basically trying to say as the Reform Party, we're basically the new Conservative Party, we are the right of British politics. It isn't such a bad thing to have a string, a stream of former senior Conservatives coming to you because you're basically sending a message to right of centre voters across the country that we are the live, credible force on the right and the Tory party is dead. And that seems to be the strategy that Farage is alighting upon.

10:05Yeah, and I think actually what this allows Kemi Badenok to do is to say there is a clearing out of the closet here. And if reform are going to be the party of immigration, then they can be the party of the economy. and for as long as Labour is taking immigration seriously, which I guess you would say with Shibana Mahmood in the role of Home Secretary, they kind of are, or at least they are trying to get to grips with immigration, then it allows the Conservatives much cleaner ground, which is to say, is the country still not working for many people? You know, are your taxes still too high? Is Labour spending too much on welfare?

10:43All the areas where traditional Conservatives are actually very comfortable, And I think Kemi and those around her are very comfortable. And if you go right back to Theresa May's conference speech, do you remember when she talked about the nasty party, this idea of the Conservatives not being able to brush off the sense of them being the nasty party? Well, hey, maybe this is a spring clean. Maybe this is a shedding of the old snakeskin that the people that were deemed to be part of the, you know, if you like, the nasty right, obviously not for reform, but for sort of many in sort of centrist Britain, they've gone now.

11:19So you look around and you say, we are keeping the economy, the cost of living, affordability, if you will, at the centre of what we're going to talk about now. will let them bang on about immigrants and people can discuss whether that is, you know, just practical, whether it's kind of tinged with a sort of reformy shaped racism. We'll let Labour sort of slightly get carried away in its own psychodrama, of which more to come. And we can just talk about the main voter concern, both here and in the US, which is affordability, what we cannot afford. Yeah, I think that's right. And so, you know, Baden-Württemberg is going to clearly, and she's right to try and make the best of this and present it as an opportunity.

12:01You know, you can sort of say that we are reinventing. We're reinventing, as you say, Emily, by getting rid of some of the problems that were there before. I think the problem is, though, is that one of the reasons the Tory party did so badly in 2024 is that even then the right of centre vote was split. You know, even then when Farage had only latterly got into the game, remember during the early stages of the general election, there were scores of seats where reform made the difference or split the difference between the conservative reform vote and labour particularly in north of england one it's hard to imagine as of right now that that split is not going to be worse at the next election than it was before now there may well be splits on the left as well with the green party so that that could you know scramble the sort of situation even more but as long as that split exists it becomes very difficult assuming there cannot be an accommodation it becomes difficult to see even if there is a Conservative Party recovery, how it would be sufficiently strong to win a majority or get anything close to it, particularly when you consider that, I suppose it depends how much space you think there is in British politics right now.

13:01I don't know the answer to this, but how much space you think there is for a more classical, one nation, conservative, sort of slightly more centre-right prospectus in politics, when you consider that all of the energy on the right and in politics generally has been on the right of politics, on a radical right of politics and whether Kemi Bade not can assemble a coalition that looks something more like the David Cameron coalition of 2015. I just don't know whether that space in that coalition exists in British politics anymore. Yeah, Tory spokesman has just commented on the defection and said the Conservatives did all we could to look after Suella's mental health.

13:36She was clearly very unhappy. That feels pretty personal. I mean, Paul Brown from ITV is kind of reflecting on that. It was always a matter of when, not if, Suella would defect. This is another line from the spokesman. The Conservatives did all we could to look after her. I don't know whether they've pressed that button a little bit too quickly. But, I mean, to your point, which is this incredibly fractured place that we may now look at, and we've talked about this before on the newsagents, whether we will see a sort of a right of centre coalition and a left of centre coalition and a vote that's split in sort of 20 % sort of nodules.

14:14And I guess the first glimpse, I mean, excitingly, for sort of, you know, poll watchers, election watchers, will be whatever happens now in this by-election, which is Andrew Gwynne's seat, which will now not become Andy Burnham's seat in Gorton and Denton. And we are going to have a very good chance to see really who has that flavour, who has the nation's flavour in that particular part of Manchester, we have to say, in something that's going to be way earlier now than the May elections. It's going to be March. I'd imagine so. Yeah, March. Late February, March, right? So, I mean, let's just take you over the events of the weekend, which was essentially Andy Burnham saying at the 11th hour that he would stand for the seat.

