Get ready for a wild year in Westminster

0:00Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. and this week's episode we are going to be looking at the future we are going to be looking at the completely insane and wild ride that 2026 promises to be i guarantee you there will be fireworks we could have a labor leadership contest a tory leadership contest we could have nigel fradi to continue to succeed or implode so we want to talk about all of those areas today we want just want to take you through from a political anorak's point of view which i guess we all are quite how exciting a year this is to come.

0:35So I'm Stephen Swinford, political editor of the Times. I'm Caroline Wheeler, the political editor of the Sunday Times. I'm Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times. And I'm Gabriel Pogrand, Whitehall editor at the Sunday Times. Let's kick off with the big one. And the big question is, will Keir Starmer survive? And I'm going to put in my tuppence worth just to kick things off and get a debate going on it. I think there is a world in which he does survive May and actually survive in the coming months after because actually getting people to coalesce around a single opponent is really difficult and Labour is very divided and all the pieces aren't on the board yet so there's a world like by Christmas of 2026 that's a different question but in the immediate aftermath and the months after May there is a world in which he holds on despite continuing speculation and I'd caveat at this by saying, as with all political predictions, you have to take them with a pinch of salt because the reality is always far more interesting.

1:37But that's my start for 10. Well, I agree and disagree with you, Steve. Firstly, can I see a world in which Keir Starmer remains Prime Minister beyond May? Yes, for the simple reason that Keir Starmer only needs to exceed expectations very slightly for the local elections and the devolved elections to be considered less than a complete cataclysm for the Labour Party. And we know Labour MPs have an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion and sticking their heads in the sand. And so if Labour do OK in Wales, and OK relative to expectations is anything more than being completely obliterated, if they do OK in Scotland, if reform undershoot expectations ever so slightly across England, Wales and Scotland.

2:29It's very easy to see a world in which on the Monday after the weekend of the local elections, Labour MPs say, well, hang on, reform didn't make as many gains as we thought and Zapolansky's Greens haven't done that well in London and, oh, you know, we didn't get annihilated in Wales and maybe we're second place in Scotland or, you know, actually Anasawa, just like the Rutherglen by-election, you know, showed us that the Scottish Labour machine can still turn out votes even when the opinion polls are bad. You can see a world where that happens. Now, do I think that's going to happen? Don't know.

3:02The vagaries of multi-party politics contested via first-past-the-post are an always tricky thing to predict. That's the new reality we're in. But if they go badly, I think sort of all bets are off. You know, the way we're thinking about this now is that it's really difficult for Labour MPs to coalesce around a single candidate. I think if it's anywhere near as bad as we expect, that's the point at which the cabinet, the key power brokers on the back benches, I'm thinking of Angela Rayner, Louise Haig and others, and the would-be candidates and the sort of critical mass of Labour MPs sit there and say, okay, we've wasted enough time.

3:47we have seen what happens when we allow ourselves to waste time and you know this is where kira has taken us we just need something else and i think at that point there'll be a quite powerful impulse on the labor benches to just agree on something else and come to an accommodation with one person who can be palatable to the whole party now i suspect that person is likeliest but perhaps not overwhelmingly likely you know relative to all the other options probably marginally likeliest to be west streeting you know i can see him brokering some sort of deal not with angela rayner but certainly with parts of the soft left um but yeah i think the psychological shock of a set of locals that are as bad as we expect will have a really profound effect on how the parliamentary labour party thinks about all this yeah just in the spirit of this futurology I mean, what are some of the factors that could end up securing Starmer's position?

4:43Well, let's just be straightforward about the fact there is no one candidate. This is not the Tory party in 2019 where, you know, Johnson had been looming over Tory politics for the best part of half a decade, where he dominated the EU referendum, where he dominated the aftermath, where everybody acknowledged that at some point he was going to have a crack at the whip. Well, and then the essay, the electoral essay question was, we've just lost European elections to Farage. Who can fix this? And he was the obvious answer. Exactly. I don't think that there's any candidate. Firstly, there's no clarity as to who it could be.

