Reform UK policy and political future

It's all eyes on Andy Burnham as West Streeting resigns and Kiss Starmer clings on. I'm Lucy Fisher, this is Political Fix from the Financial Times. We're going to be discussing the Prime Minister's leadership crisis. Plus, will new revelations about Farage's personal finances finally scratch the Teflon? With me to discuss it all, our political correspondent Anna Gross. Hi, Anna. Hi Lucy. FT's Deputy Political Editor Jim Picard. Hi Jim. Hi Lucy. And the FT's Deputy Opinion Editor, Miranda Green. Hi Miranda. Hi, Lucy . Well I don't know about you guys. When we convened at the end of last week, just after the local elections, some of you talked about being frazzled and over-caffeinated on the panel. This week, I'm feeling frazzled in a different way, wired from just having waited so long for something to happen, and finally on Thursday, it's all come to pass, hasn't it, Miranda? We've had Angela Rayner announce that her spot of bother with HMRC has settled, West Streeting has resigned but not launched a leadership election. Well it's a bit like I don't know it's all sort of weird Labour lawyer jerger, isn't it? Sort of assembling to try and work out how they're gonna replace Keir Starmer if indeed they're gonna do it. And quite a lot, you're right, an awful lot has happened, but there have also been strange periods of suspended animation because this phenomenon of will Andy do it or not? Will he be able to find a seat to fight? Okay, we now have an answer to that question, but it's been going on for days. And of course, with streeting, all eyes were on him. You know, would he be the person to, in the you know, Westminster terminology, wield the knife, and was very carefully not the person to actually wield the knife by resigning from the cabinet with an incredibly critical letter implying that Keir Starmer was a vacuum where there should have been a Prime Minister, but not actually going for it. And so it's all been sort of building uh as the day goes on. And it looks as if in a strange sort of way they all quite want the others to come with them to challenge Starmer as if they sort of challenge him as a group. Nobody wants to be the one to be blamed. And I think that's quite interesting because, you know, the mood, even in the parliamentary party, is not united on this. And in the country, it's not united on this, however much they think that Starmer is a flawed Prime Minister. There's a lot there to unpick, isn't there? Let's start off with Andy Burnham. We've had the really i exciting and quite surprising news on Thursday evening that, Josh Simons, a fairly young MP in his 30s, who was seen to have a really bright future ahead of him, but had to resign from the government over a scandal involving his time at a think tank and commissioning an investigatory company to look into journalists, he's announced that he's going to step aside in the greater Manchester seat of Makerfield. Jim, tell us more. Okay. So the reason this has come as a surprise is because loads of names have been identified as these potential individuals who would give up their political ambitions for Andy Burnham 'cause they love him so much. And one by one, these Labour MPs have said, well, no, I quite I prefer my career as an MP to as much as I love Andy Burnham to giving up for him. But what was fascinating is that our colleague Jen Williams had picked up that Josh Simons was the one who was ringing around on behalf of Burnham, trying to persuade other people to step down, and he appeared to have run out of ro ad. And they probably said to him, Well, look, if it's such a great idea and Andy Burnham's so good, why didn't you have a go? And I suspect he looked into his soul and he thought, I'm in my early 30s, uh, I was resigned as this minister under pressure from Keir Star mer because uh he'd been in the scandal, which didn't make him look very good. I guess he's probably gonna try his luck in the private sector. I guess if Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister, we might see the very young Lord Simons in the in the upper house. Arise, Sir Josh. Exactly, but the irony of it all is that Labour Together was uh a a think tank organization set up by Morgan McSweeney to facilitate Keirst Starmer's success. And so it's got that lovely whiff of Shakespearean treachery about it. Anna, there are yet two big og obstacles to Burnham returning to the Commons. The first is whether the NEC, that's the national Executive Committee, sounds boring, but Labour's all powerful ruling body allows him to stand, having previously blocked him from standing in the Gorton and Denton by election. And secondly, is he necessarily gonna win? Tell us about the demographic makeup of uh Makerfield. As you say, the the NEC has already blocked him once. There have been signals over the past couple of weeks that several of the members are moving in a different direction, including notably Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud, who doesn't have a vote, we should say, but she's chair of the body, so maybe quite a single. Influential. Exactly. Um, and so I think that the general feeling is that if it were put to the NEC again , especially with Starmer as weakened as he is now, it would just be so, so damaging if they were to deny him the opportunity again. What's interesting about Makerfield is that it's absolutely not a shoe-in. Labour won it with a with reform coming second, and that was in 202 4. So reform support is likely to have increased a lot since then. Reform also did very well in that area in the local elec tions. So it is clearly going to be an extremely tight race between Labour and Reform. And I'm sure reform are going to be thinking very, very carefully about who they can put forward that would have a good