The Reality of Political Power Struggles

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For fourteen years they created as much misery as possible for us, criticized everything that went on. At least when we were, I'm afraid, trying to remove Theresa May, it was about the long-term constitutional future of the country. That is not what this is about. So it would be tempting to be amused superficially, but of course it's not funny. It's the future of the country. So it's pretty serious. And uh how does one actually go about removing a leader and creating that narrative into the space to do so? It requires immense work. Gosh, I wish I wasn't expert in these things. But a political campaign out of parliament is really it's all about numbers. So there'll always be somebody who moves early, they're all on a hair trigger to go. So you know Andrew Bridgen would put his in his letter in you know, at the drop of a hat. But you're then getting it's progressively harder to get people over the line to do what needs to be done. So it's always a question of knowing where colleagues are intellectually, emotionally, what they're trying to achieve , what their best judgment of the interests of the country is. And I'm afraid, and I wish it wasn't like this, I do. Very often, it's what their grievances are, what are their frustrated ambitions, what was the time that they were let down by the person who we're opposing? And you know, wish it wasn't like that. It was politics. So if you want to win, you have to understand every MP in the round, minutely, closely, and try to give them what they want in the end, because it's not about when it's you, it's not about me, the person lobbying them, it's about how do we give this person what they want. Well it sounds like a sort of whip's office, you know, and that's what the whip should be doing, right? Yeah, the whips unfortunately it varies. So whips very often are just taking the government's line and just counting numbers like you do on the doorstep. Are you going to vote for me or not? Move on if they don't. That's a huge mistake in Parliament. So we used to call ourselves the buddies. We weren't whipping people, we had no authority, we had no patronage. But the difference between when Marc Francois and I were doing it and when the whip's office was doing it, is we could only win by offering people what they wanted and going with the grain of where they wanted to be. Whereas of course the Whips office, where you won't get promoted, well, you know, we put a lot of resources into your marginal C. I've heard that said. Be a shame if you didn't win . Yeah, rough. Um I know one colleague who voted for something because otherwise he wasn't going to get a hospital in his constituency. Wow. Right, so yeah. So you you know you can't do that sort of thing. So you have to just know them minutely and try to give them what they want. So a wise whipping operation really is friends with everybody, insofar as you can be, and it's requires ruthless commitment to the task at hand whilst also being everyone's friend. Don't make me give away all my secrets. But one of the things also is momentum or or narrative, if you want to call it that. And we've seen in the labor context this week, you know, we're streeting, was he gonna go over the top? I had one person to come here and And now he's on, he's resigned. Uh we've also had Anjarina cleared. I mean narrative and momentum are very important, right? Absolutely are. You have to have exactly the right story calibrated to the next group of people you're trying to win over without angering the ones you won early. So you're constantly looking at where you are in the sort of window of plausibility of winning the next bunch of people. And that the narrative has to be calibrated, that in a sense the flames have to be turned up and down. I used to do that quite often. And just as you're carefully calibrating the narrative you're putting into the press, somebody will go out and say something worse. A phenomenon I used to have, which presumably I can see things like it working now. I would find I'd give a quote to say the telegraph, and then another colleague would be on the front page, Peter Bone or Andrew Bridgeon very often. And they would have said something that was just another couple of levels higher than me about how terrible things were and everything needed to change instantly. And that of course would drive people off and make the objective further away. So what I'm observing now with Labour is that this wisdom, if I may say so, and the capacity to organize how the message is, the narrative is fed into the press, that is missing. We're getting things are being said which are too aggressive and have no eye to the unity of their own party. So I, we always had an eye to keeping the Conservative Party together to deliver the larger objective. If ever I had anything to do with it, it was never about the destruction of the Conservative Party. It was about achieving a policy objective. And it was important the Conservative Party remained capable of delivering it. Whereas where the when you look when you look today at what is being briefed out into the press. Mu ofch it is merely destructive. And people have lost the dis the discipline which comes from purpose. If you know what your purpose is, you select and maintain your aim, as we used to say in the armed forces , then you can act with purpose to that end. So yes, narrative, timing, constantly, ruthlessly focusing on who are you talking to, who are you trying to persuade, what will be forgotten, what will be remembered. Don't do bad things with no purpose that will be remembered You dealt with a couple of prime ministers who were pretty stubborn and refusing to go, Theresa May, very different circumstances still, but Boris Johnson as well. What do you make of Keir Starmer sort of digging in saying, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon? Absolutely bound to happen. Even if you're the most noble Prime Minister who just genuinely believes that only you can save the nation and have all the right ideas on policy, once you've achieved the thing you crave, you're going to cling on to it. People should understand that politicians do get into power for exactly this: power, influence, ability to control. And the idea they would give it up lightly, or even under quite substantial pressure, it's for the birds, actually. I've said it before in another context and I don't wish to make light