5:18You spoke about West Streeting. There's Shabana Mahmood. There's Angela Rayner. There are, by the way, plenty of people, you know, who we probably haven't expended much time speaking about on the podcast. Alan Cans is a good example of, you know, there are the wild... John Healy. John Healy. John Healy, Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham. There are people who could just emerge and say, I am, per what you were saying in our last episode, Caroline, I'm not encumbered by the legacy of the last government. We just don't know. I think the fact that we don't know who it will be is one of Starmer's great strategic strengths.

5:55I think the other kind of big factor for him is the fact that there's no intellectual clarity as to what it is that this candidate would be. would they have a completely different critique of the economy of progressive politics or would they just be not keir starmer and is just not being keir starmer actually an adequate platform to run and i think there are lots of unknown unknowns but there are some known unknowns too namely well how prepared are the various candidates you know after the batley by-election which was shortly after the hartley pool reckoning 2021 people said if starmer lost that he would be challenge Morgan McSweeney was ready at that point with a multi-day grid populated by various announcements and big ideas designed to catch the media's attention but also you know it being McSweeney there was no shortage of the dark arts too they were going to put people up on the broadcast round in order to deliberately flush them out so they could be asked about their leadership ambitions I mean I think the question is is you know 10 minutes two hours 24 hours after the locals in May.

7:01Is West Streeting actually ready? Many of the people who you would expect would coalesce around him are engaged in doing the job of government. They're on the government payroll. Shabana Mahmood faces the same predicament. Andy Burnham's not even in parliament. I mean, I think, you know, the one great lesson of Starmer's leadership is that if you do plan, the spoils can be yours, you know, notwithstanding your personal weaknesses. You know, he was the guy who sliced and diced the membership had a plan executed it and becky long bailey uh remember her was off on holiday and hadn't agreed who her campaign manager would be so there is a question as to well who who has actually done the work has anyone done the work if the answer ends up being no not really um that could secure starmer's starmer's position yet or at least give him a few months more but i think that's in some ways what starmer's been saying to mps i think it is it's better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

7:57Because actually, I think what I hear the kind of internal number 10 machinery has been saying to MPs is, if you roll the dice, you don't know what you're going to get at the end of it, you might think that you're going to get West Streeting. But because, as you were saying, Patrick and Gabriel, you know, the party is split in so many different ways. And, you know, as I said in the last episode, it's not always obvious which side certain people are going to go with. I mean, I would have thought that most of the soft left MPs would have coalesced around Angela Rayner. I'm sort of starting to find out that's not the case, which actually makes you realise even more so that if you throw the dice, you might think you're going to get Wes, but you might end up with somebody completely different.

8:38And that is, that's definitely quite a powerful message, which I think number 10 are deploying quite successfully at the moment. And that's what's keeping a little bit of a lid on what's going on. However, I mean, I've lost count of the number of times I've written that a local election is going to precipitate a sort of change of leadership, a change of direction. We certainly wrote about that with Theresa May. We wrote about it with Boris Johnson. We wrote about it with Rishi Sunak. And it often didn't happen in May. It often happened in a completely unexpected way. If you think about, for example, Boris Johnson, nobody would have predicted the Chris Pincher incident, which brought to a fore bubbling tensions which started with the Owen Paterson fiasco and really kind of brought to the fore a kind of crisis in confidence, in leadership and judgment.

9:27And so in my experience, it's often things that you don't expect that kind of bring all this to the fore. But I think the one thing I would say is there are not many people that I speak to and often you will have conversations with cabinet ministers and they will say to you with a twinkle in the eye, of course we're all behind Starmer, of course we're all pulling together, but you know behind the scenes, because we all speak to people that talk to everybody else, that behind the scenes, almost to a person, there is nobody saying anything positive about this government and there are very few people thinking that it can limp on for too long.