15:03He's the Greater Manchester Mayor. presenting a big headache for Keir Starmer, which is, do you invite a potential leadership contender into the fold? Do you welcome them in or do you look slightly angsty and scared by blocking them? And at around 12 o 'clock yesterday after an NEC meeting, which is basically the executive committee deciding whether or not he is allowed to stand because he, as a serving mayor, still really should, you know, in their eyes be seeing out his full term. and it was an 8-1 vote to ban him from standing. Yeah, Andy Burnham expressed, as you might imagine, his dissatisfaction with this.

15:41In his initial statement, he had some magnanimity, but he couldn't help about 30 minutes later tweeting a Keir Starmer ally, Tom Baldwin, basically saying, well, as a result of all this, we're definitely going to lose the seat, which will displease some in the Labour Party. He was doorstep by the BBC this morning, though. This is what he said. What do you make of the NET's decision, Mr Burnham? I'm not making any comment. I said what I needed to say. and here I am, back in my job, full focus, on my job as Mayor of Greater Manchester. Do you think Keir Starmer is scared of you? I'm not making any further comment.

16:11I've said everything that I needed to say. Are you frustrated with anything? I'm getting on with my job now. Thank you. There is a lot of sort of heat and noise around this story, but I can't help feeling that actually everyone has played the role that they had to play. In other words, Keir Starmer never really had a choice. Of course, he had to block Burnham from standing because otherwise he'd essentially handed him the gun to take his role. And I think Burnham had to stand in a seat that who knows, maybe he didn't even really want to stand for. I mean, there were all these rumours of who else is going to come in, some big beasts.

16:49It is entirely possible he might have lost that seat, even in Greater Manchester. and Burnham then gets blocked and he has managed to test the water, find out exactly who's on his side. It's almost a little sort of, you know, data number here. He knows those people will speak out. He knows he's got that support and Starmer knows that he's tested the NEC and they've come up Trump's on his side. They've all agreed with him except for Lucy Powell. He's had Usdor and GMB unions also blocking Andy Burnham from starting it. And I guess, I mean, I guess this is short-term pain for something that probably makes the problem go away.

17:24I mean, those in Starmer's team are directing us to a former quote by David Cameron, who once tweeted, great news that Boris plans to stand. I've always said I want my star players on the pitch. Well, obviously that didn't really work out very well for Cameron. You can invite people in, but they will probably eat your lunch. And the thing that I find really striking is how many now in the Labour Party are saying things like, well, I hope I'm wrong, but there's, I hope I'm wrong, but I think we might lose it now. I hope I'm wrong. People in public life who say, I hope I'm wrong, very rarely hope they're wrong, but you can feel that, I hope I'm wrong.

18:08I think what it means is, oh, that was a big mistake. We're going to make life quite tricky for Keir Starmer now. Yeah, look, I think you're completely right. I mean, I think that I didn't quite understand why so many people seem to convince themselves over the weekend that there was going to be any other outcome. I was doing the Sunday show on LBC this weekend. I had quite a few people come in and sort of say exactly that. You know, they thought, not just publicly but privately, they thought the pressure that had sort of emanated a couple of days before might somehow change the calculus for number 10.

18:39It's nonsense. Just nonsense. Andy Burnham might as well have been handing a piece of paper to Keir Starmer that says, I, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, resign in your favour. Please sign here. because why would you allow perhaps your most potent rival for your job the keys to number 10 which is exactly what he would have been doing it was never going to happen um as you say i think burnham had to go for it he's put a marker down he will destabilize starmer to some extent there are some mps who are deeply unhappy about it but to be honest the mps who are deeply unhappy about it are the people who are deeply unhappy anyway and what they wanted was clear keir starmer and Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, have many frailties.

19:15One of them is not internal party management. That is the one thing that they have shown the steeliest resolve on from day one. He's quite good at getting rid of people when he wants to get rid of people. So the idea, and it remains probably his most, his greatest strength as a politician, his hold over the Labour Party machinery. So the idea that he was going to allow the Labour Party machinery to allow Burnham back into Parliament, particularly when there was a reasonably strong argument they could make, which is to say that this was going to be a very expensive by-election I mean, you're talking about a million pounds on a mayoralty election, maybe that's an exaggeration but it's a really easy way to get the taxpayer on side, just by saying do you really want to spend that kind of money on an election you don't need to have?

