NEWS VS POLITICS
Harold Macmillan was a wise old bird. His reply to a question about what he feared most: “Events, dear boy, events” neatly encapsulates how easy it is for politics to be knocked off course by news.
Some days you set out to explain proposed NHS structural changes, you can instead get sandbagged by “news”:
“I was in the studio when the news of Trump bombing Fordo came through, so the NHS 10-year plan was right out the window.”
Thus, “the Grid” may dictate that Minister X is going out to talk about Policy Y on Outlet Z today, but then there’s the news. Meanwhile “the news” becomes ever more synthetic and irrelevant to the lives and interests of 99.6% of the general public, who can no longer be relied upon to draw round the tele at 6pm to listen to a curated selection of happenings.
Macmillan’s quotation made me think about a recording of a television interview of Harold Macmillan in 1957 that I was recently watching (A-level Modern British History!) Struggling to make Macmillan take him seriously, a frustrated Reginald Bosanquet interjects: “Sir, as time is short, could we question you on a domestic matter which I think is uppermost in our minds at the moment?”
Macmillan visibly winces: “If you must!”
Bosanquet was introducing a less subservient style at the time, but this now looks and feels like a bygone age of deference. However, in our era of fully scripted exchanges and politicians who have all been on the same media training courses (“ignore the question and just get your messages out”) this exchange and many others from the 1950s and 1960s deliver remarkable and now-forgotten value: actual answers, concisely provided, to questions the audience may actually be interested in.
This last week has seen its fair share of “news”: the fallout from aforementioned US bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iran-Israel ceasefire, the damp squib of the NATO meeting, even Starmer’s climbdown over the proposed welfare cuts in the face of 100+ Labour backbenchers opposition gets submerged by Anna Wintour’s semi-retirement from Vogue, Blaise Metreweli’s appointment at SIS (great name) and random rappers’ anti-Semitism at Glasto. But instead… here’s some politics!
REFORM UK
The first IPSOS-MORI voting intentions poll since last year’s General Election. (1,180 British adults polled in the first week of June 2025, just before the announcement of the Spending Review) delivers a shocking move in potential electoral fortunes:
Reform on 34% and 9% HIGHER THAN LABOUR!
Conservatives on 15% THE LOWEST EVER RECORDED.
Party apparatchiks are probably taking a lie-down in a darkened room while issuing no hint of a plan from either Labour or Conservatives. More immigration chat? Reduce income taxes? Commit to public service delivery reform? Nothing “cuts through” the determined and really grumpy disillusionment with politics, politicians and government. The Great British Public’s reaction? Shake it all up, sling the lot out and put in a maverick who will kick everyone hard.
YouGov’s prediction of this scale of vote change suggests an election polling these sort of numbers would result in:
– Reform on 271 seats (up 266 seats)
– Labour on 178 (down 233)
– Lib Dems on 81 seats (up 9)
– Tories on just 46 seats (down 75).
Not an absolute REFORM majority but enough to command a majority over any potential Lab-LibDem coalition. The Tories virtually ended.
Recent REFORM policy announcements have been underwhelming Last week’s idea was the “Britannia Card” – a £250,000 payment for non-doms to avoid UK taxes on overseas income – designed but unlikely to slow the stream of millionaires leaving the country since Rachel Reeves’ (fairly disastrous) tax changes last year. One senses the Britannia Card is not really going to “move the needle” very much at all. Rod Stewart’s pre-Glasto call to “give Nigel Farage a chance” may possibly have had more impact (although Nigel’s social media presence does him no harm with Gen Z although it’s a bit cringe for Gen 𝛂…
The critical drivers of REFORM’s rise are all DISSATISFACTION. In pushing the Britannia Card which literally has a target demographic of 100s in the W8/W11 postcodes, the Reformers are reckoning that at this stage in the election cycle and probably with four years to go (despite Starmer’s current travails) they should not produce actual policy, but just lambast existing politicians for their inadequacy and irrelevance. They have a point!
Is a Farage premiership a foregone conclusion, or even a reasonable bet? Not at all. Farage has shown himself to be a relatively poor team-builder, not entirely fascinated by policy nitty-gritty and subject to some pretty poor HR blow-ups, just one of which could blow him, and by extension his one-man-party out of the water.
What can not be overestimated, however, is the raging fury of the British public at the patent inadequacy of the current generation of UK politicians of every party. Those winds, they’re a-blowin’.
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