10:03And look, there is definitely a school of thought, which is, should we change leader now or should we wait right up until the last knockings and sort of have a bounce just before a general election with a new leader in situ. That's definitely a conversation that I've heard. But I personally just can't quite see how it's going to limp on that long unless something really dramatic changes. And if you've still got groups of MPs who are looking at their own electoral prospects, and again, I refer back to the group of MPs that I'm told is the angriest at the moment, which is that rural group of MPs that are really facing a crunch around that inheritance tax issue.

10:41I just can't see how it goes on for much longer. And I certainly, if not May, would make a prediction that Sir Keir Starmer does not lead the Labour Party into the next election. Now, whether that comes sooner than we think, because of an unforced error that perhaps we're not expecting, or later than we think, because, as Patrick says, perhaps things aren't quite as terrible in the May local elections as some are prediction and to be fair there's no sign of that at the moment if you look at the polls it's looking universally dire um i still think that that this prime minister has a big big problem can i make another prediction connected to this and actually connected to nigel far as well we're all going to be talking a lot more about brexit in 2026 so one starmer wants to talk about brexit he wants to talk about nigel far as the guy that walks away he wants to foster closer ties that's fine we've been talking about that in recent weeks the other thing is we've got some really interesting polling from YouGov, which says that four in 10 Labour members would favour rejoining the EU, full stop.

11:44So sorry, Labour voters, I should say, those who voted Labour in 2024. And why that's interesting is because we've got, okay, if we think a leadership contest is coming, then you're gonna have Wes Streeting, who was a vocal advocate for a second referendum. You've got Angela Rayner, who I think believes the Brexit issue is settled and is very worried about the influence of reform in her constituency. Andy Burnham, I'm not sure where he'd sit on that spectrum. But either way, there is a world in which if there is a Labour leadership contest, it also turns into a discussion about Brexit. And that is no longer as settled an issue as it is now with Keir Starmer's quite clear position that we're not re-entering the customs union.

12:19It's quite interesting, actually, because as we've said before about, you know, who the candidates would be and whether they would mark a kind of departure from Starmerism, That is one issue where you could actually see there being proper differences in opinion between the leadership candidates, which might actually act as a catalyst for change in a way that perhaps I've not considered in the past, which is this is one area where you could see something different being offered to what the status quo is. Yeah, and for that reason, you know, some close allies of the Prime Minister think he should do it himself, that he should say, look, by the end of this parliament, we should be moving towards negotiations on a customs union with the EU.

13:02Because the moment you say that, what does a West Streeting or somebody else have to differentiate themselves in the eyes of the members on Europe in a leadership election? But we'll also be talking about Brexit, I think, Steve, because it was a big coup for the Prime Minister, Nick Thomas-Simmons' Brexit minister, to agree to begin negotiations with the EU. That deal they agreed to commence talks on a range of issues. But the reality of the talks is proving quite a bit trickier. And, you know, the defence deal has already collapsed. We've also seen the EU slap steel tariffs on the UK. and Europe is preoccupied with Ukraine and much else besides.

13:47So it's entirely possible we end up lurching to a place where we have to consider big, bold action because this idea of running a parallel track of negotiations on a range of issues turns out actually to be much harder than it looked. I think on that very theme, we're talking about Starmer's future, sure one potential fly in the ointment for the various contenders is you know as harold mcmillan put it events we don't know how those could end up entrenching starmer's position against the odds ukraine was a lifeline for boris johnson you know not to be too high-minded about it but you know if china invades taiwan if russia encroaches on one of the baltic states you know those are moments where the office of prime minister carries some heft and also where a leader is able to redefine themselves in the public imagination.

14:40I think, I mean, there's one pollster who I spoke to not long ago, who has, from time to time, been called upon to provide insight in Downing Street. And this person said that, you know, Starmer's position for now, his public perception has crystallized. There's not that much that can be done to change it. It doesn't really matter what resets take place or what language or what TikTok or Substack message Starmer is seeking to convey with the public you know he he will need an a capital event to uh you know rebalance the scales but if that were to happen you know there are obviously reasons why he was elected last year um which could reassert themselves you know the statesman statesman like Starmer the serious Starmer the Starmer who represents you know sobriety and certainty in the correct scenario that can assume heightened importance none of which is to say that the economy ever retreats into the background for too long as the kind of central determinant of politics but Starmer may have the luxury of other matters seeming far more valent after those local elections than just kind of straightforward electoral considerations and the PLP happening to think he's rubbish.

