The Need for Political Risk Taking

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I'm Tim Shipman the political edge of the spectator and my usual sidekick, Mr. James Hill, is not with us this week, so I am delighted to be joined by Luke Trill of More in Common, one of Britain's leading pollsters, one of the best focus groupers in the business, the man who has his finger on the pulse of the British voter and nowhere more so than in those red wall seats that he has uh chronicled extensively over the last few years and that is now key of course because there's only one subject on everybody's minds and that is the Merakfield by-election coming up in mid-June, which is going to decide not just who the MP for Makerfield is, but very likely who the next Prime Minister is as well. So, Luke, delighted to have you with us. Great to be here. So look , this is probably the most sort of bizarre and exciting by-election we've ever had in British political history. And we we, you know, uh journalists are giving to hyperbole, but it I can't think of occasion where we've had one that's literally going to decide who runs the country in quite this way. And he's quite often you get leaders parachuted into seats, or they uh go with no opposition, you know, at various points in our political history to just get a seat so they can go and be the Prime Minister. But this is a proper contest. And what are you hearing from the ground? Have you done any straight constituency polling yet? And just talk us through what you're seeing from all the pollsters. Where where does this contest lie at the Yeah. So I would go a a step further in terms of how Tutemic I think this by election is, not just will it decide likely the next Prime Minister, but actually the entire contours of electoral competition in the run up to the next election. And that's because if you look at Makerfield , on almost every level, it is a seat tailor-made for reform to gain. You know, heavily leave voting, um, slightly older than average, fewer gradu ates there. Um one of those areas which become known as sort of left behind. And in fact, actually Josh Simon's I think very good letter makes the point about towns around the north of England that have been uh left behind . So you know on the one hand you've got that. And so if it were dominantly white as well, predominantly white. Exactly that. So you know if you were to ask me kind of straight off in the absence of Andy Bernard, that this is an easy reform pick up, and if reform aren't picking it up, actually they'd be in trouble. On the other hand, and I've spent a lot of time in Greater Manchester, in different parts, because it's quite interesting, Greater Manchester, you've got kind of leafy alteringham, you've got the centre, it's much more uh Stunty, you've got Galton and Denton, and then you've got places like Wigan, Woodley and Hayward Middleton, those other uh seats which are much more red wholly. And the truth is, the Burnham factor is real, right? Talk to people in focus groups in the area, and they can point to things he's done, particularly around trans , but also this idea of him as a champion against Westminster. And people bring up, I mean I, still remember it, but people bring up, you know, when he was on his phone during COVID and he finds out about the tears, and you know, it's become a kind of iconic image for him. And so what you're getting is Burnham's personality versus the gravitational pull of the seat to reform. We think that Burnham, you know, if you use his mayoral contest, Burnham's overperformance is around 20 points. Oh, really? It's that big. And has been. And if you then model that onto the seat, you get Burnham just narrowly uh ahead. That's also similar I know Cervation have done some modelling as well based on their polling. They also have Burnham just ahead there . But as a I mean, with your forty eight percent, what Sam Coates was saying earlier, coin toss is probably the right phrase. And I think you believe that it had Burnham run in Gorton and Denton, he probably would have just got over the line there. as well That seems contested still, but certainly most Burnham loyalists think that he had enough of that personal vote. Because in in constituencies, normally a personal vote is well, a couple of thousand votes, it doesn't amount to twenty points is a is a heck of a thing. And what does that point to? I think it points to still that sense of this is obviously a metropolitan area in a profound sense, but if you think of London as the metropolis, it's us and them and all of that, and it's people pushing against sort of liberal progressive London. So on the one hand, Andy Burnham wants to come south to take on the Labour leadership, and effectively will need the votes of progressive London, but right now he needs the votes of Red Wall Old Labour, essentially. And that is going to be the the sort of uh the conflict here in in the messaging and in how he presents himself and you know imagine the role for those people knocking on doors. You've knocked on doors for candidates before. Can you imagine knocking on the door saying, what, I really need you to vote for this bloke from my party because I want him to go south and kick out the leader of my party. So you're relying on a kind of anti-Starmer position as well. It's it's gonna be very aucs for the I I guess Manchester Labour will lead on it, and you won't see beyond