Transcript: Labour braces for ballot box bloodbath

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Labour braces for ballot box bloodbath’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
There’s just one week to go before voters across the UK give their verdict on Keir Starmer’s government in their biggest electoral test since 2024. Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. For Labour, it’s set to be a bloodbath at the ballot box after another agonising week for the PM.

The Tories too are braced for a hammering. So, with nationalist parties on track for gains and Reform and the Greens also set to be celebrating next week, what kind of fallout awaits Starmer? I’m joined in the studio by my FT colleagues, Miranda Green, our deputy opinion editor. Hello, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
The UK chief political commentator, Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hey, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And political columnist and writer of the Inside Politics newsletter, Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
So, guys, Starmer has limped to the finish line of this parliamentary session, but it’s been another pretty gruesome week for the prime minister. Robert, he’s faced more testimonies at the Foreign Affairs Committee around the appointment of Peter Mandelson. And also, this debate and vote on whether to refer him to a sleaze inquiry. He won that vote, but a bit of a hollow victory.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, one of the reasons he won that vote on whether he should face the kind of inquiry that Boris Johnson faced over Partygate with the incredibly important and powerful privileges committee.

He won it by whipping his MPs to support him, and that’s not a good look, because this is the kind of thing that is meant to be a free vote where MPs are stepping above party issues to decide whether one of their number has broken the rule. So, he won it, it’s what you do in his position, but it wasn’t great for him.

I think we sort of reached the point where we’re just heaping dignities on indignants. It doesn’t really matter anymore. Is any one of these things gonna be a killer blow? The answer is any of them could be a killer blow. It’s just what’s the one that breaks the resolve of everybody in the party. And I think what everyone else is waiting for is the results of these elections in May in Scotland, Wales, and England, and just how awful they are.

And there is this sense, I was talking to a minister a couple days ago about this, and they were saying, you know, everybody thinks they know what’s coming, everybody thinks it’s priced in, but when the actual wave of emotion hits you, when you see these councils falling, you know, oh my God, we’ve lost X.

That it can be a totally different thing. So, we’re in a slightly phoney period for a week where it could go either way there. You can construct an argument for why Keir Starmer will get through these elections, do other things, move on, and we’ll just be in the prolonged period of political paralysis, or that the dam could burst, and we’re just waiting on that now.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, I’ve been struck just how hard Starmer had to activate the emergency lever this week, not just with the whipping operation, but himself pleading with the weekly meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on the eve of that vote, getting cabinet loyalists to ring and text round colleagues, even wheeling out Gordon Brown at this early stage.

It does suggest that if things go as badly next week, as the poll suggests they will do for Labour, he’s already sort of spent a lot of political capital, and while people have been talking about the ability for him to potentially host a reshuffle as a final roll of the dice, there seems to be a sort of counter-narrative that’s firming up, that he’s even too weak to do that. What’s your take?

Miranda Green
Well, that’s so interesting, isn’t it? Because, you know, a reshuffle can go wrong, and it’s supposed to be a demonstration. I mean, obviously in an ideal world, it’s about merit having the right people in the cabinet, but pushing that aside, in terms of the politics of it, it’s supposed to demonstrate that you have the patronage.

And so, even if you’ve lost respect with some of your MPs, for whatever reason, fairly or unfairly, you’re still the person who makes or breaks careers in the party and government. If you’re actually so weakened that you end up doing some sort of botched reshuffle, for example, which, you know, we have seen examples of in the past, does that help your authority?

So, I’m quite interested in, you know, the pre-briefing around this reshuffle possibility and whether they sort of backtrack from the idea that it will be a kind of, you know, macho reassertion of Starmer’s authority, because you can’t actually do that if it sort of ebbed away too much. On the other hand, the mood seems to be sort of slightly despairing rather than being for blood. But as Robert says, the psychology of a huge electoral defeat can be overwhelming and it can change the mood overnight.

Robert Shrimsley
It’s very interesting. I remember the post 2017 election of Theresa May, you know, she just had this actually disastrous election. She’d called a snap vote, it had gone wrong, and she was suddenly unable to do the reshuffle that she wanted to do. It was very clear in advance. She was going to sack Philip Hammond as chancellor, suddenly she couldn’t do it. And in fact, what was built as the big reshuffle turned out to be an absolute demonstration of her impotence.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, who could he safely sack from the cabinet to make room for fresh talent, or at least, you know, binding enemies or potential enemies?