shot of beating Andy Burnham. And if that were to happen, it would be extremely embarrassing for him. Of course. And we should also point out four thousand odd Tory votes at the last general election that reform will presumably try to squeeze. Interesting Miranda, let's say Burnham does get back in. Margaret Hodge, Baroness Hodge, Keir Starmer's anti-corruption czar, former minister in the Blair and Brown governments, has called for a coronation. She doesn't want to see a messy contest. And I've been quite struck that with West Streeting resigning and saying in his resignation letter it needs to be a broad debate and calling for the best candidates to be included in the field . Sounds like he might be sort of suggesting, you know he could fold in behind Burnham. Do you think that there is any likelihood that we could see no contest and just an agreement between Starmer and Burnham of a handover. So I agree with you. This is the most intriguing thing about the story as we sort of look at these various characters jostling for position, like at the beginning of the race, but without the race actually having been started by anybody firing a gun. Sorry, I've gone from, you know, wielding the knife to firing a gun, but you know what I mean. And I think the unknown in this is Starmer himself, because he's been so firm in saying that he will not go voluntarily . And so that has led everybody to sort of assume that, you know, somebody's going to have to be the person to, you know, to challenge him directly and come out in front of the pack at least to do that. But if they can find some way of saying, you know, we actually have unity across all these different parts of the party, we all think you should go, but we have worked it out amongst ourselves. What's been completely lacking so far in any of this since the terrible election results for Labour last weekend is anything that looks like a plan, right? So you've had all of these individual high-profile characters coming and highing, finally declaring themselves today. But none of it has looked like a plan. I think that's possibly also what the country finds so unsettling. So if they can between themselves actually work out who it is that they sort of will coalesce around, presumably they can then work out who's jostling for what cabinet position. Maybe they can affect some sort of coronation. I read that line in Streeting's resignation letter and thought, oh my goodness, you know, last time Labor MPs called for a broad debate and it went to a vote of the membership. They ended up with Jeremy Corbyn as leader. So they might want to think about how unpredictably the Labour selectorate can actually behave before they put it to a vote of the membership. Well though they have changed the rules to stop French candidates getting in the you know they've raised the threshold. The campaign group's not big enough to which you didn't previously. But you cannot count on the results. That's the point. You know, once an election gun is firing, here I go again with my guns and knives. But anyway, once you fire the starting gun, you know, any electorate, including a party membership, can behave in an unpredictable way. Just on your point about no plans, it's just struck me this week that Wes Streeting has clearly been planning this for some time, from what I can tell from speaking to MPs, even when he was sort of making last ditch attempt to try to get the 81 signatures that would be necessary to actually launch a leadership bid. Several of them were saying, you know, well, can you explain to us what your policy platform is, how it differs from Keir Starmer's? And he seemed to have very little, for at least from what they're telling us, that he could say that differentiated him. And I think that's one of the key things that MPs really, really want to s they don't just want to see someone who, you know, might speak a little bit better, perform a little bit better, that they can envisage combating Nigel Farage on the pub on the public stage. I think that is important. But they also genuinely want to see, you know, what are you gonna do that's different, you know, economically in terms of polic But isn't the catch twenty-two, Jim, that if the party were to change leader and to change policy prospectus, essentially that new Prime Minister would need to host a general election in order to renew their mandate if they're not going to stick by the policies set out in the manifesto that Labour took to the country in twenty twenty four. I think we have enough precedent of this happening before. So Gordon Brown taking over from Tony Blair in two thousand seven But with the continuity on the policy front, by and large. Um I was gonna I was gonna also talk about it. Right? And questions But I mean more recently we've had Liz Trust taking over from Boris Johnson and being replaced by Rishi Sunok and they changed loads of policies. I remember in one year the Conservative government had three different policies on fracking, which is part of the energy department that I cover. So I I think unless you like massively changed, like you voted for a left wing Labour government and now I'm gonna peel off my face and do incredibly right wing things. Well though you could argue that Summer did kind of do that to his own membership. But no, I I don't think you need to have a general election. Obviously the Tories and Reform and everyone else will say you have to generate the president. Can I ask you about the policy? Um You and I and colleagues this week have been writing about what some of the Labour factions , caucuses, pressure groups have been coming up with. And in particular, there are three: the Labour Growth Group, which has said it's sort of pressing for more supply-side reforms that focus more on work than owning things. You've