the few ministers who'd quite like to see see Keir Starmer go. You know, you're gonna see those kind of London people going and knocking on doors and saying, come on, we need this lad and he's one of yours. Send him down to sort us out. That's going to be the message, essentially. How's this going to play then? So reform are obviously the main challenges, but there's some interesting other blocks of votes there, aren't there? So there's a there's a bit of a green vote, which I can see voting Labour to turn the Labour Party more left-wing. There's Tory votes. Now are those there were- I think there were 4,000 Tory votes at the last general election. What are they going to do? Have they evaporated, as the local elections say they've gone already? Have they already decided where they're going? Or I could see people voting tactically to vote for Burnham, uh to keep reform away from a seat. I can see people voting for reform to cause as much chaos as possible in the Labour Party. Though I think the most chaos would be Burnham losing. Ironically, we can come to that in a moment. But tactical voting, where what which is more significant do you think? The the the sort of stop reform or the or the stock Burnham carpet bagger kind of argument that you'll get from some people? Well certainly in Gorton and Denton stock reform was by far the biggest driver and in part that was the candidate that reform chose to pick in Gorton and Denton, had a long track record, made some comments which lots of people consider quite inflammatory. And people in the focus groups in Gorton would say, I'm I I want to stop Matt Goodwin and I I think think reform are going to try and pick a different style of candidate uh indications are they'll probably go with the same guy who's a local small businessman who's, you know, kind of salt of the earth kind of character. Those people can be dangerous in a very high-profile by-election if they're not that experienced, they can say the wrong things and things can get blown up. But I would have thought if you're basically relying on Nigel Farage to be there most days marching around, he's one of you, unlike this bl oke from down the road. That will be part of their argument. Definitely. So I think it's gonna be much more Sarah Pochin than Matt Goodwin, right? Uh in this. But then so then you get into all of these interesting dynamics. So, you know, the Greens have said, I think that they're running a candidate for sure now. There's around ten percent of the vote, which was green. Does that get squeezed massively? And you know, actually, if Burnham wins having also squeezed the green vote, he's basically taken on Labour's twin dragons, right? That's an argument he wants to take south. I mean I think this is why if he were to win this, I mean you've heard there have been quotes over the weekend of people saying, you know, he'd be literally carried high through the streets of Westminster by uh Labour MPs because he would be have shown himself able to beat both of those sort of uh, as you say, the twin dragons, the people who are stealing all those Labour votes at the moment. But a big problem has come up over the weekend, and part of me quite admires Wes West Streeting for what's can only be described as uh running interference, I think is the polite way of putting it. I have no doubt at all that Wes Streeting wants to rejoin the European Union. But uh make that his first big pitch, having not quite launched the leadership contest, and effectively daring Andy Burnham to repeat what he said last autumn, which is that eventually he would like to rejoin the European Union. That is potentially the most sort of toxic thing. And the Burnham people are furious about this. They sort of said West Streeting's done this on purpose and now we have to talk about this in a very leave seat. And that and that's going to be a problem. I don't think we yet know, you know, what does this mean? Andy Burnham's basically said, well I, do want to rejoin the European Union, but I don't want to talk about that this in this butt. Well, I bet you don't. But I guess to be fair to Andy Burton, we don't yet know, would he plan to put it in the next Labour manifesto? Would he campaign on it? On what terms would he be prepared to rejoin? Because a lot of very sensible people on the left of British politics understand that rejoining the European Union would be quite problematic. We're in the midst of talks at the moment. There's supposed to be a summit in June or July to agree all the stuff that we were campaigning uh uh to improve with the EU last year, that hasn't happened yet. And then there's another round of talks which looks even more problematic. And if we were getting into rejoining, you know, does that include the euro? Does it include rejoining the Schengen zone? All of that kind of stuff. I think this is the last thing that Burnham needs. But it's odd that his team didn't seem to have a better kind of answer lined up, because even if West Streeting had not put this straight on the agenda, you can pretty sure Nigel Farage would have gone back and looked at those comments. But how impactful might that be? I mean how you've done a lot of work on Brexit, maybe not necessarily in this seat, but what what are people thinking about that now? So and this is it. This is why I think people are slightly tying themselves in knots because Brexit, as you know, better than anyone