Coffee House Shots
Has Reform peaked too soon?
The stage is set. Get a front row seat in the run up to the election by subscribing to the spectator for just three pounds for three months. We'll even send you a free election mug. Go to spectator.co.uk/mug. (upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to Coffee House Shots, a spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Katie Bowles, and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Hill. Is reform in trouble? That's the question today. After a reform candidate has defected to the Tories. Comes as another reform candidate who's found to have said Nicola Sturgeon should be shot. Fraser, I suppose just to start with you, if we go back, I think, to mid-June around the time of the D-Day debacle for Rishi Sunak, soon after the return of Nigel Farage, it felt as though reform would overtake the Tories in the polls, and they did in a couple, but would potentially then build from there. But over the past week, it feels as though they're actually plateauing and going backwards. That's right, the post-Fresh surge took reform from about 12 points in the polls to about 17 or 18. Now, given that the Tories are on 20, that's very, very close, and as you say, some polls do show them overlapping. But recently, perhaps, I'm not quite sure whether this was related or not, but ever since Nigel Farage claimed that Putin was provoked by the West into invading Ukraine, it seems that there has been a certain plateauing of their support. Now, what we're seeing here, it reminds me of the Cleggmania during the 2010 campaign, where all of a sudden, the party was way more popular than anybody thought, and the press and everybody else went to really attacking and scrutinizing and trying to deflate it. Now, with reform, it was seen basically to be a bit of a jerk, a bit of a punchline, and to reach your ties. And at the time, it was like, we can't believe you gave the whole page to that, James. You know, these guys are never gonna be a fringe party. Nobody ever votes for them. Well, nobody's saying that now. But the point, Katie, I think, is that they're now getting a whole load of scrutiny, but they never got before, because they are obviously going to make a huge impact in these elections. And also, this means that all of these candidates, they're defined and pushed forward really with no notice at all. The snap election does force your opponents to try to immediately endorse candidates who they might have seen to be a little bit dodgy. So you are, of course, now getting at one candidate today. Drop it out because she said the rest of the reform people are wrongens, basically, racist, misogynist, et cetera. Not the leadership, she says, but the candidates. And now we're finding other candidates who've said some pretty dodgy things in the past. Now, my only surprise is that it's just, it's so few of them, because you'd think, if you're gonna find, you know, like 200, 300 candidates at short notice, statistically, of course, some of them are going to be people you would not have endorsed. But we are seeing this kind of hyper scrutiny applied to reform, and we're seeing it struggle under that degree of scrutiny. - James, what do you think the mood is like in the reform party camp at the moment? Now, publicly, there's obviously the usual, this is MSM, also knows mainstream media, you know, a witch hunt, this is a Tory plot to ultimately, you know, there are accusations that, of course, the Tories would deny of, you know, candidates being bribed or pressured to make these statements coming from the reform side. But is there frustration when you scratch the surface? - Yeah, I think there's a bit of frustration. I mean, look, two weeks ago, reform was riding high, and the polls, everything was going as far as away, everyone loves a winning side. It's when things, you know, you lose momentum, things grind to a halt, that's when I think some of the frustrations creep in. And I do think there's been a bit of a difference, perhaps, in how Richard Tyson and Ida Frage, who were both being leader of reform in the first six months of this year, would have handled different cases, et cetera. I mean, obviously, you know, reform is a very exceptional political party, and that's a registered company, and so it's very much more a handful of people at the top running things, than perhaps other ways of parties with a grassroots activist. I would just say, I think that, you know, part of this is, you know, the attacks that have been from their enemies, and the opponents, I think there's some validity in that, but equally a lot of them are their own designer making. And you know, if we're all, you know, Roger Frage is on interview channel five, and he talks about how, you know, I came back as a leader three weeks ago, all these candidates were, we asked for volunteers, they came forward. Well, equally, I can remember Richard Tyson three, four months ago, boasting about how they had 500 candidates in place, they were going to contest every seat. So I think that, you know, to suggest all of this has been strong on them, and he had no control of the vetting, I think is a