“It was just seventeen, you know what I mean…..” so praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

I’d planned to ask why the Conservative Party was stuck, almost glued to 17 per cent in the polls?  But we aren’t. We’ve moved.

Down to 16 per cent.

For our opponents that’s funny. For the Reform crowd firmly encamped in our comments section it’s especially so, but for Conservatives it has to be a brutal, shut out their noise, ‘what-do-we-do-about-this?’ conversation.

Henry Hill’s excellent contribution yesterday highlighted a sign, a good old fashioned barometer of when things are not going well. Today’s papers are if anything an absolute example of what Henry was saying: you know a party is in trouble when papers don’t take the trouble to ask that party’s opinion.

I’ve lived this. Two years as a Government adviser specialising in communications and often dealing with journalists I knew personally very well, who asked me not to take it personally when they were more interested in what the then opposition had to say than the government. We’d get the courtesy last one sentence. Now they don’t feel the need to even ask for that.

Kemi Badenoch made a good speech yesterday, it had a lot of good lines, and consistency in policy, not least the dropping of my new favourite insult – the “waffle bomb” – to describe a speech the same day by Rachel Reeves.

This morning, and yes, I get it, Reeves is Chancellor and that carries way more weight – and the headlines for her aren’t great at all – but the waffle bomb itself gets coverage everywhere and Kemi gets a shallow spread of hits.

Reeves, in the words of most, called a press conference to fail to answer the one question she’d called journalists together at short notice to ask. I can’t resist quoting Jon Sopel of all people here:

“Don’t stand there saying ‘I want to be clear’ when you’ve got a fog machine on your arm, spraying mist across the room”

Waffle bomb, fog machine whatever you want to call it we all know it; she’s going to raise taxes, having sworn blind she wouldn’t, and everything is everybody else’s fault. Global pressures and Brexit are the new lines, but as with all hypocrisy, you’ll find endless quotes of when Rachel Reeves dismissed global pressures to make out it was all the Tories fault. She still is, but she’s Chancellor and ‘blame the Tories’ it’s going as stale as a Kier Starmer tweet.

Back to the Tories though. In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 defeat former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said the main and relentless focus of the Party now in opposition and damaged by such a defeat was to ‘win the right to be heard’ The Conservatives, despite an excellent Conference for Kemi Badenoch, even her opponents would have to accept that, are not winning that right.

Ok, so Kemi’s team will at this point be reaching for the phone to tap out a counter argument but I think I can pre-empt it.

She has said, not least to ConservativeHome, that the process of getting to be heard, and via that trusted again, has always, and will now, take time. Fifteen months after a defeat of that kind after fourteen years that wrongly, but no good belly aching over that, hang like an albatross, no, the public are still not ready to listen.

A Tory peer and veteran of opposition, government, and cabinet reminded me yesterday: it was only in late 2009, the media, the polls, and political institutions started to behave as if they anticipated the Tories might win. Until then opposition stayed hard work.

Here’s the dilemma: I get the Kemi strategy, it has lots of logic to it, and she’s shown a number of times that she does deliver on promises that announcements will come, but it is too theoretical, and the facts are the party is still stuck on 17, 16 per cent. The desire to not be planning a war on two fronts from table top in CCHQ, but to be actively harrying Reform and Labour amidships with broadside after broadside, has suffused a number of jumpy MPs.

Kemi would love them to calm down a bit, but that’s harder to ask if the plan isn’t yet delivering.

One seasoned veteran, is astonished some of those hungry MPs who actually shine at opposition, aren’t brought more into the leadership fold. I point out the flaw, in that most of those he lists didn’t support Kemi for the job, and are suspected of seeing a different future playing out. However he countered with ‘there’s nothing to lose. If these young Turks are a success at making the Government’s life a daily misery, then that’s good for the leader, and post Conference that whole, ‘when is she going?’ chat in the media has evaporated… for now‘.

Let’s just look at who we share 16 percent with.

The Greens, and their new pied piper, the financial fantasist and former hypnotist,  who in my humble opinion makes a bigger boob of himself every time he opens his mouth, but who our columnist David Gauke argues we’d be wise to take head on. No party ever won the young by claiming climate change doesn’t exist. It does, the science is very clear, but net zero by 2050 is economically unsustainable. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, as many have argued on these pages, mean the Conservatives surrender any pretence of green policy, indeed scrapping the climate change act and slowing the rush to net zero struck me as policies based in realism, because they still accepted that climate was a major challenge that does still need addressing.

Getting heard is hard, getting trusted again is even harder and can’t happen until you are heard. Reform and Labour very clearly want the public to think that the Conservative party right now is the Conservative party in June 2024. Actually Labour want to pretend they assumed office in December 2022, as that suits their economic lies better.

The party ‘under new leadership’ demonstrably isn’t the same, but will be shouted down increasingly loudly by those for whom it is politically convenient to refuse to see that. They need to repeat ad nauseum ‘nothing’s changed, all still the same’ and then point to the hidden mystic cabal of Lib Dems who apparently ‘hold the Tories back’. In other circumstances it would be a tragic and woeful attack, but you know what?

It’s working.

Louder, prouder, and in the words of a senior Tory campaigner “every single day focussed on how to shoot lumps out of anything and everything this useless Government comes out with” Yes, the steady ship, no policy until it’s so good they steal it, or battle proof because it’s been so well tested, yes, I think genuinely, we all get that, but the party can’t get to make the case for ‘it’s only the Conservatives that can/will/should’ if they are stuck by others in the sound proofed room, being essentially ignored.

As IDS started opposition with that call to arms about earning the right to be heard, so then hear this from former hard lefty intellectual and Brexit Party MEP Baroness Claire Fox because on LBC she nails the problem we have, with an attack on a Labour MP:

“It’s tone deaf to say, ‘we are doing really well’, and it’s tone deaf to keep blaming the Tories. We all know how useless they were, the point is you were elected to be better, not be where we are now, and the reason  why Reform stand a chance is because people go ‘I don’t care if I trust them or not. I don’t necessarily like Farage but I’ll give anyone a go who will go in and shake things up”

That’s pretty much where we are. It can be changed, but that takes work, and volume.

Labour, and actually Reform, are a ‘target rich environment’. Start firing a relentless barrage. You don’t have to promote or reference them to hurt them. They’d give you no quarter, at all. They haven’t. According to their spin teams we are already dead.

We are alive, but we’re back after the post Conference buzz of asking; are we kicking?

May next year is where everyone is pointing as the next big pinch point. It’s not plausible to expect anything remotely good, if in six months, it’s still just seventeen…

…You know what I mean.