got the tribune group that's a little bit more left-wing and focusing on public ownership. And then you've got mainstream, which is this think tank that's very aligned with Andy Burnham, which is purporting to put forward more Manchesterism policies. Take us through what Andy Burnham, if he does come back to Parliament, if he does take over in Downing Street, what we might expect from uh a government led by him. Yeah, I think the way to look at these various papers and announcements doing the rounds in the last couple of days from you know intellectual type people in the Andy Burnham orbit is they they see this less as a sort of a prescriptive list of policies which Andy Burnham has endorsed and will carry out and more people around him doing some think y leg work for ideas that Burnham could then take off the shelf if he gets the keys to number 10. I thought the ones that were most fleshed out in terms of specific policies was this one by Tribune, Louise Hay, former transport secretary, co wrote a paper, and there was quite specific policies in there. So for example, splitting the Treasury and having a new economic growth ministry, getting rid of stamp duty and having a new kind of land tax, and the other probably the most significant one is this idea that fiscal rules, instead of being over five or seven or three years or whatever they are, should be over ten years. And obviously uh the bond markets quite like to look at that as basically the soft left trying to soften fiscal discipline. And I suspect that's one of the ones that if I mean they're talking about not introducing this un until the budget is a bit more balanced in a few years' time. But I think that could unnerve the markets a little bit. Well can I just say, Miranda, before coming to you, we are recording less than half an hour after Andy Burnham announced that he's going to run, and already the pound has hit a month low. So there have been these suggestions that some recent jitters in the guilt markets have been linked to public statements that Andy Burnham's made. He recently said he was interested in borrowing more outside the fiscal rules to pay for a um uplift in defense spending Miranda . Are we gonna see the country plunge into further economic turmoil with the likelihood of him returning rising? Well I mean we all have to hope not, because even this week so far, the changes in, you know, how much we have to pay to borrow money as a country essentially mean there's a whole bunch of as somebody said to me earlier in the week, there's a whole bunch of nice things we now can't have already. And this has course has been part of Stamerstick this week, has been look what you've already done to what we can do as a government by jittering the markets. But I actually think that, you know, the Labour manif esto was, I think, vague enough to mean that some of these slightly more radical, but not particularly radical, policies could be introduced without too much fuss so long as they are so long as it's clear that they're trying to meet the same objectives laid out in the manifesto I mentioned breaks the manifesto. No, exact exactly. So I actually think there is room there for another leader to come in and deal with what I think is the overriding feeling in the country and the Labour MPs, which is an emotion which is basically impatience. I don't think the country sort of has given a message saying we want a different direction. They want to see the change that was promised, and there's lots of ways you can try and improve that impression and make it real without changing the nature of your government or putting it somewhere else on the left-right spectrum, actually? And I think that's part of the answer. I saw Greg Cook, who's a former political and strategy director of the Labour Party, speaking earlier this afternoon. He's a very, very clever guy and, he made a really good point, which was that people are talking endlessly about, you know, what sort of different program could be offered, but why not focus on the program that was supposed to exist and delivering that one. And I actually think that's the challenge, and that's the kind of essay question before the group around any incoming leader. And interestingly, so Josh Simons, who is going to give up his seat for Andy Burnham, he actually quite early on in this government, he wrote a piece for the FT in which he kind of coined this phrase, we need to govern as insurgents, particularly when we're now facing reform, this insurgent powerful populist voice on the right. So, you know, do you know what I mean? I think it might be more the flavour and the urgency and the delivery that matters and then communicating that to the public rather than changing direction in some way. I actually agree with you and to me one of the key essay questions is who can beat Farage in any leadership contest, the person that has the best answer to that or the best prospect of doing that, I think will win. And that's another reason I think actually Makerfield is a good seat for Burnham to stand for, because you know, given the threat from reform there, if he can win it, then he can start to build this narrative. I am the man to take the fight to Farage's party and and overcome it. It's an incredibly risky move by Burnham. It is. I mean, I think we all always knew that this was what he would have to do and that's what he would have to demonstrate. But of course after last week's set of election results, particularly in the Greater Manchester area, it looks worse and worse and worse as a prospect. And for Labour keeping the Manchester Merrill, te uha potentially because there'll have to be a by election there. Let's just have a quick word on West reating. Anna. So what happened? He resigned, he didn't lead . Did he ever have the eighty