little bit of, you know, an application of responsibility, perhaps. But James, on the vetting, isn't one of the points of contention that reforms that they had a vetting company that didn't do the job. But when you look into the company, the company doesn't actually do the vetting for you. Yeah. It provides you with the tools to vet them yourself. And that's, I think, a real struggle for reform two respects, one of which is the first of all, they didn't get the proper people in to do it, which I think actually is striking how different the candidate has been performed with as other candidates, you know, for parties, like labor and the Tories have taken much efforts on that. And the second thing, of course, is that when reform was approached about this, they then said, oh, this guy used to work the Conservative Party. Well, if that was the case, why not do you hire that company? And again, it sees a pattern throughout this whole campaign, which they went off to Channel 4, they've gone after the mail papers, I think often criticizing the messenger, even if that messenger sometimes has an ulterior motive, I think perhaps sort of misses the point of the reform. And this kind of aggressive playbook we've seen in the last fortnight, I don't think, as the poll suggests, is wielding them the right results. I think that's the difference between forage and ties, though. I think the ties is, for example, I don't think ties would ever, in a million years, claim that Putin was provoked into invading Ukraine. So, if ready for today, there's quite a test to exchange on that. Yes, that's right. He was asked to endorse the language, and he didn't. Now, similarly, Nigel Farage uses tactics, which is more akin to a European-style populist. Like, attack the press. He's literally suing the Daily Mail, as you say, James. But also buying efforts. Buying efforts immediately, he's attacking Channel 4. I dare say, he regards the spectator as part of a mainstream media plot, etc. But you will struggle to find a populist in Europe who doesn't blame the press, the establishment. This, rather than being left and right, I think is what makes the populist. It's the narrative. I represent the people, the establishment, and all the press are the enemy, they can't be trusted, etc. Rich ties never really engaged in that language, but Farage does. And we can see now this, certainly, as far as his tactics, starting to rebound, because, in my opinion, everything's Nick Robinson sort of teased out of him in that opinion about Putin. I do think Farage intended, really, to say that. He has doubled down on it. But I think he got that more from the American playbook, because his head has been in America, where you're way more likely to find people on the Trumpest right, saying that Zelensky is a fraud, etc. And I think that lets slip, and it doesn't go down well here. I think we can see that in the stagnating reform. And all of a sudden, people are thinking, hang on a minute. This is a party which is too defectively on a conservative manifesto. But nonetheless, you're coming up with some foreign policy positions now that do sound rather less than the patriotic version, which Farage was expanding in the first place. And, of course, you can tell, Richard Tynes is trying to be very disciplined, not to allow a cigarette paper to be put between him and Nigel Farage. But you can also tell, these are very different politicians. If two of them were elected to parliaments on Thursday, I suspect that party would split fairly soon. Fraser, do you think it will make much of an impact when it comes to how reform performs on Thursday? Because, of course, if we were going to get into the mindset of perhaps the populist leader, they would probably call this podcast Westminster Bubble, suggesting that we were focusing on things that most voters weren't actually looking into in terms of the minute eye of comments. But do you think this could be the difference, perhaps, between reform getting a handful of MPs and getting no MPs? Well, one of the legitimate criticisms of commentators like me is that we look at the opinion polls as if they were just down from Mount Sinai. The polls have been so radically wrong in the past. How much do I trust them now, not particularly? I don't think that Richard Tynes is going to be Prime Minister on Friday, for example. But beyond that, I wouldn't really want to say, when you tell him a pollster that you back Nigel Farage, that doesn't necessarily mean to say that when you give you a constituency and you look at the tactical voting element, will that really be what you do? Technical voting decisions can really change the actual election results versus opinion polls. And also, you've got the sample as well. I mean, especially for smaller parties, it's very difficult to tell. So right now, I'm not sure how much I would read into the opinion polls. You do here anecdotally, for example, but less trust is in trouble, that the reformer out there and that Jacob Rees-Mogg is in trouble because the reformer is in Somerset or on his case. You hear this sort of thing, but then again, in the 2015 election, I heard anecdotally that