15:56Can we move on to talking about Nigel Farage and the broad question on Nigel Farage is has he hit a ceiling as people like John Curtis the great elections guru suggest or is there further to go one of the things that we're picking up that we'll be doing the story on is that they are going to throw the kitchen sink i mean this seems obvious for the local elections and the the welsh election the scottish election but in hard money i suggested to me they're going to spend more than five million quid they're going to do a huge direct mail campaign because for all of the talk about social media that is still seen as the most effective mechanism for getting through to voters so a completely uncontentious prediction actually we are going to be seeing a lot of Nigel Farage.

16:38Yeah, and crucially, what's interesting about the direct mail campaign is, part of the reason it costs so much is they do genuinely send it to everybody in the country, including people who haven't voted before. Usually political parties don't touch those people, but reform always makes a point of speaking to them. What reform figures say, senior people in reform say, is that ultimately they want to get beyond the 30 % of the vote they've basically had consolidated since May to 35%, 36%, and then even higher by the end of the year. Now, they're confident that when you look at what happened after the locals last year, that their numbers went up, that in Caffili, in the Welsh Parliament by-election, they actually overshot their polling.

17:25They were at 36 % of the vote in that. They're still winning lots of council by-elections. You know, every week they will win seats from the Tories. They'll win a seat from Labour in Darlington the other week and Labour went down to something like fourth or fifth place. So actually there's plenty of data to encourage you if you're reformed. reform. The ultimate test though is whether, you know, 30 % is the floor now or whether it's the ceiling. You know, a couple of weeks ago I spoke about their plan to focus more on the cost of living. It is to make sure they are resilient enough and offering a broad enough offer to withstand what you said, Gabriel, you know, events.

18:09What happens if, you know, net migration goes down to zero under Shabana Mahmood next year. You know, it's not actually impossible. You know, it's already down to a hundred thousand. You know, what happens if emigration massively goes up? You know, all of these things. What happens if the context changes? It's about making sure reforms, political organisation is sort of resilient enough and that they have something compelling to say about the economy and, you know, continuing to present Nigel Farage as a plausible, credible prime minister. one question as well um uh you know correct me if i'm wrong but it's not just whether 30 percent is farage's floor or ceiling it is well what are the demands of first past the post in this increasingly balkanized context i mean in many ways if you know the progressive parties to starmer's left flank end up uh kind of continuing to cannibalize much of starmer's natural vote uh you know if you have nationalist parties in wales and scotland further reducing the threshold required to win i mean does the old analysis apply that you kind of need this mythical 35 36 percent of the vote or could farage end up cobbling together a minority government coalition with the conservatives or something even more spectacular with a much more slender share of the vote than would have ordinarily being the case i mean does farage even need to go to places that prime ministers have previously gone in order to be in poll position and the thing very few people have picked up on uh reform hq certainly have and wise people in the labor party certainly have is if you look at more in common did some really interesting polling of negative motivation among voters last year and it asked voters of every party who do you basically who do you hate most and who are most motivated to cast your vote to make sure you get them out or they don't get in and for both Tory voters and reform voters the answer was the Labour Party by a massive massive margin which implies that although we sort of talk about tactical voting as if it's something that you know was invented by the Compass think tank and is done by Ramona websites telling you to vote for the Lib Dems here and Labour there and the Greens there, actually we could see it work pretty mercilessly in places in the country where either reform are the clear challenges.

20:40And actually we already saw that in Wales, right, when the Tory show the vote was down to 2%. It's not necessarily true that the remaining Tory voters would never vote reform if the proposition is, do you really hate the Labour government? Yes. Well, Nigel Farage is emerging as the man to vote for if you really, really want to give them a kicking. But conversely, it must be the same the other way as well. which is in terms of the Lib Dem and Green voters and Labour voters would do absolutely everything they possibly can to avoid a reformed government, presumably. But, I mean, the interesting thing I also think is going to be fascinating in terms of working out where a reformed vote is going is the relationship with the Conservative Party, of course.