Stephen Bush
Well, I think the Theresa May reshuffle in 2017 is, I think, a really useful historical comparison, right? So, May was actually quite good at doing reshuffles including those quite elegant ones in the second half of her time when she was very weak, and they were these kind of Sudoku puzzles, and the sort of Sudoku puzzle for Keir Starmer is that there are three factions in the Parliamentary Party you have to have on side to have a parliamentary majority.

The sort of revisionist Blairite modernising wing, the traditional old right, and the middle of the party/the soft left, right? Those are the three factions which together make up the parliamentary majority. And after the last reshuffle, there are essentially two more Blairites around the cabinet table than there should be.

I don’t mean that from a competence perspective. I just mean the whole of the party feeling represented, you got to get rid of two. Now, what Theresa May did is she effectively sacrificed Damian Green’s full cabinetry because he was a close ally and friend of hers. I ultimately, when you’re an embattled prime minister, what do you do, you dismember one of your friends. And that would, if you are Keir, you . . . 

Miranda Green
Not literally.

Stephen Bush
No, no, not literally, but if you were Keir, then that would suggest good night, Steve Reed. You know, he was big in Labour together. They’ve been together a long time. And that, of course, is literally like Angela Rayner’s old job because the whole point of doing a reshuffle would be to find a slot for Angela Rayner, to find a permanent role for Lucy Powell.

And then, of course, you, this being a cabinet reshuffle, you’re also then thinking about regional balance and gender balance. So I would then suggest the other person to be worried would be Peter Kyle, because he’s a man, he’s from the south, he represents a southern seat, and he’s a Blairite, and so I kind of feel them, you know, through no fault of his own, he’s the obvious out of the air option, but Keir hates reshuffles, right?

One of the reasons why you have a lot of people in there who have these kind of still these slightly weird non-jobs is because he doesn’t like sacking people. He had to be really talked in to the last reshuffle, which of course made his position much worse. So I think there’s still a chance that he just decides he doesn’t want to do it, even before the fact that if you get it remotely wrong and someone, instead of going ‘Oh, you know, fine officer of the backbenches goes, I’m going to do a big statement about how useless you are’, which, you know, you can’t predict will happen until you do it. I think there’s quite a good chance he’ll just go ‘No, it’s not worth the candle’.

Robert Shrimsley
I think the added problem, Stephens explained all of the sort of intraparty political nuances, but the other thing is, given the circumstances in which a reshuffle like this would be held, you have to use it to be saying ‘We’ve got things wrong. I’m doing something different’.

If you think back to the big reshuffle he did in opposition where he got rid of his, I think it was after the heart he got rid of his big friends like Anneliese Dodds who was shadow chancellor and he demoted Nick Symonds. There was a point there which I’m bringing in more experienced people. I’m pushing us back more towards the political centre and away from my own rough base. There was an argument there. I think in the circumstances he is in, he would have to be presenting his party with an argument as to why after everything that’s gone wrong, there is a reason to stick with him beyond fear of what the alternatives might be. And that argument has to be ‘I’m pushing the party in this particular direction. I am reshuffling my cabinet in order to say, we’re going to do less of this and more of that’.

And what I don’t hear so far is any convincing argument, apart from that we’ve got to get Angela back. Any convincing government says he will use this reshuffle to show that Labour is now moving in x direction. X direction has to be in terms of where they’re going, has to be away from the chasing Reform and towards regrouping the Left block. And that has to be the primary purpose. And I don’t hear anything about that and I don’t have any sense of that. And so I find myself thinking, even if he is able to reshuffle, he feels powerful enough to, it’s not clear to me that there is a purpose behind it and therefore it will not achieve anything.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, I’m keen to get your sense of whether you think Rayner would want to come back because there’s now some suggestion, you know, that might not tactically be the best move for her. We’re hearing a lot of swirling briefings from her supporters, also Wes Streeting supporters suggesting they have, both have the numbers. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, he popped up on Wednesday and giving a little interview to Bloomberg to talk about his view that Labour needs to change direction. I thought very interesting him making a sort of Sop to the right in the party by saying — we need kind of higher defence spending and raising the prospect of doing that through more borrowing.