the Tories were sunk in a whole bunch of seats that they went on to win. So I think at this stage in the campaign, two days out from the general election, we still need to be quite modest about how much we don't know and how much the polls wouldn't really tell us. I do think that two weeks ago, reform, how much greater momentum for an insurgent party than momentum is so crucial. Two weeks ago, I think, from the pollsters and cannons, I think they seem to be more around 20% of the vote. And now I wouldn't be surprised if they got more close to 15% of them, which is very impressive still. But for context, 2015, you get about 12.5%. Now, you think, after the past 10 years or so, where the Conservatives really are right now and all the way in which they've kind of tanked their brand, you might expect reform to give better. If it does transpire, they're around 15% rather than 20%. Will they get more votes from the Lib Dems? That's a major test. Right now, I'd say they probably will, though we wouldn't want to see definitely. And of course, how many MPs will get over the line? Are we going to see Nigel Farage having his birthday drinks in... Strangers. Strangers, bar in the House of Commons. So I think... The secret doesn't burn it. But I guess what it will all boil down to. I think we can rule out there being significant numbers of reforms. One of the things that I'm going to be looking at for an election like Haiti is how many Tories are going to lose their seats in places where to form probably cost them their seats. I think there will be a forage effect in taking the Tory vote down quite a lot. But then again, one of the surprises on the evening might be reform voters who will, like some reform candidates, put two and two together and think, "Hang on, if I vote for this party, I'm more likely to get a Labour or the Lib Demim peeve and an inventory." And then maybe Jacob Rees-Mogg isn't the worst scenario in those things. So we might see people, even though they back the objectives of reform, and would quite probably like a reform government, nonetheless, votes another way because they don't think that reform would be, first of all, we would succeed in that constituency. And also that voting reform might let in a candidate even worse than the conservative they're trying to stop. And just finally, James, if there is a reform blame game, say we go from some of these quite optimistic, or I suppose the upper end of the poll suggests that they could have got, you know, eight reform MPs, and they don't do that, perhaps they get one. Who do you think is most at risk in that blame game? Is it Nigel Farage for his Russia comments and then Nick Robinson interview? Or is it perhaps the party machinery on the vetting? I think both, I think Nigel Farage, obviously, has been central figure because of his status as so revered within reform that I think that he'll probably escape the blame for that. I think the danger is, of course, that reform is just allowed itself to get distracted from its central messaging, rather punching the Tory bruise on immigration attacks every single day. These kind of weird media spats where, for instance, today they're ascribing more agency to CCHQ and kind of having all these stitch-ups and sort of candidacies and, you know, entreaties to convince people to turn against reform. And I don't think even in CCHQ they think they're that capable of doing that. So that's been the irony of today. Look, I think that, you know, reform can truly learn lessons from this, but it's something we've seen, strengths and weaknesses from the UK, the Brexit Party, and reform. They can get greater than an insurgency, they can do lots of change, they get great rallies, and that's all admirable. But equally, there are some downsides that come with that too. Whatever happens, I think Nigel Farage has established himself as Britain's, not just Britain's most effective political entrepreneur, which he is, but one of the most significant politicians of our times. He done this several times over. I mean, it's amazing what he did, first of all, putting Brexit on the agenda, secondly, creating a party for nothing and then finishing first in the 2019 European elections, by the way, paving the way for Boris Johnson. But now putting a cat amongst the Tory pigeons in the most spectacular way. So he, I can't think of any other politician who's capable of what Nigel Farage has proved himself capable. So it's a phenomenal achievement. My concern, of course, is that achievement will have exactly the opposite of its intended effect, and it will mean far fewer voices, advocating the sort of change which reform voters want to see. Thank you, James. Thank you, Fraser, and thank you for listening. And while we have you here, just to mention, we have a coffee house shots live coming up next week. We'll be digging into all the results, including how reform did or didn't do. Perhaps some on this podcast will have to take back the words. Perhaps some will be able to say, "I told you so." To purchase tickets for that event on July the 11th, go to www.spectator.co.uk/live and it's in the evening at the Emmanuelle Centre. [Music]