19:55And I think, look clearly, this was all it was no win scenario in any situation because Keir Starmer is so weak. If Keir Starmer were strong, Andy Burnham would not want to go back into Parliament because there would be no prospect of his becoming prime minister. He enjoys his job. He has a great deal of prestige and independence, being Greater Manchester Mayor. The only reason Burnham wants to go back is he doesn't want to be a backbencher. He doesn't even want to be in the cabinet. He wants to be prime minister and leader of the Labour Party. He's stood twice before. Do it again. So that is a reflection of Starmer's weakness.

20:25And it is a reflection of Starmer's weakness that Starmer has said no. Because if Starmer were strong, he would be more indifferent to the idea of his coming back, i.e. Andy Burnham's coming back, just as David Cameron was more indifferent to the prospect of Boris Johnson. really indifferent. I think Cameron was not indifferent ever to Boris Johnson, but I think he also realised that the party was on, naturally was on Boris Johnson's side, so it wouldn't have made him any more popular by blocking. Well, I think Cameron's internal position, when Johnson was allowed to stand for Uxbridge in 2015, Cameron's internal position and external position was much stronger than Starmer's is, so I think he was more relaxed.

21:03But sure, he was of course aware that the better example is if boris johnson had not been in parliament in say 2017 18 19 and theresa may allowing him to stand which she would not have done for precisely the same reason that keir starmer is not allowing burnham to stand which is both were internally very weak i also think as you've already alluded to we're not talking about a sort of barack obama messianic sort of glide across water to the labor party here he's been a very very successful greater a Manchester mayor, winning every single ward in the last mayoralty elections and electorally, I mean, about as sound as it gets.

21:41But he has, in Westminster terms, not been always electorally successful. He's stood to lead the party twice. The party have had their chance to elect him twice. I mean, he threw the 2015 election away. It was his to win because of various things we don't need to get into. Corbyn won instead. Yeah, I think as so often, there are quite often these sort of Labour pretenders to the throne and I would put David Miliband in the same camp actually, somebody who's looked as if he was all ready to take on Gordon Brown and actually didn't get there, you know. And I think there's not the steel actually, or I mean you could say there's not the access now, of course but I'm not sure that that's where Labour should be looking to renew the party now.

22:24Well there's two things, I mean first of all, Burnham is not universally popular even within the Labour Party, quite the opposite. There are Labour MPs who are unhappy at his manoeuvring, they're still unhappy We remember back to the conference season where he kind of imploded a little bit. He sort of made the moves on Starmer that went down very badly at the Labour Party conference. You can't keep edging forward and going backwards. No. I think that's not a good look. He's not universal. That said, he's easily the most popular Labour politician in the country. You might say that's not very difficult at the moment, but nonetheless, that's true.

22:51As you say, Emily, he has been a very successful mayor of Greater Manchester. Greater Manchester is a very rare economic and political success story in this country. And publicly, I mean, the things that he can name, like the Ellsworth Compensation, really getting to the bottom of the cover-up, extraordinary stuff. He's done extraordinary stuff for homelessness in Manchester. He's kind of brought in some of the bus companies and made the whole transport system run better. I don't know whether that automatically equates to running a very fractious party in Westminster. Well, I've not heard. I mean, the thing is, is that the moment...

23:22It is easy to be king over the... At the moment, the deepest water, because he's not even in Parliament, it's easy to be king over the water and it's easy to be admired from afar. I've not seen, if Burnham were to go into Parliament, he has laid out an alternative prospectus. It is to the left of where Starmer has been. He would, of course, face many of the same structural problems, in fact, all the same structural problems that Starmer and Reeves find themselves in, which is, you know, pretty poor public finances, pretty sclerotic economy and so on. These things do take time. He would clearly have greater communication skill than Starmer has.

23:53That's probably his greatest asset. But those problems remain. As I say, I think that this is, it reaffirms this entire story more than anything about the Burnham-Stammer thing. It reaffirms something that is blindingly obvious now that we know, which is that Starmer is weak politically. And the net winner in all of this probably is not so much Starmer. In fact, it's definitely not Starmer. It is the other pretenders to the throne who are in a position to do something about it, i.e. those who are in Parliament, the West Streetings of the world, the Angela Raines of this world, maybe even the Shabana Moods of this world.

24:24Starmer is weakened further by this. it is probably the best case scenario he could hope for. It definitely is. The net beneficiaries are his parliamentary rivals, not Andy Burnham. In a moment, we'll be talking about the latest shooting in Minnesota and how Trump may be reacting to it now.