No doubt it’s something that would cause jitters in the gilt markets, but it feels like the alternatives, as you call them Robert, they are beginning to position or at least their supporters pretty strongly in the lead up to the election now.

Miranda Green
They are sort of definitely jostling, aren’t they? But again, I think it’s quite hard to predict what the mood will be like when those, you know, results come through in full and whether the, in the famous phrase, whether the herd will move or not.

As for Rayner, she’s got to get this tax problem out of the way. You know, her HMRC little local difficulty with underpaid stamp duty, she’s got to get that out of the way, sort of, you know, cleansing herself. I think, you know . . . 

Lucy Fisher
And can I try it on you? What one of her supporters said to me, which is, look, you know, she’s already said she’ll pay it, that’s not in question. She’s already resigned over this issue, so therefore she’s taken responsibility, you know, it’s a matter now of just, you know, dotting the Is and crossing the Ts and we can all move on. Do you think that will wash?

Miranda Green
I think that’s really hard. I mean, all of the people who, you know, hold focus groups around the country, even beyond what we know about her numbers, it comes up spontaneously in focus groups.

You know, people really did not like this, and it’s a serious vulnerability for her, you know, not just to technicality. I mean, I personally actually think she’s very sort of underpriced in terms of her actual political talents and what she could achieve. And I think she’s a bit too useful for the Right as a kind of bogey man of what a post-Starmer Labour government could look like.

And I think if you think about what she said recently about being serious on defence and that she’s actually not sort of fiscal danger in the way that Andy Burnham with his remarks about not being in hot to the bond market has seemed comfortable with being. I think there’s a lot more to her potential candidacy, you know, than is often sort of appreciated.

But I think it’s all about the timing, isn’t it? I mean, you know, it’s Robert’s piece this week said this whole game of waiting for Burnham to be actually in a position to challenge is one aspect of what might go on, in which case they’ll all be sort of treading water for a while.

Stephen Bush
I think the thing is though is that I find it very hard to see how someone, how anyone not called Andy would be him, right?

Because the argument is essentially like none of them really want to change the fiscal position, right? They don’t think there’s an appetite for broad-based taxes. And although some of them are happy to pretend to be mad than they are, none of them are actually, you know, crazy enough to go ‘Oh, do you want what we really need to do during a looming supply shock when we’re already struggling to sell our debt at a price we would like to, let’s have more of that’, right?

So they are all going to be doing ‘Look, I’m better lipstick on this pig’. If it’s a question of who has the best lipstick it’s obviously Andy Burnham, that is clear in every single poll that he is the best if you just want to have a new face. I think what’s most likely is that the leadership change will essentially end up triggered by accident.

You remember after the EU referendum defeat when there were kind of these vague plans about getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn and it had been being sort of half passed around. And then we left the European Union, which for most Labour MPs was this horrible, dislocative event that was huge upset in the Parliamentary Party.

So it was a very fraught space emotionally. And then suddenly all of these coups kind of went off without meaning to, right? They all kind of launched at the same time and they were all kind of half baked and half thought through. And I think that’s probably the most likely way that the end of Starmer will happen.

It might not be the local elections. So yeah, my instinct is it will just be like a panic. It will be some weird event or someone unexpectedly resigning. I mean, that’s ultimately what did for Boris, right? It was Rishi resigning over an unrelated manner. Looking abroad, that’s what did for Justin Trudeau right? Like it was Christina Freeland deciding that she didn’t want to go along with other issues and that being the thing which caused everything to collapse. And that feels to me still the most likely thing is just like a random event.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Although, you know, ahead of next week, let’s just look at some of the forecasts. Lord Robert Hayward, a Tory, but very respected pollster predicts that Labour will lose three quarters of its local council seats, 1,850 odd seats, that is going to be a hugely traumatic moment. Robert, which parts of the country are most unhappy?

Robert Shrimsley
With Labour?

Lucy Fisher
With Labour.

