Don’t labour under the illusion that this Government has not descended into an utter circus

“I’ll be honest, a lot of your side tell us to keep an eye out for you, as a future leader”

I said this, nine years ago to a fresh faced newish MP as we stood chatting on a damp autumn day on College Green shortly before recording a second BBC Daily Politics interview in just his first year in Parliament.

Wes Streeting already had a public political profile when he became an MP in 2015 having led a council and been President of the National Union of Students. He was smart, and articulate and the suggestions about how far he might go were genuinely voiced by some of his older colleagues in the Labour party.

Not so long ago I bumped into him at Westminster Tube station. As with many politicians in private he was not bothered I had worked for the Conservatives and was now Editor of this site, and we chatted perfectly normally.

I’d related honestly how hard it had been to push through real change in the Home Office especially our frustrations trying to stop small boat crossings. Already the Health Secretary he grinned and said:

“One of my colleagues said, ‘Wes, they should put you in as Home Secretary to sort it out’ and I said ‘Wow! What did I do to upset you’”

It’s no secret the Home Office is seen as a very tricky job that can break careers, so he wasn’t saying anything that surprised me, indeed I had a knowing laugh. I genuinely understood the sentiment.

Now Wes is being openly talked about as a potential Labour leader, and ergo Prime Minister, but in circumstances he’d have preferred were very different.

My time in the Home Office was cut short by Rishi Sunak’s ultimately selfish and certainly unwise decision to go for that early election. The result, an expression of profound anger and disappointment in the Conservative party has seen Kemi Badenoch have to battle through – and still is battling, valiantly – the ongoing effects of that voter feeling.

What it meant however as the Express’s Senior Political Correspondent Christian Calgie posted on X yesterday, was:

“The Labour party won the election by default, based on hatred of the Tories, on the tiniest of margins…They are not good. They are sub-bare minimum and they hit contact with political reality last year and completely imploded”

I confess, when I thought about the Editorship of ConservativeHome over the summer of 2024, I had no idea if the Conservative Party would be in any condition to report on, and only a suspicion, borne of their lack of any articulated plan, that Labour might struggle. I certainly did not expect their entire operation to turn into the very label they had stuck on us:

A circus. A clown show.

It’s ceased to be a series of resets – we’d be on ‘phase’ 30 by now – but a seemingly unending catalogue of missteps, false starts, and kite flying that ends up crashing to the ground. It’s more newsworthy now when Keir Starmer has a good week than a bad one.

One can have a nagging doubt about the efficacy of Robert Jenrick posting someone else’s AI generated video of the Deputy PM David Lammy donning a clown suit at the despatch box, not least because in Justice Questions on Monday Jenrick made Lammy look a fool over accidental prisoner releases anyway. But the truth is at last week’s PMQs Lammy had managed to make a clown of himself, both by his preposterous tone and performance and walking into James Cartlidge’s well laid trap with his eyes wide shut.

These people had entered power thinking they were the ‘grown ups’. It’s not often a London audience for Question Time rounds on Labour but in the most recent programme one audience member asked:

“At the last election Labour, promised that the ‘adults would now be back in the room’. After this week’s Cabinet briefings and internal sniping, where are they?”

I can answer that. They’re in a big red tent of their own making, with big red noses, and Harpo Marx horns for a comms operation.It’s as if having traded off the undoubted toxicity of the Conservatives hokey-cokey with leaders after Theresa May, Labour have now decided ‘you think that was bad, let’s show you how it’s really done’.

‘Send in the clowns?’ Don’t bother they’re here.

.There is no doubt whatever that people close to Starmer did brief the media about a plot against him, and indicated Streeting as the beneficiary. He’s expressed his ‘full faith’ in his Health Secretary, who is providing him with one of the very few successes he can trot out at PMQs, under the increasingly confidant questioning of Badenoch, that health appointment availability has gone up significantly. Despite that the cack handed briefings have in fact weakened Starmer and boosted Streeting.

Here is the ongoing tragedy for this Number 10. Whatever the issue, they either fumble it, get blocked by their own MPs, or fear the consequences of being tough. Even when Tories can see merit in the aim behind something, Starmer manages to attract maximum damage to himself in the delivery. He’s upset farmers, businesses, the elderly with things he’s done, and driven away the young who think he’s not socialist enough!

The operation at the heart of Government is clearly dysfunctional. Morgan McSweeny is not the Machiavellian genius we were repeatedly told he was, and the entire circular firing squad works for the benefit of a man who clearly isn’t up to the job.

The departure of scandal hit ministers, the freebies they’d sanctimoniously claimed were beneath their inherent integrity, the Sue Gray fiasco, the policy to stop the boats actually producing record numbers, the utterly unnecessary Chagos deal, the China trial collapse, it’s all one long wave of big top prat falls and clowning around, pretending to be in power.

And that’s before we even get to the economy.

After desperately hunting for whatever ‘plan’ they had, we learned months ago that ‘economic growth’ would be the relentless focus of this new Government. Like many other things mentioned, they’ve managed to stifle the very thing they set out to achieve.

The fallout of the first Labour Budget in fourteen years has been newsworthy for fourteen months for all the wrong reasons. You can crow about ‘fixing the foundations’ and ‘Tory black holes’ in seemingly ChatGPT generated online posts or ‘waffle-bomb’ press conferences and add that you have the fastest growing economy in the G7 but as figures revealed yesterday show, for 2025, Quarter 1 growth was 0.7 per cent, Q2 0.3 per cent, Q3 0.1 per cent and GDP per capita 0.0 per cent.

I can remember the hollow Tory laughs Gordon Brown got when he once talked about ‘a zero per cent’ spending rise in a Budget speech.

And today, having briefed, dropped into interviews and flown the kite we learn apparently Starmer and Reeves, the ring masters of this circus of tears, are now dropping the idea of an income tax rise. They’ve taken the flak and the pain of marching the country to the top of a hill, tried to gloss over how it would break their election promises, and now twelve days from a Budget, so late it would qualify for Christmas lights, apparently that plan is off.

It’s not tribal glee that drives this it’s sheer frustration.

Yes, I bear the bruises of their onslaught on us, some of which I can’t deny we possibly deserved, but never did I think they would be as you’ve heard me repeat many times before, and using the words of a Labour advisor “this shit this quick”

However here’s the sting in the tail, as if the bleak prospect of years more of this wasn’t bad enough for the British people, the Conservatives are having to navigate the consequences of Labours poor perfomance.

Assuming, reasonably, you had time to work up a completely new policy agenda and ethos within the party, only worked if Labour had had a honeymoon. It’s been more like a victory funeral. The gap has seen Labour fortunes plummet but has undoubtedly boosted Reform happy to fill the airwaves with less detailed new promises, having junked 90 per cent of those they made over a year ago.

I’m not even going to argue that Labours failings, in trying to mend things voters thought we got wrong but just making them worse, is like welding together stronger the seams of that “uniparty” attack. One that despite endless loud repetition is simply and demonstrably untrue, and depends on comparing Labour now with the Tory government in 2022-24 but not the party in November 2025.

Kemi has to KBO as Churchill used to say.

The party isn’t dead by any means, but as frustration with Labour grows – and who knows what effect Reeves’ second Budget outing will provide – Kemi, her team and the wider party need to keep amplifying that there is another option, another way forward, that isn’t Farage. Davey or the toddler politics of that Pied Piper, Polanski.