else, it has never just been about Brexit, right? It's been a sort of symbol for the type of country that people think we had and who it works for, and where we want to be in the future. So to start off with salience. Brexit pretty low salience. Never comes up, basically in focus groups, apart from some people say we never got that 350 million from the NHS contested, obviously, but that's the only way in which it comes up. Secondly , people tend to say, if I quite overwhelmingly say it hasn't worked, but they split on could it never have worked, or did politicians stuff it up? And actually a plurality say, it was politicians that stuffed it up. So you've then got that. You've then got the third issue, which is so we don't ask people in our tracker about rejoin, because I think it's a on what as you expect. We don't want it to rejoice. So we asked people about how they would vote during if the referendum was rerun, because we think that's a more honest question. And there has been a shift, both some regret, but also the bigger thing is new entrance to the electorate. And all things being equal, it looks now like, you know, it'll be a reasonably comfortable, but this isn't enduring a campaign, but just, you know, uh all things being equal, reasonably comfortable remain vote. We then, if we project that onto somewhere like Make a Field taking count of the demographics, think it would be potentially actually narrowly, you know, remain now. But interesting. That is in the absence of a campaign and it ignores the fact that what Brexit is code for, what it says to lots of people is it's about priorities. And I think the danger for Labour is less about this becomes a debate about relationship with the European Union and more a sense of, oh my goodness, have these guys not learned anything we've been trying to say for the to them for the past ten years? Is it going to go back to this London centric model places like Makerfield end up being uh forgotten? And I think that's a risk. And then the final thing I would say on that is that even as Brexit is low salience, might not matter, people don't think it works, immigr ation really does. And if I were Andy Burnham, my worry would be the next question after uh being asked about um Brexit would be what are you going to do about Shabana Mahmoud's immigration reforms? We know that, you know, we think he's been sort of critical of some aspects of that in the past. If he is seen to move on that, because Makerfield is one of the constituencies that cares most about immigration in the country, that I think would be much more dangerous than the Brexit question. Yeah, and what the relieve campaign did very successfully, certainly the Farage side of it and during the campaign, the the Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson side of it , was to effectively tie migration and Brexit together. Farage said, this is, you know, we have freedom of movement, this is why we have high migration. Of course, that argument in essence doesn't work in quite the way it used to because who put up migration, net migration more than anybody else? It was Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister, with Priti Patel uh as his uh home secretary. So the Boris wave has done some damage to that argument, but that's not an excuse for a lot of these voters, I don't think. I think uh their view is that migration is still a problem and Brexit might have low salience, but I mean I I I don't know about Makerfield, but correct me if I'm wrong.etty Pr well everyone has a cost of living at the top, and quite a lot of people have migration either at the top with it or just behind it, essentially. And there are other issues that matter in British politics, but those two are far and away the most salient and significant. So Burnham has now got a decision to make about how far he leans into this. Now, I know people on the right of the Labour Party think if Andy Burnham can go through the fire of Makerfield and emerge recognizing that control ling migration is not a bad thing and that Shabana Mahmood's policies are supported by seven out of ten Labour voters nationally and even half of Green voters nationally. That might actually make him a rather better candidate to be the Prime Minister. It might make him a slightly less emphatic candidate to be the Labour leader, but the likelihood is if he's shown that he can beat the Greens and beat reform, that that won't matter because West Streeting is not going to beat him in those circumstances. And here Starmer all indications are over the weekend that Starmer in that situation would face the music and understand that he needed at some point to step aside. So it's very difficult to see how he squares that circle in in campaign rhetoric when reform are just putting out attack videos already now and and uh Farage is calling Burnham Mr. Open Borders. And the problem for Burnham over the years is that he's been a quiet sort of he's a character who has tended to move with the passing prevailing winds. You know, there's an old Labour joke about a a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbinite walk into a bar and the barman says, Hello, Andy. And you sort of wonder which which Burnham is going to stand up. It seems to me that Burnham now has to decide which Burnham he's going to be in this campaign, but actually the campaign could shape him a bit as well and actually make him perhaps