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t know. I think this is one of those occasions where the phrase uniform swing I think kicks in. I think there is general discontent everywhere in different forms and it’s manifesting in different forms. So, in you know, the places that we used to think of as the Red Wall, it’s manifesting itself with the Reform. In a (Inaudible) it’s manifesting itself through the Greens. And I think the interesting issue, I think we’re going to see is the extent to which, and I think what triggers everything is which MPs look at these results and are able to say, that’s midterms, they’re bad midterms, but you know, that’s where we are or they look at this and go ‘Oh my God, that’s the Greens now really seriously challenging for my seat in my constituency’ or ‘That’s Reform, meaning I’m not going to be an MP anymore’.

And so I think England is the place that matters most in this respect, just because England matters most electorally. What happens in Wales is going to be a huge jolt. I think the S&P getting back has been priced in for a while. But I think when people look at the seats of England and they look at the big inner city seats, when they look at some of the places that they won to win back power, and they see Reform and the Greens and the Liberal Democrats who we keep, we all forget about, but they are going to have a pretty good night probably. It’s just going to be an across the board sense that everywhere in the country, people are finding someone with who can beat us.

Miranda Green
And I think there’s something really fundamentally challenging about that, as well for Labour, which the message is, who are Labour’s people now?

You know, if you lose Wales, which you’ve literally controlled since the 1920s, and you’re also being challenged in these other areas, which are more those . . . the areas where all of the presenters stand on general election night because they’re the swing territory that governs who gets into Number 10 all the rest of it, if you’re losing those as well as your heartlands, who is your party for?

And then you’ve got this new vehicle on the Left, you know, eating up the kind of Corbynite tendency, which we, surprised us all with how alive it was during the Corbyn years. And you’ve really got a big, you know, task of thinking to do about how you recover and it, because it’s not tactical recovery at that point, it’s who are you now for?

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen, the Tories, I mean, they’ve been sort of a little bit under-reported in recent weeks, maybe months, but they’re also gonna have a really dreadful night. It could be looking quite existential for them on May 8.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. I mean, the sort of irony of the Conservative position is one of the things Kemi Badenoch has very successfully convinced her party is that the essay question that she has to answer is: ‘Are Labour doing badly?’ rather than ‘Are the Conservatives doing well?’

They’re also forecast to have sort of similar kind of, you know, 70 to 74 per cent of their seats and up being lost. Now, there are far fewer Conservative seats up this time just because of the nature of the map this time around. I think for them, the devolved elections are actually an even bigger deal, right?

Because unless the polls are wrong, and I would say, I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel my impression travelling the country is the polls are gonna be about right, they will be in both Holyrood and the Senedd, the biggest rightwing party won’t be them, it will be Reform. And those are paid full-time jobs, right?

And at the point you have paid full-time legislators of another party, that is baking in the existence of that other threat on the right. And I think your Conservative Party will somehow still manage to at the end of this set of local elections go ‘Oh, but it’s fine because Labour are doing badly’. I think, however, they should be much more alarmed about the fact that it’s wholly possible that in lots of these places, they will be sort of full on replaced, you know, in say Cannock Chase, a stretch margin of the Labour Party, a place which when they made gains there in 2024, it was such a sign that, you know, they were on course to be elected with a big majority.

For Labour, it’s a nice to have, but Conservative or Reform government, it’s a must have if you want to be in Downing Street. I think that it looks likely somewhere like there that you will overnight, I mean, election third, so still be here, but overnight, all of those Conservative seats might go, you know, from blue to teal, should really panic them.

Most Labour MPs, even in marginal seats, were selected for the first time this time around. They don’t have that experience of losing and losing again. And I think that’s gonna make them much more likely to panic when they wake up in the morning and they go ‘Oh, where, where have all my friends gone?’ And they suddenly have a hostile council, a council leader will probably be the candidate next time, you know, making announcements about the things they’re doing in the area. And I just think that stuff is so corrosive to the morale of a parliamentary party.

Miranda Green
So one other thing that’s so interesting as well about that point of the Conservative Party having a bad night and just being effectively replaced by Reformers, the party of the right in some areas. The Lib Dems are briefing that some of that territory that we would always have understood as a very easy to grasp blue versus yellow fight is now a Reform versus Lib Dem fight. So it’s changed overnight even pre the results. It’s really interesting because that’s a territorial shift.

