When I heard it made me sit up and keep listening.
Evan Davis the politest of the BBC’s inquisitors, was trailing, as presenter of Radio 4’s PM programme, that he’d be interviewing Reform UK’s Lee Anderson.
While we waited a number of things struck me.
First the left would see it as ‘evidence the BBC was now the propaganda wing of Reform UK’, probably one of the silliest assertions I’ve ever heard. Polling where they are it seems perfectly legitimate the BBC would interview Reform, regularly, even if it is frustrating for other parties.
It’s an equally silly view when the BBC is getting flak, and possibly rightly so, for examples of where hidden left bias has been exposed on certain agendas. As a 20 year experienced ex-BBC staffer, I know that bias has slipped into coverage, and despite my own political allegiances, I really did take my responsibility for impartiality seriously. Rosettes aside I can spot a mile off where it’s slipped, and I’ve always been happy that some fellow Tories were suspicious when I became a SpAd as they had not thought I’d ever had a ‘tribe’.
Evan Davis is a gentlemen face to face and one of their few who understand economics and the world of business. However even he, faced with Lee, on home turf – they were doing the show from his constituency- I thought he might give in to the temptation to ‘show the audience where he stands’ (a bad habit some ex BBC presenters still commentating on politics today, didn’t even bother fighting when they were there)
He even gave a ‘trigger warning’ of sorts that Lee Anderson had used the bluff language he always does in the pre-recorded interview we were about to hear.
My third thought in the seconds before it ran was that it was tactically foolish of the Conservative party to drive Lee out. If he knows and trusts you, despite ‘authentic voice’ being his stock in trade, he is in private a mellower more thoughtful man than many think. Some of the authenticity thing, is, ironically an act. Rishi’s team would suggest he gave them no choice to remove the whip, but keeping him in the cold was, as it turns out, probably a mistake.
Evan didn’t beat about the bush. His first question was about experience. Does Reform really have enough experience to form and run a Government?
“Depends on what you mean by experience.” Came the reply.
What followed was a list of Lee’s experience of life, of business, and of politics. The theme being, anyone who has experience of Government has messed it up, and experience of life is more relevant to whether Reform are up to the job of running Britain. It’s a point, and one nearly all parties make about getting more real life experience into politics. Lee then painted a picture of Tory Oxbridge types who did PPE who knew nothing but politics as the problem. Thing is that isn’t actually very accurate about his former colleagues, and is why at that point Lee and I disagreed.
Quite apart from the fact that the Nigel Farage has publicly admitted their weakness is a lack of experience, and that the Conservatives have five times more MPs with a business background that Reform has MPs, or that claims of a ‘uniparty’ sound hollow from a man who has been in Labour, the Conservatives and Reform – there is a gap in the logic.
Fine tuning your politics through the prism of running a business is a tricky feat to get right. The politics has to come first, based upon business experience, because The Conservatives have had, and Reform risks this in spades, those who take the mistaken route in thinking that you can run Government like a business. You can’t.
On the Conservative ledger two very different characters made this mistake: Adam Afriye, and Andrew Bridgen throughout their years in parliament would tell me all Government needed was the efficiency of a business leader at the top to ‘sort out the nonsense’ – longtime Farage fan and backer Aaron Banks thinks much the same: The all-powerful CEO as a mode of Prime Minister.
I can see why that might attract Nigel, but again to give him his due he has still said they need experience.
Originally, and odd given his distaste for all things Conservative, a party he’d like to destroy or swallow up, I think the call for experience was supposed to be solved by a tsunami of defection, especially at Tory ex-Cabinet level. They’ve had some, but not yet the sort that would fill the gaps they have.
They’ve now switched to ‘having ministers from outside politics’ appointed round the Cabinet. This is an idea that has some merit, though Gordon Brown’s attempt was mixed to say the least, and not in Cabinet. In Norway, it is perfectly normal in their system, and it is at least an idea worth all parties looking at. However it ignores the practicalities of Ministerial accountability to Parliament. Perhaps, and this is a mistake, that’s why Reform like it.
This is how Government ‘experience’ works: Think of it like flying a plane.
It is almost impossible to fix the many bugs you find with the myriad systems of the plane, whilst flying it. Often the problem is so large it makes you wrestle with the controls just to keep it airborne, and as with the Conservatives’ last years in office your end up switching pilots, all struggling and not always flying well just to keep the thing in the air.
Labour had no blueprint for flying the plane, and had dismissed the possibility that the plane might be at fault, preferring to load all the blame on pilot error. Now they’ve discovered some of the same glitches in the system and are flying spectacularly badly. Indeed, I’d say, are now heading for an emergency or crashed landing.
Too few are listening to the Conservatives about why the plane flies badly, or care that they have been thinking, now on the ground, how you’d fix those glitches before being allowed to take off again, if permission was ever granted. But just because you struggled before it does not actually follow that you’d do the same again.
Whilst opponents insist they will, it is clear now from what the party is saying, with a new air crew, that they know they can’t just ‘do the same’.
Reform? Well not only have they not flown this plane, nor made a grand success of early training flights in local government, despite the boasts – and yes Richard Tice you did promise to bring council tax down not put it up – Reform have never flown a plane.
Yes, yes, I know, we are repeatedly told none of this matters electorally. As I quoted Baroness Claire Fox recently, voters aren’t interested in the experience ‘thing’. Polling wise right now that seems to be true.
However, it does matter. We should all take a closer look at Labour. The Times’ Patrick Maguire published an insight late last week, into just how many Blairite and Brownite advisers have been recently drafted in to help Starmer try to grip the delivery of whatever it is – and frankly who knows – he wants to achieve.
Starmer, having clearly had no plan for Government going in, losing people, literally, right left and centre for fifteen months and having the worst start in Government British politics has seen in decades, has had to grab old experience in a desperate bid to shore up his plummeting popularity.
Now Reform and the Conservative would agree, a Blairite blueprint for the future is both stale, and also inherently what got us into the mess we are in now. ConservativeHome has had recent articles making this point. But that doesn’t mean the right thought-through blueprint for the future doesn’t come from sometimes hard and bitter experience, but is ultimately better for it. The Tories need to push that point from now on.
No, I doubt yet, this argument will land. But I suspect in a few years, after Labour have written off the plane, it will.
By then Reform will need to have shown they either have found the experience, or know and show, where they can get it.