one? Is that where he fell short? What what what happened? Well it felt like it all started to fall apart on Tuesday. So Tuesday was when there was the the cabinet meeting. And West reating's allies uh said that he tried to have a chat with Starmer after that and it wasn't actually able to. And then there were rumors that there were going to be some really big cabinet ministers who were going to step down. The name that kept floating around was Home Secretary Shibana Mahmood. That never materialized. She was very adamant that she was actually staying in post . Um and and and in fact only four ministers resigned by the end of it. Well there was a point at about four o'clock where Shibano and me's team were asked, is she about to resign? And they didn't deny it. They said this is pure speculation. This room hasn't been briefed by our team. And then they had to sort of it was two hours later in the evening that they so it's seemed like there was wavering. Yeah, there was wavering. And and anyway, then the following day, there was some quite bullish briefing that West Streeting believed that he had the 81 MPs needed to launch a leadership challenge. But over the course of the day on Thursday , that became a lot more shaky. And what was really interesting was how the the briefing around that changed, some of the allies started saying, you know, things are moving around. And, you know, some people have said to me, you're close to the streeting that it's actually about how you interpret the the people who'd signed up because some of them you know it it wasn't necessarily that they were willing to put their names on a list of people who wanted to uh go now, they were just saying if there was a full slate of candidates and we were running a leadership bid, then yes, we would go for streeting. So basically names, if they existed at any one time, seemed to have dwindled over the course and pests of the day. I know I love that you read out to me a a text from one MP you got that said the problem is and this has this happens on the doorstep too, the bastards lie to you. Um so it looks like maybe there were ministers willing to back streeting in the event of a contest, but didn't want to have to resign in order to precipitate a contest and maybe be left without a cushion job in government if the challenge didn't happen. For now, Wes is out of the government, but he did leave with that parting shot. Uh, Jim, uh, Angela Rayner, curious this week that she found out from HMRC on Tuesday that this was gonna all be wrapped up without any fine. She said that she is um exonerated by the tax authority but she didn't announce it until Thursday. It almost feels as if the HMRC has a a love of high drama as as much as the West minster Bubble, having worked on this for eight months, which seems quite a long time for a pretty straightforward stamp duty issue, they just happen to drop it in, you know, like a little extra sort of confetti on top of everything else to say, uh you're not gonna be fined. As far as we know, she's already paid back the forty thousand pounds that she was owed. Not a small amount though, let's be let's be fair. But the forty thousand pounds is she's doing speeches for ten or twenty thousand pounds at pop at the moment. Angela Raina, 40 grand is not a lot of money. To the average voter, yes, it's more than the annual salary. Um, but Angela Raina is now in a place where she is believes to be herself to be politically purified. I'm not sure voters on the doorstep will have totally forgotten the scandal, fairly or un fairly, because once once the mud sticks to you like that, it's quite hard to shake it off. But you know, she is re-emerged in a position where um it's not inconceivable to see her having a tilt at the big job, but it's probably more likely to see her. She's been talking a lot to Ed Millerband and Andy Burnham over the last few months in secret, which we love. And it's not impossible, therefore, to see her as a sort of power broker in the soft left trying to take control of the Labour Party via Burnham We should dwell on Kirstarmer for a minute. The 11 trade unions that are formally affiliated to Labour coming out with a joint statement saying it is clear to us that Keir Star mer cannot lead the party into the next election. I've also spoken to ministers, a cabinet minister who are loyal to Starmer, don't want to see a contest now, who privately will admit they also don't believe it's possible for him to lead the party into the next general election. And if you work backwards from that, there's obviously got to be some kind of contest. But can I ask you the counterfactual? Yeah. Is that orthodoxy, as I think it is growing, taking root in Westminster, is that right? Is there not an opportunity now for Starmer to try and turn things around with the good economic data that came out on Thursday, the good NHS waiting list data that that came out later in the day. Well, if it was a runoff between Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, we actually think that he would stay in post, don't we? Because there's been quite a lot of polling data that shows that, particularly from Labour List, which has a survey of Labour members, as you would imagine, uh from its name. And uh, you know, so that there is a sort of sense in which the diehard Starmer loyalists might still be telling him that there's a way for him to turn this around. I think you're right about that intervention from the unions because the point about that statement was they were saying out loud what everybody says in private in the Labour Party, which is, you know, even those who think he's sort of trying his best and that they should stick with him for now. They think it has to be different at the election. So the question then working backwards as you said