Conference season is under way, and it opened with a donations scandal.
Reform gathered in Birmingham for the first outing of the season, three days at the NEC, bigger than last year, and with a well-attended business day on Friday.
Nathan was there for us, and his read is worth your time in full: Reform UK’s First 100 Days, Lost in the Noise (here). Two things stood out to me. One, there some was real policy substance: Richard Tice launched a genuinely serious planning platform on day one (‘The Planning Teal Paper’) and Jenrick pledged £100bn in savings, with a full deregulation package sat behind it. But, none of it really landed. Farage’s own spokesman and head of policy were suspended within hours over an undercover sting on party donations which ran for 40 minutes on Channel 4, and Reform spent the rest of the conference fielding questions about a fake American donor and dodgy polls rather than talking about policy.
Nathan’s line stuck with me: a party that gathered to reassure itself it still has momentum spent most of its time managing a scandal instead.
The polling underneath is more complicated than the noise suggests, too (see our Sunday update here). Reform peaked around 34% last September and has been narrowing since, largely because Burnham has been eating into the same voters Reform needs. Ipsos has Labour on 28%, Reform on 25%, the Conservatives on 18%. That’s Labour’s best position in over a year, a genuine three-point lead, though still within margin of error. The personal numbers are starker. Burnham’s favourability is up eight points on last month to 40%, and in a straight head-to-head the public prefer a Burnham government to a Farage one, 50% to 29%. He beats Farage comfortably on being in touch, on honesty, on understanding the country’s problems. 59% still think the country’s heading in the wrong direction, so none of this is settled. But six weeks in, Burnham is winning the argument about who they’d rather have running it.
I went on Times Radio to look back at his first PMQs. Worth a watch if you have a couple of minutes (here). It was a comfortable outing for the new PM, not a dramatic one. He kept to the plan: deliberately non-combative, no point-scoring, speaking past Badenoch and Farage to the country, drawing on 2,000 town hall sessions as mayor rather than despatch box theatre. It ran long, past the usual half hour, and the Speaker has already had to nudge him towards shorter answers. Badenoch landed the more substantive hits, on what he’s actually cut given the small-state rhetoric, and on the cost of borrowing, though it’s a stretch coming from someone who’s hired one of the authors of the Truss mini-budget as her shadow chancellor.
The real challenge, of course, comes with next month’s Budget (October 28). Expect Burnham to have a good conference, but with little on detail until October 28 and long term vision coming with the launch of consultation on the 10 Year Plan.
Conference season is where the noise usually lives. This week is the quiet bit in between. Parliament has the Health Bill back for report stage, covering the abolition of NHS England and the new single patient record, the Civil Aviation Bill and the Social Housing Bill both at second reading, and the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill back on Friday for a free vote. Andrew Bailey is in front of the Treasury committee.
Then the conference circuit picks up again: the Liberal Democrats in Brighton from 19 September, Labour in Liverpool from the 27th, Burnham’s first conference as prime minister, the Greens back in Brighton, and the Conservatives in Birmingham to close it out in early October. We’re at all of them, with me leading the charge on the left, Nathan on the right, so if you find yourself in need of a stiff drink (or reviving morning run) then drop us a message.
Have a great week,
Kevin
p.s. This week Nathan and I go deeper on Reform’s conference on Political Business, including a conversation recorded by Nathan at the NEC with Leila Cunningham, Reform’s candidate for Mayor of London. Listen on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
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