a more palatable candidate to s to some people who've left the Labour Party th than than beforehand. What do we know about his rivals though? Because let's war game this out. If Burnham wins the by-election, which, as we, you know, we all agree basically at the moment is a coin flip, though that could change if one of these campaigns kind of g athers pace on something he said or something he now says. But if that doesn't happen, it looks pretty chaotic. Where do you think the public are in terms of definitely wanting Starmer to go, firstly, and if it's if Starmer if the assumption of the cabinet and everybody else is that Starmer's going but Burnham's not available, where does that leave Ed Miliband, Angela Reyner, and Wes Streeting, who I think everyone agrees that's you know, Al Khan 's uh can do all the social media he wants, but I don't think anyone uh really thinks he's nice sunrises. Oh some beautiful sunrises and the odd sunset as well. But where where are they? There's a s there's already a movement in Labour saying it we need a woman, we need a woman, 'cause they always say that, uh though they seem always to never quite elect one. Um we saw George Osborne over the weekend uh winding up his mate Ed Balls saying, What about this Avette Cooper woman? She's rather good. Why don't we have her, who's of course Mrs. Ed Balls? Angela Rayner, my strong impression from talking to the people around her and people who know her well, is that she's prepared to defer to Burnham. I'm not sure whether she's prepared to defer to Ed Miliband. Ed Miliband seems to have decided that Andy Burnham should be the leader, but if he's not, he needs to step in to prevent Angela Reynold being the candidate. And obviously West Streeting on the right of the party is hoping for as much chaos as possible. So he can say, well look, I'm the answer here. I'm with you guys on Brexit, but I'm a bit more less likely to sort of blow up the economy than some of these people on the left. And all what are the head-to-heads looking like within the party? And is there a sort of strong feeling in the public that could have a sway on these things. Because the Labour Party membership can be more pragmatic than than the than the MPs in terms of wanting to win elections. Just tell us what you're finding with everybody else. I just wonder just on the neutralize the the question of Burnham, because you've now got to give some kind of answer on this EU question. And if I were him, what I would do is 'cause you know you can't there's just no way you can do it in this parliament anyway, right? It wasn't manifest you'd you'd need some given. I think he needs to and I know others have suggested similar some version of the Gordon Brown five tests where he says we will look to rejoin if these things are met, and he must make one of those will it benefit places like Makerfield? And if it doesn't, I won't. If it does, I will. And you you've you you've fronted that up. You said the previous arrangement benefited the South and London. This is what we do. So And if you look at what they've renegotiated, what have we got? We've paid a large sum of money to go back into student travel, which may or may not be relevant to the high school kids of Makerfield. It's all, you know, it's sort of posh London families who want to send their kids to France for a year, who are going to benefit from that primarily. Are we you know, there was talk of fighting our way through the passport cues and not having to do that. Um that seemed to take a long time, not least because uh a lot of the individual countries have the right to say one thing or another. So the proof of what we're already actually doing with the EU already looks quite Southeast focused. Yeah, and so it's not about industrial, you know, recreation in Manchester or Birmingham or you know the more d uh discarded places of the north east. That's not what it feels like at the moment. But No Absolutely but the I mean the one thing I would say though it's actually the E gate passport thing drives everyone mad. Oh yeah. That's the biggest thing. But on to I mean, look, so the head to head. So look, Burnham is much more popular than Keir Starmer with the public. He comes at 16 points ahead in our tracking. But interestingly, with And that's a sort of approved, not approved. That's who would you prefer? That's who would you prefer as PM? Now there's a big chunk of don't knows in the middle, uh, but Burnham sixteen points ahead. When you ask about Starmer versus streeting, Starmer is actually five points ahead. Uh and this is with the public. This is with the public. Yeah. But again, huge chunk of unknowns then. Actually, nearly fifty percent say that they don't know. Starmer versus Miliband, Starmer is up eleven. So you know, he is uh much higher there. Because in the party, Ed Miliband is the most popular cabinet minister, a guy with an agenda who has an ability to drive that agenda. The people on the left think well if he's not gonna be the leader he might be a r a a respectable chancellor of the exchequer. But the public remembers Edmund , or those that do at least remember a lot of intellectual chat, not much grit, and and you know, bluntly, they remember a bloke with two kitchens who couldn't eat a bacon sandwich properly. He's not got that sort of national warmth. But also the reinvention of Ed Miliband into, you know, a person who, whether you like his