is when is the right time to switch? Well I think one of the issues is whether they're doing this too early. Because if you actually switched to a new leader in the run-up to an election, giving them some time to bed in, but before they were perhaps tainted with dis the disappointment about this government, might be wiser than to go now where there's still time for somebody to try and fail and try and fail and then face the electorate. And in a sense it could turn into a bit of a kind of rishi-sunak syndrome, which, you know, an incoming leader would not want to be the rishisunak of the Labour Party and, you know, be humili ated by the electorate at the at the next election. I mean we saw that last time um when a a Andy Burnham tried to launch a sort of l rival leadership thing around around party conference last year. And I think, you know, there will be people, and there's some people I've already spoken to who say that including in the Labour Party who were a bit more on the fence this week, say, you know, he's he's shown some mettle this week. Even with with all of that speculation rife, even with so many people saying, you know, you should you should stand down, he said, Well, look, who has the numbers? If someone comes and they have the numbers, they can launch a they can launch a rival leadership contest and and no one came forward. I don't think it will last, and I do broadly think this has been an extremely damaging episode on top of months of damaging episodes for Star mer, but I do think that that that he does come out of this looking you know a little bit stronger. You can't run a government from a bunker though. So if they're now in a defensive bunker, you know, I mean am I the only person sitting around this table who's Yeah, and and actually the public liked him as a person. So it's very interesting your point, Anna, because I think you're right. I think there will be actually sympathy for Starmer just because nobody likes him But nothing more lethal than sympathy. No, that's right. That's right. And also it's painful. You can't really make progress on all the policy questions that need to be tackled. Jim, final word to you on this. Do you feel that Starmer is already a lame duck? You know, the civil service, are we going to see things grind to a halt as they foot drag, wondering whether it's worth implementing any policy that his successor might decide to unpick. And what about, you know, the big UK EU summit coming up this summer? Is Brussels really gonna want to negotiate with a guy who looks like he could be on his last legs? I think there's a real sense of paralysis in you. We haven't mentioned the King's speech, which was meant to be the big set piece replay this week with 37 bills showing that Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, had vision and ideas whether or not you'd like these bills, you know, that there are some plans. Those plans are now sort of hovering in in midair like one of those cartoons. We don't really know whether they're gonna land uh or whether somebody else is gonna come along and and and redo all the plans. And you're right, you know, European negotiations this summer. The European counterparts are going to know that the man in the room may not be there six months later. And then there are going to be things, there's been a bit of a sort of debate within Whitehall over the last couple of days with some loyalist ministers saying you know we'd have to have a perder if there's a leadership contest that goes on for a couple of months. It seems that's a little bit disputed. I think you spoke to the SME spirit. My um experts and secret squirrels in uh in the civil service confirm that that is not the case. There's not a formal perder, but this question of being a lame duck, there's a de facto one, right? Sure. And I think the other point is that you know, the electorate don't particularly like politicians or the political classes generally, but they probably like uh Westminster even less when it's squabbling and fighting among themselves. And what's really interesting is that one of the arguments the loyalist ministers have been making is that, you know, have you noticed guilt yields are hitting fresh highs? There's a whiff of Liz truss in the air. And they're saying this to try and kill off, well they were saying saying it's to try and kill off Wes Streeting while he was still a cont ender, but I don't think they realized how much the public could be hearing this and hearing oh maybe the Starmer government has got a bit of a whiff of Liz Truss about it . Let's move to talk about Nigel Farage. He hasn't escaped the limelight this week, Anna, has he, despite the crisis engulfing Kirstarmer's leadership. Um tell us first about what's happened regarding the latest on this five million pound personal gift that he was given from Thai-based crypto investor Christopher Harborn in 2024? Yes, so he was given the gift, as you say, in 2024 before the general election, and he didn't register it in his MP's register of interests. So, first of all, yesterday the parliamentary commissioner announced that he was opening an investigation into whether he'd broken the rules by not registering that gift. In extremists, that could lead to Farage potentially being suspended from the House. And then if he was suspended for 10 days, there could be a by-election in his seat. But there's been a fresh revelation from Sky that mere weeks after receiving this five million pound gift, Nigel Farage bought uh a £1.4 million house in cash. Um, and this is crucial because Farage's defense or explanation for the gift that he received in a telegraph piece after it was revealed by The Guardian was that it was to pay for his security for a lifetime. And he's maintained that now for weeks, that Christopher Harborn gave him this money to pay for him to remain safe and secure for his lifetime. And Jim, after this Sky Scoop that Anna talked about, about this extraordinary purchase of what sounds like quite a big house for 1.