Stephen Bush
What was so destructive for the Conservatives in London was they lost the council and then in the election cycle afterwards, their vote went tactically and through ideological and realignment and demographic change to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. And so they just kind of vanished from places where they had previously at least had a sort of puncher’s interest.

And I think that, yeah, that is the real risk for them in the former Liberal-Conservative battleground is if you have somewhere like say Gosport or East Surrey where you suddenly go from, oh, it was blue and now it’s blue and yellow, oh, and now all of that blue has been replaced.

We know from London that it’s so hard to get back into contention. Mark Pack, who is a very, he is probably like the most influential, important Liberal Democrat that you’ve never heard of. He used to be party president. He was very influential in the strategy and lesson getting 72 seats. Always argues that our country is becoming a 650 different two party contests and the Lib Dem aim has got to be the second party in as many of them as possible. And yeah, I think that big risk is that the Conservatives wake up on Friday and they are no longer the second party in a lot of contests.

Robert Shrimsley
Stephen’s right in that the Conservatives will just breeze through this in their own heads and say, or think they will, that actually, you know, Kemi’s done really well. She can point to the fact that she’s ahead of her party in the polls, which is important that changing the leader doesn’t necessarily improve their situation, which is a big deal for her. But there are a few things that are gonna happen, I think, which are when they stop and think about it, they’ll start to reflect rather more gloomily.

One of them is that we’re just not going to talk about them. But when this election comes and goes, we’ll be talking about Reform, we’re talking about the Greens. and when we’re talking about who’s vanquishing Labour, it won’t be the Conservatives. Their best hope is clawing back a couple of councils in places like London. And if they do that, they’ll suddenly proclaim it as a good night.

But I was talking to someone from Reform early today and he was saying, look at our prospects in Essex, for example, you know, you look at, look what happens in the wards in Kemi Badenoch’s own seat in Saffron Walden and one of the safest seats . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
. . . around, you look at how many of those wards we actually end up taking, you know. And actually, although the Conservatives will still be hanging on in lots of places, they will be becoming less and less relevant in the conversation. And that’s what’s got to worry them.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. As to Reform, can anything stop their momentum? And in particular, I’m interested if you think that the, to my mind, pretty extraordinary story this week that the Thai-based crypto investor, Christopher Harborne, gave a personal gift of £5mn.

Robert Shrimsley
We’ve all got the wrong friends, aren’t we?

Lucy Fisher
We have. To Nigel Farage in 2024, just before he stood. Will that change the dial at all? How will the public view that?

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, it ought to be something to reflect on, not least because of Reform’s deep fascination with and for crypto. But my slight feeling about Reform at the moment is that if stands and proprietary are your thing, you’re probably not looking at Reform at the moment anyway. You’re looking at people who are, you know, breaking the rules, changing things, shaking it up, defying the odds. And so, uh, unless you’re able to pin . . . 

Miranda Green
Well, it’s cutting a few corners here.

Robert Shrimsley
No, but I think it’s, you’ve got to be able to pin a specific thing on Farage about this, beyond he didn’t register it when he got back to parliament, which is an issue, could do damage, but I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, I think you’ve got to show a line between the donation and something they’re doing.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
Something wrong and that’s the tricky part if it exists at all.

Lucy Fisher
Is it the kind of thing that more motivates the rivals of Reform and their voters then actually turns off people who are Reform curious?

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I think the fundamental question about Reform at some point is what is their ceiling? You know, they have a core which is very committed. There’s a chunk of people who don’t think Reform is hardline enough and they dally with Rupert Lowe’s party. But, you know, they have a core, a committed core.

The question is, how much more can they pull in because the core isn’t quite large enough yet. So this is the kind of thing that can alienate the people who look at them and go ‘Well, you know, I, they like some things they’re saying, but I’m just a bit worried about the kind of people they are’, and this is in that space along with a lot of other Reform issues.

So the question is, does any of this amount to pulling people who are wavering back away from them, back to the Conservatives, back to Labour, whatever it is, and it goes to this fundamental question, which we will get to the next election is your imperative to remove this Labour government or to stop Reform if those are the two big choices.

And if it becomes an election about Reform and stopping them, then they’re in trouble. If it’s an election about getting rid of Labour, then they’re not. So it’s all about how much muck you can hurl on to these people.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, could you just pause a moment on Rupert Lowe’s party Restore, which is sort of, you know, incorporated as a political party in February.