21:17And I think when Kemi Baden-Ock's Conservative Party was in sort of meltdown and freefall, you could see why there were people that were giving up on the Conservative Party and perhaps looking for a new home. What I'm fascinated to see is whether or not Kemi's transformation, particularly at PMQs, which I think we've all seen before our very eyes, is going to have an impact in terms of people thinking, well, maybe we shouldn't write off the Conservatives. Maybe there is a future here. You know, she's done quite well pretty much since the China spy trial collapse started giving her ammunition to really attack Sir Keir Starmer.

21:52And I think since that happened, she's beaten hands down at PMQs pretty much every week, choosing the right questions, not going on things that are kind of a bit obscure, making sure that she's read her brief, making sure that she's going in with the up to date minute. I mean, there was definitely suggestions in her early PMQs that perhaps she'd prepped a couple of days too early and wasn't on the right issue. She definitely is now. And I think that there is certainly a sense amongst those people, perhaps not in the Rob Jenrick camp, but certainly in the kind of the more mainstream members of the cabinet who feel that she's doing a good job now.

22:30And actually, she's performing a lot better. And that might be something that is going to concern Nigel Farage. if she starts routinely performing better and also stemming the tide of perhaps people that are leaving the Conservative Party to join the Reform Party with that string of defections that we've seen. Well, you mentioned Robert Jenrick. I think my prediction for 2026 is that he'll be a Reform MP by the end of the year. Oh, well, we should definitely do some other predictions. We've written it. It was strongly denied at the time. And then Nigel Fras gave this press conference with a very public overture.

23:02It's very emollient. Yeah, very emollient. And come hither. Now, Generic's people say absolutely not. But I saw a senior member of the Shadow Cabinet last night and they were in festive form. They were pretty, pretty happy. And they were saying Kemi has got swagger. She's doing so much better. And this was someone who a few months earlier had been briefing that it was over and that she was she was dead. Right. It's so it is a big change. I think the question is, does it make any difference out of the ballot box? Right. So we can feel it. We can see it. MPs can see it and feel it. but can voters and that is the big question of those local elections you patrick i remember talking on one of our first podcasts about there is a situation which is the worst of all worlds she has a good conference she survives and then you kind of limp you get through to may and actually it's all kind of terrible you know so yeah well exactly exactly and she's not limping to may she's skipping to may you know and she she's a good performer i think voices did they pick up on this Well, look, her personal numbers, there's been a modest increase in her personal numbers.

24:05She is now sort of jointly the least unpopular politician in the country. Everyone's unpopular. I don't want to say most popular, you know, the least unpopular politician or least unpopular party leader in the country. If you look at her numbers, Nigel Farage's numbers, Ed Davies' numbers, they're all sort of roughly the same. They're about minus 13, minus 14, which a triumph. People now know who she is, which definitely wasn't the case, even around the time of Tory conference. So, look, she's had a good year. Her year has ended with her being still leader of the Conservative Party. Who would have thought that when we began recording this podcast in September, the week before Tory conference?

24:43Is there a chance actually she's leader of the Conservative Party beyond Keir Starmer's, the end of Keir Starmer's premiership? Maybe. but also we do have to reflect on what actually happens when the Tories fight elections in the real world and not sessions of prime ministers questions or opinion polls the answer is more often than not they lose to reform and yes you know Kevin Hollenrake he'd say Tory chairman would say oh look actually we're now our vote share is up we're only losing them by a whisker some at some point but yeah you know you're still losing and actually many others you're being absolutely poleaxed by reform.