£4 million in cash uh being purchased. He then gave an interview to the son, say actually this was a gift from K Christopher Harborn, not for his personal security, as he'd previously maintained , but rather a reward for twenty-seven years of campaigning for Brexit. Absolutely. And he basically said that the money wasn't sort of linked to politics at all. It was just sort of a cash gift from a friend, but campaigning for Brexit obviously is political. And you know, um it's kind of astonishing to me that we've all just woken up to the reality that if you give a huge amount of money to a politician, more than twelve months before they get elected, that's somehow okay. There's no recourse or follow through. But even the fact that the money was received within twelve months of him standing for parliament, and therefore he might have broken a parliamentary rule about declarations. That to me doesn't seem like up to the level of problematicness that this is. What is the potential benefit that the crypto industry and Christopher Harborn might have had from this huge amount of money going to this hugely popular politician who was clearly about to get elected and running Reform UK. Well, within a few months of the last general election, reform has come up with a whole draft bill for the crypto industry with a cut and stamp duty from twenty four to ten percent, deregulation, loads of things that would be advantageous to that industry. We should just add that Farage also insisted on Thursday that, Harborne's gift had no bearing on his decision to stand as an MP in the 2024 election, adding, I can't be bought by anybody. Reform also claimed that the purchase of this house was already in train when the gift was given, that he'd already passed checks on that he had the requisite funding to buy it. And also on the point of the crypto bill, Reform UK says it's a total coincidence that they took money from the crypto industry and have got draft regulation that will really help the crypto industry. It's just a coincidence. Miranda, is this going to dent forage or is he just going to remain Tefl on? Well this is what's so interesting about it isn't it because he has always operated sort of on some sort of understanding that different rules apply to him than to the rest of politics. And I think it'll be very interesting to see how much of this actually cuts through and and starts to damage them. It's true that there are sort of quite measurable segments of the electorate that do care about probity and you know even ministerial behaviour and public life is part of the thing that's the thing that did for Boris Johnson's administration uh before the the last election as well and the the sort of that carried on the taint of it carried on and did for Sunak as well. But you know there is a problem which is that we live in a social media age where information is not a kind of shared baseline of political debate anymore and all information becomes partisan and so I just wonder actually it,'s it's such an extraordinary amount of money. And we know from the Angela Rayner tax problems that the public do not like large property transactions that are not done absolutely by the book. I wonder, but I think it 's absolutely the case that there are ways in which a populist party can actually sort of just deflect. And also, you know, the the sad fact is is that the public think that politics is like this. We all know that it isn't and that this is extraordinary and that all the things are wrong with it that Jim has outlined. But I just wonder can I just come to both Anna and Jim for a very quick thought on whether you think this will dent for age before we start to talk about their programme for government. Well yeah, I mean interestingly, just half an hour ago, not long after this story broke, I got a text from someone who's known him for for decades saying I think this will do for him. Um but interesting but I am skeptical and I think , you know, it's it's fascinating that Zack Polansky, the Green Leader, was so severely dented in his popularity almost immediately after he made some extremely ill-judged comments about the terrorist attack in Gold as Green, and also there were some anti-Semitism concerns in the party that were swirling. Nigel Farage seems to manage to sort of bat all of this stuff away. And I think I wonder whether there's a kind of difference in the expectations of the types of people who vote for those kinds of parties. Well that Zach Polansky's also had his own little local difficulty with taxation as well, hasn't he, in terms of council taxes? Yeah. He maybe should have been paying. So you know there That's why I wonder if Farage can escape because many of reform's voters, and it does look like one of Farage's talents is reaching people who um haven't bothered to vote previously or in many years who might already think that politicians are in it for themselves and and view him as being on the same plane as others. So here is what I think the difference is Anna with the the Zach Plansky thing, which I think it's very clear for people to see there was a situation where a terrorism suspect was being taken down roughly by the police, and his instinct was to have sympathy towards the terrorist being brought down. It's just really easy for people to see it and understand it. The problem with money in politics is it's a very complicated thing. You have money coming to political parties, you have money coming into uh constituency offices or like MPs to run MPs offices, and you have political donations. And what's weird about the Farage money is that