Polls to suggest that’s bouncing around 3, 4 per cent. Is that potentially significant in some places, you know, going forward to a general election, if we’re in a fragmented five party plus system, could that change the outcome of seats? And do you think that it could force or compel some in Reform to sort of move further rightward in a way that could turn off Reform curious voters who are more to the centre and will be definitely turned off by that sort of hardline nativist attitude?

Stephen Bush
So, I have to, my instinct when we talk about, you know, other polls about Right is that when I see a poll suggesting that restorer on 4 per cent of the vote, you know, this is a party with, you know, an, as you say, an extreme ethnic nationalist position. I don’t feel when I travel the country as obviously a visible minority, that this is a country where one in every 20 people is going, there’s an orch I should deport, right?

Like that might turn out to be like gravely complacent, but what would worry me if I were a pollster, seeing as that most of the places where that leader showing up are online samples and go ‘Oh, is this the perennial problem of polling where I have too many engaged people in my sample?’

However, the more important part of your question is, does this mean that within every sort of far-right populist party that’s succeeding in Europe, you’ve got someone who’s successfully presenting as ‘Oh, you know, look, I’m moderate, I’m different, I’m changed, I’m blokey, or I’m, you know, I’m an approachable woman, you know, so, you know, Farage is just, oh, I’m a bit of a geezer’.

And then you always have other people in that party going ‘No, let’s have the old time religion, you know, let’s talk more about, you know, race and nation’. Now the potential benefit for Farage is it’s a way he can position himself as moderate by going, look, I don’t have those people in my party. You know, he always makes great play of the fact that he runs the only party where you can’t be a member if you’re a former BNP member, which is partly how he performs moderation. So it could help him in that way, but equally, of course, if I’m wrong about, and it turns out that 4 per cent is about, right, that, every little thing helps when you have fragmented politics.

Miranda Green
I’m not sure about this because I think there are bits of the country to your kind of geographical point, Lucy, where they can do a bit of damage, particularly on the East Coast. And I think, you know, as you said, if you’ve got this hugely fragmented voting pattern, you need to keep those people on side somehow. And I’m not sure that Farage’s traditional shtick of his performative moderation, as you put it, Stephen, has been quite so evident in recent months actually.

And so I think if you put that slight tendency to try and keep those people in the fold together with worries about the probity of Reform and Farage and the finances, which does matter to some groups of people, we saw that strongly in the blue wall in the general election, for example, and you put that together with worries about his closeness to Trump, um, as well as some of the more out there policies. I think there are a set of factors which then makes Reform almost a slightly easier to beat in some areas for whichever is the centre left vehicle party to stop them.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm.

Miranda Green
And I think that dynamic is gonna become more and more important.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, can we move on just to talk about the Greens, obviously, having a good election campaign, but a few question marks being raised about Zack Polanski and his attitude towards antisemitism. He is himself Jewish and obviously we’ve seen the appalling attack in Golders Green this week. Do you think that’s something that’s cutting through?

Robert Shrimsley
I think it possibly . . . I mean, I have to say, of all the things I find really irritating is when people are defending Zack Polanski on this issue, say the Greens can’t be antisemitic in any way because they’ve got a Jewish leader, but I don’t hear those people saying ‘Well, Reform can’t be Islamophobic because Zia Yusuf, one of the most important figures is a Muslim’.

It just doesn’t work that way. I think that it is a problem for the Greens long term. I don’t know that it’ll be a problem for them in these elections that they’re gonna have good elections, but I think it’s raising some issues and tensions that they’re gonna have to address because you’ve got Zack Polanski, I think, trying to be nuanced about this.

He has clearly, you know, a very strong anti-Israel position. I don’t think Zack Polanski is an antisemite, but he’s got a party which is pulling in the same toxic crowd that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party pulled in, and some of them really are antisemites. And at the same time, you’ve got a deputy leader of the party in Mothin Ali who’s saying, no, we must defend our people from these attacks.