agenda or not, delivers on a and does definitely seem more at ease with himself. That hasn't cut through to the public just because it's not a public. Exactly. Exactly. And then Rayner, if you look at Starmer versus Rayner, Starmer's up 12 there. So you know, actually Burnham is currently the only one who is ahead with the public When you look at them we haven't done membership probably, but again, Labour List and Servation I think have done some and there they find that Burnham ahead of Starmer. Rayner and Miliband, I think remember just ahead of Starmer as well, streeting again Would lose Starmer and would lose. And that's just members, that's not the affiliates that they're po pping trade union members. Yeah, and you d you detect that the trade unions are in a state of pretty much open revolt at the moment. They've had enough of Starmer . They don't think he's delivering the agenda they want. Though I don't think they most of them would regard Ed Mullaband uh sorry, would regard Wes Streeting as being uh the kind of person who would deliver the uh the agenda they want either. But I don't know what this tells us really. It tells us that this could be pretty chaotic. I mean I did some numbers at the, you know, end of last week and I think, you know, the percentages could change a little bit, but I had burn them on, you know, nearly half, and then Miliband on slightly more than half of the rest of it. Uh and I had Starmer and uh Rayner at roughly the same kind of level, about ten percent each, because I don't think Angela Rayner um wants to fight Burnham and I think Milibam would try and stop her fighting him. That may be that that's wrong, and that, you know, as these things evolve, Rainer could emerge again. I think the view amongst MPs is that she sent a lot of mixed messages for a long time about whether she wants the job or thinks she's up to it and again similar mixed messages from the people around her. But that push to have a woman, you know, the Tories have had a lot of women. They've had a lot of non-white leaders and that's embarrassing for the Labour Party, bluntly, isn't it? What would happen if you bring in some of the other sort of what are perceived as the safe pair of pantas? Let's talk about Evette Cooper. I mean, I don't know how whether she's better known than any of these. I mean her reputation in Whitehall is of someone who's quite cautious. Shimana Mahmoud was sent to the Home Office to sort of sort things out because she didn't really want to kind of really get to grips with it. Her reputation as a minister in the previous Labour government was as someone who didn't make decisions particularly precipitately. So would she you know is there name recognition there? Is there a sort of safe pair of hands argument that people could advance if they wanted to? Or are people inside and outside the Labour Party really sort of looking for something a bit more kind of radical and punchy these days? Well, I think I guess it's uh I mean she definitely does have more name recognition and the public do like to be reassured, but then given the public, you know, the one thing we should have said is despite Starmer being ahead on those metrics, the public overwhelmingly think he should, you know, resign as sort of two twenty even Labour twenty twenty four voters are split on the question uh now, which is the most damning. So what question are you answering with a vet Cooper or a John Healy? And I thought again, I thought Josh Simons was really interesting because he made the point when he was doing media round yesterday that politicians have become scared of taking risks. Yeah. Right. And that actually, you know, he was making it from a sort of ideological point of view. From a public point of view, I can see that as well. Like, no one people blame polling and focus groups, right? They go, oh, the problem with polling and focus groups is that you know people just blindly follow them. No,, no no. What purling focus groups should show you is that people want an argument to be made. They want you to go out there. They want you to advocate . They want to be led bluntly. They want to be led. Like just do it in a sensible way. And you know, people as writing something about this. The thing that drives me mad is people talk about winter fuel as if it shows that the British public, you know, can't deal with any trade-offs. No, winter fuel was announced in the middle of nowhere, outside a budget, with a threshold that was too But it was effectively it's wrong for all these rich people to be getting all this money and we can save some money and give it to people who need it more. I mean, proper labour arguments. Same with the welfare reforms. All these people are on the scrap heap. This is a disgrace. We're we're failing them as people. And we're losing an economic gain as, you know, human capital is being wasted here. But it was all dressed up as cuts and savings. And I agree that's partly a comms problem, but I think most of uh the most of the time comms problem I mean you've done comms . Most of the time you were on thin ice doing columns was because the policy was rubber. And that policy you know, but it be it was that it was that twelve grand threshold. You had people just above it who would say, well, I've worked all my life and I'm not getting it, you know, X down the road, hasn't there stu you know I mean it was just on every level, it was just a bad