we all know that that five million was a gift. It was very much out of the ordinary. But I think it's quite hard for the the typical voter to differentiate between these different flows of cash. I do wonder if buying a house in cash of that value breaks through to people, most people are either renting or you know have mortgage or they've had to pay off a mortgage over a very long time period of decades. What's so interesting though, also, Lucy, isn't it, that in this sort of moment where we know a lot of voting at the next general election is going to be negatively motivated tactical voting, i.e., who do I most want to block and who's my vehicle party for doing that? I saw some new polling today showing that 61% of the people who voted for Clyde in the Welsh elections were doing so to block reform. That was their number one motivation. So in a sense, these things that are sort of negative markers on a party, even though it might not dent their own support, it might have the effect of motivating an anti vote in a stronger way. I think that's think that's right. Could could galvanize the other parties , uh particularly on the more progressive left. Let's just turn briefly. The FT this week has run a fantastic four part series on what a reform government would look like. It's been a long time in the making. Anna, you've led this series, and we will link to it in the show notes. One of your pieces uh centers on what a reform government would do. Take us through the highlights there. So essentially, I think that the policy platform as it currently stands, and it's not fully fleshed out, I should say, is a lot more radical, I think, than some people might might be aware of. There are very, very clear parallels to the Trump 2.0 kind of playbook in the U S, ranging from ripping up renewables contracts and removing all subsidies for renewable companies, deporting up to two million people by our calculations at the FT, a huge culling of the civil service, and major deregulation of the crypto industry, which is relevant to what we were talking about before, as well as c drill baby drill and the oil and gas sector. Then what what's quite interesting is there are key areas where their their p policy making is either massively in flux or there's tensions, right? There's some some some areas where they don't agree. Yeah, yeah. So exactly. So there are tensions at the top of the party. And or it's in flux. They've sort of massively paired it back um because they realize that it's just not an area where they were they were winning votes. And I think the economy is one of them. That Farage had some and and reform had some very kind of big bold claims and pledges that it had previously made about slashing and removing inheritance tax, slashing the personal allowance, which would be extremely costly. A lot of these things, potentially getting rid of the OBR, a lot of these things have been removed, uh, watered down , partly at the behest of the new Treasury spokesperson, Robert Jenrick, but as the party sort of tries to become more palatable and focus on the bread and butter big social things that think they think that that will win them votes. You had that good example of the tracks, didn't you? Yes, so both Nigel Farage and Richard Tys have publicly said that they're gonna rip up all exist ing contracts that renewables companies have signed with this Labour government and they've said that publicly many times. But we were told that in a meeting between Richard Tice, who's the sort of business spokesperson , and uh Drax, he basically said, look, we're not really gonna do that and it's it's not gonna happen. Although he didn't say that publicly. So it again, I think it just shows that there's a kind of public fac ing presentation that they're making, and then there's kind of backdoor deals and and wrangling that's going on behind the scenes that shows that their policy platform isn't really fully ironed out at all. And Jim, you've also been behind part of this brilliant series. One of the pieces was on the court of King Farage , picking out the key advisors, MPs, donors around him. What can we learn about him and the party from that cast of characters? Some of them are quite unconventional political figures Somewhere Swiss you know, Montenegro . Come on, that's the best of the whole story. Montenegro. And I believe he's also had a conviction for fraud, Anna, correct? Yeah, for where fraud. So he's an fascinating, interesting character. Uh Aaron Banks, of course, who gave a gigantic donation to the to the Brexit campaign as a bit of a rough diamond kind of character, I would say, even to his friends. Can I tell you a uh a confession time actually appear in his memoir Former colleague Kieran Stacey took a taxi all the way from London to his country estate in Gloucestershire to interview him. So he he obviously has no grasp of how the FT expenses system works. Um and then you you've just got this weird mix, haven't you, of sort of I guess failed Tory politicians. None of them were finished their careers in huge success. Maybe that's a bit unfair. Maybe maybe all Tories are failed Tories a as of twenty twenty-six. Um but you've got these sort of interesting Tories there, then just a just a sort of s curious collection of people. But what they do share, and they don't agree on absolutely everything, but the thing that connects them, I suppose, and this is also true with what Anna was saying in terms of the the policy piece we did, is that it's very easy to think about Nigel Farage from the way he appears on TV, you know, walking across the cliffs of Dover with a Labrador or whatever the dog is in a flat cap, to sort of think of him as a kind of essence of traditional Englishism. If you're kind of small C conservative, but there's a much sharper edge