Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[mongers]

Reform has picked up Suella. Good luck with that?

Like, what's the point?

Collect all the incompetents?

But what does that leave the Tories with?

The weird?

[Legbiter]

Reform has picked up Suella. Good luck with that?

Like, what's the point?

I dunno. Care home for failed Tories? 

[Jacob]

It reminds me a bit of the first act of the BC Conservative Party in BC. I don't know if it'll follow the same trajectory though.

[Sheilbh]

Reform has picked up Suella. Good luck with that?

*Pikachu surprised face*

On the one hand the party that is losing MPs is probably not doing well - on the other hand I'm really not sure that losing some of the least popular and most divisive figures of the last few governments hurts them and I'm not really sure that helps Reform.

I'd also note that Farage has never really been very good at working with a wider party - and Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have a history of being spectacularly disloyal. So that may be an interesting dynamic.

Separately Badenoch's personal approval ratings and the Tories ratings have improved (since party conference when she did well and Jenrick flopped, ending the leadership speculation). I think she has the right strategy and it is showing. It's only one poll but one out today that showed them just one point behind Reform - and I'd add that Reform having plateaued at about 30% have now fallen back to about 25%.

Struck again at just how strident and personal Tory comms are on this. I fully get that politics is a contact sport - but a little uncomfortable with the line about her "mental health" and being "clearly very happy". I think they have now retracted - but not nice:


Meanwhile in Labour think there's a lot to this piece in the Times:

Keir Starmer can block Andy Burnham but can't save his premiership
The prime minister's move lays bare a leadership increasingly at odds with its party, fearful of voters and running out of time
Patrick Maguire, Chief Political Commentator
Sunday January 25 2026, 7.45pm, The Times

It looks weak because he is weak and the choice was between different expressions of weakness. There was no good option for Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday because good options ceased to present themselves to his government a long time ago. He did what he could do, what he wanted to do, and used the remnants of his power over the Labour Party to block Andy Burnham from returning to Westminster as MP for Gorton & Denton.

He was strong enough to do that and only that. The prime minister and Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, remain in control of Labour's internal bureaucracy. Their steamroller veto of Burnham's candidacy by eight votes to Lucy Powell's desultory one proves that much. They are increasingly at odds with its prevailing culture, inspire resentment among many of its people and have shrunk its electorate in the country — and so it is doubtful that they are strong enough to weather the consequences.

That this experimental era in Labour politics probably wasn't going to end well was already obvious. If Burnham had been allowed to stand, he might have hastened that end with a challenge to Starmer's leadership within a short few months. They have stopped him from doing that — for now, at least — but in doing so have started another debate they lack either the political vocabulary or authority to win. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary and chairwoman of Labour's ruling national executive committee, saw this coming. Uneasy, she made sure to shield herself from what is to come by exercising her right to abstain and lavishing Burnham with praise on the BBC.
Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham speaking at the Labour Party conference.

Her colleagues will not be so lucky. Latent but deep resentment over the Starmer-McSweeney school of political management is what unites every faction of the Labour Party beyond that which is employed by Downing Street or the microscopic one whose members count the prime minister as a personal friend. The Burnham veto is the purest, pithiest expression of everything the party hates about its leadership: autocratic, unilateral, narrowly self-interested. You don't have to want Burnham to be prime minister to think that. Starmer's critics will say that Downing Street has thrown Nigel Farage an eighth MP to buy themselves another few months in charge. Those critics are right.

The prime minister was also right, in his impassioned speech to the officers of the Labour NEC, to highlight the risk of the mayoral by-election in Greater Manchester that would have followed Burnham's election to parliament. Starmer said it would cost his party money it does not have at a time it can ill afford to be outspent "ten-to-one" by Reform UK, whose return on that investment would be one of the most powerful offices in England.

If you want a more elevated explanation than self-preservation, there is no shame in going along with that, but what, exactly, does it amount to? Under my leadership, Starmer was admitting, this party is too broke and too unpopular to risk asking the voters of Greater Manchester — Greater Manchester! — for a mandate. The other half of the No 10 defence is the accurate observation that the public hate political psychodrama and punish those who create it. What is most striking is that they have conceded, albeit indirectly, that the same public hates the prime minister most of all.

That much will be revealed when the Gorton by-election comes. Only Burnham could have won it for Labour. Starmer's critics now fear the party will not only lose it, but forfeit their claim to challenge Reform entirely, as was the case in Caerphilly last October when Plaid Cymru galvanised progressive opposition to both the government and Farage. This time it is Zack Polanski's insurgent Greens who stand to benefit. "A Reform win would be terrible," said a sometime adviser to the leadership. "But a Green win would be existential." Already imperilled by one unwinnable test of his electoral appeal in May, Starmer has chosen to contrive another in February.

It will deplete the dwindling reserves of goodwill in a parliamentary party with no appetite to take political pain on behalf of its leader: just listen to what they're saying about reforms to special educational needs provision. It puts Starmer at odds with the deputy leader of the Labour Party, dozens of his MPs, several trade unions, Ed Miliband, Sir Sadiq Khan, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting, whose own criticisms of the leadership's imperious style now sound a little more resonant.

It radicalises MPs who neither know nor like Burnham but know they do not like Starmer's style of leadership. It vindicates those already inclined to think the worst of the prime minister and alienates at least some of those who, against their better judgement, had elected to give him the benefit of the doubt for a little while longer. It makes a martyr of Burnham, rather than the nuisance he might have been. It surely shortens Labour's wait for this premiership to end.

And apropos of nothing (I think the three comparisons from the 1979-83 parliament are quite interesting.)


But the main thing is the correct faction of the Labour Party are maintaining control of the party bureaucracy.

Edit: I'd add two points - one made by Dan Hodges who I often disagree with but think is correct on this: 'The strategic problem Reform now have is this. Are they genuinely going to convince people a party led by Kemi Badenoch are a group of wet, effete, liberals. Or are people going to think "if this lot are even further Right than Kemi, then there's something a bit odd about them".'

The other is that even Polly Toynbee is calling for Starmer to go which is a real ravens leaving the tower. She wrote the article I think Tamas posted earlier this year about how the government's actually done lots of good stuff and just need to talk about it more.

[Richard Hakluyt]

That picture of Braverman snuggling up to Farage though 

They clearly couldn't care less about the nation's mental health 

[Richard Hakluyt]

Another incremental improvement by the current government :

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/jan/27/leaseholders-england-wales-ground-rent-cap-250-a-year

Not sure how many leaseholders were being ripped off by the old system; but this is a worthwhile improvement which will help them a lot at no cost to the public purse.