Coffee House Shots
How the Tory candidates have responded to the riots
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in-print and online, along with the £320 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/voucher Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. My name is Lucy Dunn and today I'm joined by Katie Bowles and Peer and journalist Paul Goodman. The last week has been dominated by the continuation of riots that we've seen since the South Port Starring tragedy and last night was expected to be a particularly explosive night with riot police out across the city in London and also across the country. Katie, can you tell us a little bit about what actually transpired from last night and how it measured up against expectations? So I think it was below expectations to put it short. You had a situation whereby the police and others that they were looking at potentially 100 incidents. In terms of the level of violent disorder, obviously all violence disorder is bad, disclaimer at the way, but it did not compare to the weekend in terms of the activity. And while there are some scenes, I think that you also had some marches and response to it in parts of London but also across the UK. You had some protesters coming out to say we don't want to hate on our streets and doing it in that sense. So yes, there were demonstrations last night but I wouldn't say it's led to the situation becoming more severe. If anything, I think some today are breathing a slight sigh of relief. The last night wasn't as bad as they expected it to. And now you have figures saying, well, why was the media saying that there'd be all these things? Has it been blown up in a way that doesn't reflect reality? Was it wrong to write about these planned attacks? Was it all the hoax and so forth? I mean, I think you look at the events of the weekend. There's clearly something going on. But I think the size of relief in government, that this has not been an escalation, but you were still having a situation by which I think that the government and those in the country don't think that out of the woods yet. And they're saying, you know, there could be further riots in the coming days and weeks. And Paul, during this time, you know, we've got in the background this Tory leadership contest that's rumbling on. What have you made of the responses of the sex candidates to the riots over the past two weeks? I suppose the first point is, yes, it's just the response of the six candidates because the leader of the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak, really is waving goodbye. And for better or worse, isn't really around. So the first thing you've got, therefore, is quite a disorganized response from a party that's just been smashed in the general election. And nonetheless is still the official opposition. Even with 121 MPs, it's part of the political dance. And in terms of what goes on in the Westminster village and elsewhere, its response does matter. So I think, kind of broadly speaking, one, the candidates have all wanted to condemn the violence, nothing very surprising there. But then two, I think there's then a choice for them, just as there's a choice for the government, which is, do you just sort of stick at condemning all violence, kind of the easy thing to do? Or do you try to get into the whole business about causes in which the left were to talk about poverty and the right tend to talk about immigration and a lack of integration? And there, I think the response of the Conservative candidates has been quite sort of hesitant. They've been trying to sort of feel their way into getting the balance right about that. Some of the candidates have been conspicuously quite quite about it. Kerry Beidnot made a few, I thought, quite straightforward remarks about integration and got knocked about a bit by various people who left for saying anything at all. And the other person who has stood out is, you know, Robert Genrich, who's said that people shutting Al Akbar in certain circumstances ought to be arrested. I just finish by saying that one of the striking things about all this is that of the six candidates, four of them have got a history in the home office, two as home secretary James Cleverly in Patel. But Tugenhart and Genrich, for different reasons, both felt when they were home office ministers that there's something in this claim about two tier policing and that the Palestinian protests in particular were not pleased with the same rigor as some of the recent events. Now, on the surface, that sounds old because they were by and large peaceful marches, but there'd been some aspects of things that happened on the fringe that both Genrich and Tugenhart fought were unacceptable. And, Katy, there's been a lot of criticism of Cures Steimer from the numerous Tugoff surveys that we've seen out. And the public seemed to view Steimer as having handled the riots badly. Could the Tories have done more to capitalize on this discontent being expressed towards Labour leader at the moment? So, I think it's always tricky because at a time when you're calling for unity and calm on the streets, if you look as though you are politicising something, then you get accused of being opportunistic. That is times, perhaps, six when you have six Tory leadership candidates who are all trying to impress the membership and MPs. And therefore, I think some contributions that you can argue are sensible for the debate and making decent points before you know our sight dims dismissed as positioning, and therefore weaker for doing that. And I also think just having six voices, Richard notes on a holiday, but just having six voices saying different things, it means you have less impact and it is just a bit more scattergun. You know, if you had every single Tory MP calling for a pretty patellar's calling for, which is the recall of Parliament, I think that would have been quite effective in the coming days. Now, other Tory MPs saw Gavin Williams, the public, to also call for the recall of Parliament yesterday, but before you know it, when MPs start to call for the recall of Parliament, some are saying, "Oh, does that mean that person's backing pretty patellar?" And