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Good morning. I had a lovely evening meeting some of you at the first Inside Politics quiz. (Hopefully for the next one we’ll have a proper music round and I will try to make some of the questions less obscure.) Scroll down to see the winners! We’ll be sharing some of the rounds and more from the evening in a bonus Inside Politics newsletter on Saturday.
Some thoughts on the politics of competence sparked by Robert Shrimsley’s column.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Tory pains
The big picture story of this parliament, I think, is that it has been a reminder that winning over ‘‘valence voters” (voters who largely prioritise the competence and effectiveness of the parties they choose between) matters a lot more than winning over “values voters” (voters who primarily decide how to vote based on their perception of a party’s principles and positions).
In part that’s because, visibly, in the UK there are many more valence voters up for grabs than values voters. Keir Starmer’s Labour party has gone from being shellacked in by-elections and local elections when the Conservative government’s record was favourably perceived, to winning stunning victories now that the Tories are poorly perceived.
But more broadly, in the end, everyone is a valence voter. As Robert says, Rishi Sunak’s rightwing critics are not entirely wrong to say that part of their problem is that their party is not trusted on immigration:
The public does not believe the Conservatives have a grip on the issue. But a more careful scrutiny of polling data tells the larger tale that the public doesn’t believe the government has a grip on anything.
Due to a series of decisions made under both Boris Johnson and Sunak, the Conservative party has basically created a situation where the only voters who think the government has a draconian border policy are liberals, who don’t like it. Everyone who might actually support such a policy just thinks they are a bit inept. It doesn’t matter at all that these same voters also think that the Conservative party would like to have a tough policy on legal and illegal migration, because they all think that the Tory party is incapable of delivering that, or anything really.
This has also limited the government’s ability to divide the Labour coalition. Look at the political difficulties Keir Starmer has had, and in many ways is continuing to have, over Labour’s position on the Israel-Hamas war. As Kiran Stacey and Aletha Adu report in the Guardian, concern about the political price Labour may pay for that goes right to the top of the party:
Keir Starmer’s office has begun polling British Muslim voters amid growing concern in senior Labour ranks about the damage done to their core vote by the row over the party’s position on the Middle East.
Labour sources have told the Guardian that the party is running polls and holding focus groups around the country after senior officials became concerned they were losing support among one of their staunchest bases of support.
Compare and contrast that with the essentially non-existent pressure to toughen up Labour’s opposition to the Rwanda asylum scheme. The biggest reason for that, I think, is that because essentially nobody actually believes the government’s immigration policies can work, there is no political pressure on Labour from liberal voters to oppose them more aggressively. Nor is there an electoral tariff for opposing them from restrictionist voters.
Robert is right, I think, to say that the best way the Conservative party could turn itself round is just to focus on governing well — to demonstrate its competence and therefore prove that it can get a grip on something. But visibly too much of the party wants the sugar high of big and exciting moves, whether it is yet more rhetorical heat on immigration or further tax cuts in this parliament’s remaining fiscal events.
Now try this
I am approximately a thousand years behind the times on this one, but, I have just started reading Mick Herron’s Slow Horses on the bus to work. Thus far I’m enjoying it a great deal, though I have found it sufficiently gripping that I had to sheepishly double back on myself having overshot my changed connection at Angel.
Drumroll please . . .
Congratulations to the “Unpopular Front”, who came out top in last night’s pub quiz.