of the difficulties of addiction, but it's like addicts and their drug. They've got to have it. They you know trying to take it away from them is very, very difficult and they're unlikely to just lightly say, well, actually, do you know what nobody's behind me anymore? I'll give in. And it's not just the Prime Minister, that has to be remembered. And again, you can't blame people. Everyone in Downing Street has reached the pinnacle of their career. If they're a special advisor in Downing Street, they've made it. They're in Downing Street. Everyone cares what they think. They've probably only just got their strap clearance if they're a special advisor, for example. They've been through the misery of that for a year. And they've made it. So why would they give up? So they will always rally to the Prime Minister and try and keep their Prime Minister in number ten, because they know that if there's a leadership change they're out and they're off to a public affairs firm, which might be perfectly noble, but it's not what they wanted. They'll always be saying when I was in number 10. So everybody's incentives are to cling on to being in number 10. So again, wise thing to do might have been to help the Prime Minister achieve success in number 10. This is not about a policy disagreement, really. You know, I think the spectators uh been writing about this, that they're not arguing about the grand ideas of the future of the nation . It's personality. They like Andy Burnham 'cause he'll save us. But it's all about vibes. Well this touches on I think the key point you've been making and there's a wonderful clip which I'd advise people to watch, which is uh of you going viral with against uh George Osborne and uh Ed Balls on G MB, Good Morning Britain, on the uh morning of the twenty twenty-four election, and you're warning that actually this is a much more fundamental thing than just changing the blue rosettes to red rosettes. Yeah. And that seems to be very much at the fore of what's happening here, which is about personalities when it should be about issues. Absolutely, yeah. So the point I was making there is that for years, these people now elected as Labour MPs had been saying austerity is a choice, as if there was a real magic money tree, a horn of plenty, you could just up-end and have plenty to spend. Austerity is a choice. And it isn't a choice. You have to live in the real world. You can try and ignore the real world, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring the real world. Bond markets spike, and now we're seeing Labour MPs saying the bond markets will have to come in line. I mean, where do you start? So, in a context where these Labour MPs don't want to vote for reducing the welfare bill, and a context where the Labour whips were laughing at us when things when I was organizing. They were laughing at they had a Twitter account. It's gone very quiet . They absolutely clamped down on all dissent. They've treated Labour MPs very hard for a very long time. And that meant they raised the price of rebellion. Which inevitably meant when it came to the welfare rebellion, it had to be huge for everyone's mutual protection. If the whips were in the business of taking the whip off people over normal policy votes, usually it would only be over a vote of confidence or the king's speech or the budget. But if they were in the business of you losing the whip for a normal policy vote , of course, suddenly everybody's now living in fear they can't they can't rebel. And so with the welfare rebellion, of course it was gigantic to make sure they were safe. And that was bound to sow grievance and dissent, which is now erupting everywhere. So the whips thought they were being clever, but with these MPs, with what needs to be done, all of the incentives are now lined up for an entirely fruitless orgy of self-destruction. And the idea that Andy Burnham sweeps in and solves all of that is for the birds. I mean, you were in Parliament at the same time as Andy for six years. Do you have much to do with him? What do you make of him? He's not very good. He's not as good as people think he he is. So to illustrate it, I used to intervene on him in education debates in the twenty ten Parliament, and I noticed he stopped taking my interventions, 'cause I was doing quite well at intervening on him. I shouldn't have been. It was his brief. He was the shadow secretary of state. I was just taking the Conservative brief and thinking for myself, and he stopped taking my interventions. This isn't really about me, it's about him. But if you're the MP and you're the one bobbing up and down, you start noticing that he's skipping you and going to the other colleagues and you think, Well, I'm beating you now, and you've let me know that I'm beating you. And if a brand new MP can be beating him within a few years off brief,, well he's not very good. And um I noticed a caller on, I think it was LBC, saying they won't be voting for Andy Burnham in this by-election, because actually they don't like what he's done in Manchester, hugely wasteful um air qual ity scheme was decided. So if he if actually he's losing Labour voters in Manchester, he could he could lose that seat. It's a huge test of his personality and whether vibes conquers intent for the whole nation. And Jen Williams of the FT made this point, which is that she's covered him, she's a Northern Reporter, covered him for years, and her argument is that just because you have someone's got character traits, if they go to Manchester and put them in that environment and they come back to SW1 what's to stop the old traits reasserting themselves? And her point seemed to be that actually he hasn't changed that much. Leopard can't change its spots and he's going to be the same character that we saw ten years ago. Square peg in a square hole in Manchester. He's the king of the north, and that's great. But people are funny, aren't they? They don't like being taken for granted and they do like to be appreciated. So the voters now in that in that seat, makerfield, isn't it? They now know they really count. They really count for the life of the nation for a long time. And I expect they'll pay attention to what they're doing. And the the same people who just voted reform, when asked to vote for the mayor of Manchester to return to Parliament so that he can be Prime Minister, well, that's not about them, is it? Well, what is about them? It's the future of the whole nation. And I think that