25:22So it's tricky and it's interesting to see, it'll be interesting to see how the Tory party react if May is really bad for them because what do they do at that point? I think the risk then is that, you know, lots of people just say, OK, well, there's clearly one force on the right now and that's reform. So let's go and join them. It's fair to say as well, the media operation for the Conservative Party has really improved. It's much better than it has been for a long time. I get WhatsApps from various shadow cabinet ministers throughout the week updating me on things that are happening. And that's usually a sign, a good sign, that they've got strategy.

25:58They're thinking about it. They've certainly put together some really concerted sort of efforts to get scalps this year. You know, they've had various operations which they've named to get rid of particular people, whether it be Mandelson or Angela Rayner or others. And they've definitely upped their game, I think. and in a way that actually I don't see other media operations doing at the moment. The Labour operation is, I think, pretty sporadic and ad hoc. The Lib Dems do get themselves together sometimes. Zapolanski is definitely getting better for the Green Party, but I would give the Conservative media campaign operation probably the top marks of any media operation this year.

26:38Yeah, I mean, in some ways, the Bade Nock stories could be inspiring for the man in Number 10 because you know sometimes we do like to talk about politics as though there are these sort of forces of nature that will assert themselves we don't necessarily know when they will caroline you were talking about the fact that with chris pincher nobody could have said when boris was going to go but it was clear that when there was a moment you know it would act as a vessel for all these underlying spirits and emotions about the prime minister um well you know kevin baden not There's a good example of somebody who has ended up defying those previously unstoppable forces by the improvement in her own personal performance.

27:21If you look at the departure of Rayner and Mandelson, I'm not sure I could quite credit the Conservative Party for those scalps alone, but they no doubt added to them, deepened the pain for the Labour Party. we mustn't forget that you know even though there are these bigger structural forces politicians can give effect to different outcomes through their own performance i think the problem i have with that and i think you're absolutely right and kemi's a very good example of that is you know we've we've all talked about can starmer turn it round and that's one of the the narratives that they want us to hear which is look what he did with the labor party you know the labor party was in a kind of a position that suggests it was going to be unelectable for decades to come.

28:03And in a few years, he turned it round and brought with it a massive majority for the Labour Party. And people that I talk to in Number 10 and in Whitehall say, you know, you've got to remember that he's done it before. The problem I have with that narrative is I can't think of an example where he's done that in government. If you think about the peak of his popularity in some ways was the riots, which again, it was something that we couldn't have predicted. He didn't create that moment himself. And so I struggle with the notion that he will be able to reinvent himself because I've seen no evidence of him doing that in the 18 months that he's been in power.

28:39We are also in completely unprecedented territory. There has never been a collapse in the popularity of a government or a prime minister like this. And it's worth reminding listeners of that, that for everyone who's talking about kind of, if he can feel it's like reinvent himself for probably a big chunk of new statesman readers out there actually it's it we are really in uncharted waters here and and that is a problem for them and it would be something truly historic for him to pull off a comeback and actually become moderately unpopular i'm not even saying popular i'm saying that's the price away from the like the prize is on minus 55 at the moment so i mean the the question you know this idea that he is much more of a liability for his party than an asset is undeniably true if you look at the polling numbers no definitely and this is why the sort of i completely agree with what you've said before gabriel about not being kia is not enough for the it's not a leadership perspective in itself but by may by the morning after those local elections there'll be a lot of value in just not being kia and not being as bad as kia is at communicating and just having some semblance of vague political direction.

29:47One of our sources put a new acronym to us. ABS. ABS. Anyone but Starmer. So ABS may be a platform. Yeah, it will be anyone but Starmer and who is the least like Starmer. And I think Labour MPs, let's see how Number 10's attempts to communicate more clearly with the public and to, you know, refine its and clarify its own strategy go. but I think by May lots of MPs will still think this is fundamentally a comms problem and if we communicate better we'll have a better chance of beating Nigel Ferrari and who's our best communicator. That'll be the question. I think that brings this festive edition to a close.

30:30We just want to say to all of our listeners a very, very happy new year. If you want to get in touch please email us on thestateofit at thetimes.co.uk and yeah there is a hell of a year of politics to come so please join us for that