to its politics, which always probably more on balance to MAGO and the American right than it does to old English conservatism. Now there is, as we're seeing, there is a market for this for people who thought that, you know, David Cameron was a little bit too wet and Theresa May was a pinko. No, if you like your approach to immigration and tax and everything else to be really, really right wing, well that's that's what they're offering and that's that's what these people will share in terms of their philosophy. Can I just fact check Anna does Farage have a dog? I don't know if it's just a figurative dog rather than a literal dog. But he does have a dog. He legit he literally released a video on social media himself with one or two dogs and he's flat cat and he just looks the quintessential English country guy. It was really, really interesting that piece. But isn't there one thing that pulls all those disparate groups of people around him together, which is that they all think for whatever reason that the Tory party is no longer the vehicle for what they want to achieve in politics. So you can say, yeah, but they're fault-failed Tories, but there's a lot of the public who are with them, right? And all those people who've got a particular right-wing agenda, that's what unites them, and we don't quite yet know whether they're right or wrong. Well, we've just got time left for political fix stock picks. Miranda, who are you buying or selling this week? I am buying the uh backbench Labour MP for Bradford, Nasha . She was granted what's seen as a sort of privilege in Westminster of making the loyal address which, is sort of welcomes the King's speech. And it's quite a formal speech, but the tradition is it's kind of jokey, and also you talk about your constituency. It's not a political speech in the normal sense. And she gave an absolutely barnstorming performance, which I recommend to everyone. It was funny and moving. And she does have the most extraordinary life story and background. And she was she was great on Bradford's curry houses. It made me want to get a train up there. I don't have it. struggles. I I had too much Yeah, no, that's right, absolutely. I mean she she know she and her mother were both at the re on the receiving end of appalling kind of domestic abuse and violence and she became a campaigner because of her mother. She has written a autobiography about that struggle. But it was a really fantastic speech, which I recommend actually for anyone who's got twenty minutes to sp im, who are you buying or selling? So I'm selling Andy Burnham. And the reason why is because we've had this roller coaster all week where one minute, oh my God, all the momentum's behind West Streeting. And then suddenly the momentum's behind Starmer. And then suddenly, oh my God, Ed Millerbands could be the guy. And as of this moment in time recording this podcast , everyone feels that Andy Burnham has the huge momentum, which is always a good time to think about the value of a stock. And I am looking at Make a Field and precisely what happened in the local elections last week. And the truth is that reform won all of the uh seven wards there. They took 50% of the vote, Labour won 26% of the vote, and D. Burnham is making a massive bet that he can defy political gravity. I'm not even convinced that he'll get through the NEC. I think on balance the NEC probably will let him be the candidate for Make or Fails. My gut tells me he's in for a humiliating disaster . Wow. Anna. I'm gonna buy uh deputy leader of the Labour Party, Lucy Powell. I think she's played a pretty good game this week. She was one of the first people out of the door kind of defending um this government, defending Keir Star mer. She's also a very key Andy Burnham ally. They've been friends for a long time, and I'm sure whatever happened going down the line, she'll be with him along the way. And I think as of this moment, there's not been anyone announced to replace a health secretary West Streeting and I think she could potentially um be in for that role and if not that role in another ministerial position. How about you, Lisi ? I'm buying Al Ken's. Action Man. Action Man. All six foot five of him. He is a defense minister. He is uh a former special forces commander, has an incredibly distinguished military career . I think he's the only MP ever to have won a military cross. And he beat Andy Burnham in a in an arm wrestle. And he beat Andy Burnham in an arm wrestle. He ascended Everest in an a rapid seven day ascent last year. And um he's obviously been having enormous fun on social media just tweeting these cryptic photos of sunrises with messages like good morning world. He published a thousand-word essay in the New Statesman, obviously the Labour Bible, setting out his prospectus for how Labour could win again. And even those in the Labour Party think, look, come on, this is a bit ridiculous. This guy who's only been an MP for two years could take over as Prime Minister, think you know he is potentially setting himself up well to become the next Labour Defence Secretary under a new administration. Well that's all we've got time for. Miranda, Jim, Anna, thanks for joining. Thanks, Lacy. Thanks, Lucy . And thanks for listening. There are links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They're articles we've made free for political fix listeners. There's also a link there to Stephen's award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You'll get 30 days free. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Nisha Patel. Manuela Saragosa is the executive Producer. Original Music and Sound Engineering by Breen Turner. The broadcast engineers are Andrew Georgardis and Bianca Wakeman. Cheryl Bramley is the FT's Global Head of Audio. We'll meet again here next week .