it's slightly not seen in that metric and it's like, "Well, actually, should we not be talking about whether or not Parliament should be recalled?" And therefore, it just complicates and skews all. Is there an opportunity? I think we're also seeing in terms of what's happened to the reform party that, yes, there may be an opportunity, but there's also a risk in on this. And there's some interesting polling out today, which suggests that Nigel Farage is losing support in his party years in the past week or so, which of course, many are linking directly to the fact that he has been intervening. And I think if you would say, Nigel Farage's interventions have been to help care-style recall for unity. Instead, he's been accused of trying to stoke things slightly, play into things and say, you know, there's no, you know, order on the streets. And that clearly touches with some people. But in terms of this poll was suggesting amongst leave voters, that he has, you know, lost, you know, I think about 10 points as a result of that. So it, again, just adds to the sense that there is just risk in anything you say or do on this. He has been pulled two ways. And this week's been problematic for Farage in much the same way that the Putin business was a problem for him during the general election. And the extremism of some of his Kansas was a problem. And the problem really is this, on one hand, Farage wants to say that immigration and lack of integration are a cause of the problem. If he does that, on the other hand, he can be accused of trying to excuse the riots and challenging law and order. And he's dealt with this in a very uncertain way. I mean, Farage is a very intuitive and quite undisciplined politician. He's never had the responsibility of being in government. He's not someone who sticks to scripted lines. It's very much part of his charm, if you think it's charm. And he gave a very long eight-minute broadcast on X, where, in effect, you could see the weaknesses in the argument. So he's now resorted to saying that I was misinformed by, as I understand it, his argument now is, I was misinformed by Andrew Tate and all these people about what was happening. In which case, the obvious cause of argument is, why or not did you believe them in the first place? So I think it has been an uncomfortable week for him. And it's a point to a possible sort of weakness of reform, which is that there's always a danger in trying to ride the tiger of public discontent, because the tigers got the capacity to you up if you can't ride it with a sufficient skill. And Farage is being denounced now, all over X, by people who were involved in the riots, by the likes of Lawrence Fox and so on. So that's kind of not easy for him. And on the subject of uncomfortable stories, I suppose there's something that came out today that showed that a Labour donor, Ian Corfield, has bagged a top job in the civil service. Labour have gone after the Tories in the past for cronyism, but is it back now? I just look forward to the proper police of all this at the Institute of Government and the Constitution unit getting us worked up about it as they did about so-called unitary political appointments. And let's see what they do. It's an interesting thing, because Labour have obviously made a big statement about cleaning up politics, about, you know, restoring trust and so forth. And a lot of that has been the idea that the Tories were dirty, they're muddied by cronyism, and they'll put an end to that. And I think the, I mean, I don't claim to have been around particularly long, but I think you just have to be around for a couple of months in Westminster to know that the slight problem is the way the system operates and the way that, you know, whipping and so forth and the way that you get things done. Some parties might have particularly bad incidents of it, and I think you look at the Tories over the past three or four years, the multiple leaders, Boris Johnson's resignation, honours list, some of the conduct, it wasn't great, but it's not confined to one party, all parties have sleaze stories. And it's obviously much easier in opposition to say, you're going to do acts when you get in. Now, of course, this isn't a clear, I think some would say, this is such a dry story in the sense of, oh, some is a director on acts, and they donated, you know, only a couple of 10,000 over the course of nine years. This is not, you know, equivalent to Boris Johnson, golden wallpaper, and, you know, some of the stories we've heard about sleaze and politics. But of course, I think that the point is, if you're having clear rules, what are the new rules of the system? The danger of this one is you can be accused of, is this a cash for access type row, which of course, Labor will deny and technically they haven't done anything wrong. And it does feed into that. I always remember, and perhaps not to make too broad a point, but, you know, I was looking back at, you know, Tony Blair did a lot of the cleaning up politics thing in opposition before he got in. And later, I think, said in his memoirs that he actually had regretted it, because as soon as he had got in, it's thrown at him all the time, an albatross around the neck, and something he came to regret. And I do slightly wonder, if he's starma, by the time he gets to write his memoirs, it's going to have a similar thing to say. Yeah, Blair said, famously in opposition at the height of inverted commas, Tory sleaze, closing inverted commas, we must be whiter than white. And this really did come back to haunt him. I mean, finally, for myself, I'm curious and unusually relaxed about people giving money to political parties. I think political parties are a good thing. And I don't get very worked up when someone from a political party is appointed to a job. But, you know, great Goodman cliches of our time, what's good for the goose has got to be good for the gander. And the standards that have been applied to, you know, the rotten, terrible, evil, effing Tories must, of course, be applied to snow white, kiss, starma's labour, mustn't they? Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Paul. And thank you for listening. [Music]