And it’s all a get up. It’s all a scam. None of these people are antisemites. And I think you’re gonna see these tensions begin to play out in the weeks and months that follow because you’ve got someone in Zack Polanski who’s trying to professionalise the party a bit as well. He’s a very effective communicator. They’re doing all kinds of small things to try and knock off their negatives. And he can clearly see them, and there have been a couple of cases in the last week where there are people in the Green Party who so obviously crossed the line that they should be got rid of and he’s done it. And you’ve got other people saying, no, he mustn’t succumb to this.

So I think what you’re gonna start seeing after the elections is more focus on the Greens and the fact that they are just nowhere near in a state of readiness to be major challenges. It’s all happened a bit too fast. And all of the things that they’re exposed upon, the people who think that prisons should be abolished, the people who want heroin legalised, as well as all the stuff around antisemitism.

And I just think it’s all gonna burst out and they’re gonna find themselves in a mess because they haven’t got the professional network in place to deal with these. And if you look, compare them to, say, Reform, who clearly have many of similar problems, but the one thing Reform have is an absolute dictator of a leader who could just say ‘OK, no, he’s out, she’s gone, that’s over’. The Greens don’t work like that, and I think they’re just gonna find, they’re gonna have a great night next week, and then I think they’re gonna find all kinds of messes.

Miranda Green
Can I just have a shout out for a wonderful quote in the piece by our colleagues this week on the problem with vetting candidates in both Reform and the Greens, which you might call the two sort of populist wings of our new political landscape. There was a, I think it’s the chair of the London Green Party saying that he was very annoyed with some candidates who wanted to put the, put climate change on the leaflets. (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
You can’t make it up, can you?

Miranda Green
No.

Stephen Bush
I think the other really interesting long-term risk for the Greens, right, is that unlike Reform, who are broadly speaking, going to take over a bunch of councils which have, due to the long period of austerity, essentially just delivery bodies for their statutory responsibilities.

The councillors can’t do very much and it’s different, right? Whereas your green counsellors will be taking office and in some cases power in places where A, lots of people who work in the media live and will be directly affected by their services, but where actually, because they don’t have as big social care responsibilities because they have younger populations, there will be real choices about how they govern, that if you have a situation where you have people who have said, you know, crankish and vile things, it means you’re having to kick them out before the election. You probably also have a bunch of people who, in a couple of weeks time, are going to be asked to help run local authorities.

And I think in terms of their stated aim of replacing the Labour Party, you know, not just being a leftwing challenger, but it’s an alternative, I think this is a, clearly a week they’re gonna do very well. But the reason why the SNP have been able to replace Scottish Labour is they’ve been able to take not just people who wanted a left alternative, but centrist Labour voters, Labour voters who might at one point have considered voting for the Scottish Conservative, you know, people with mortgages, all of which the Green Party is consciously making itself repellent to. And that, I think, puts a very hard ceiling on their ability to get beyond the 15, 17, 20 per cent in their polling on around now.

Miranda Green
I can’t believe how old-fashioned this is, even actually daring to mention that the local elections might be about running local surfaces. I mean, surely it’s just a national poll of another.

Stephen Bush
But I do think that one of the reasons . . . 

Miranda Green
it does really annoy me, actually. It’s really important, you know, how these evolved governments work and how local governments is billions and billions of pounds. And that’s why the number one salience issue at this electoral point is the state of the roads. People care about their local services.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ve just got time left for Political Fix stock picks. Robert, who are you buying or selling?

Robert Shrimsley
I think I’m going to buy Angela Rayner this week. I don’t quite know exactly why in the sense that we know that we’re gonna have . . . 

Miranda Green
She matters.

Robert Shrimsley
We know that, but that sort of is my point in a way.

Miranda Green
Yes.

Robert Shrimsley
We know that after the elections, there’s gonna be this enormous shakeout and row in the Labour Party as to what happens, whether they do move against Starmer, whether they keep him in place.

And I think she’s going to be completely pivotal to the outcome. Whether she decides to go over the top and stand against him, whether she comes back into the cabinet and therefore helps him survive, whether she makes the calls that begin to topic.

I don’t quite know where it’s going because all kinds of people are briefing on her behalf and not necessarily her behalf, but their behalf as her allies. But I think next week she is going to be the pivotal figure in what happens with Keir Starmer, so I’m buying her.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, how about you?

Miranda Green
That’s a really good one, but I’m going to sell Prevent, the counterterrorism programme, because once again, and somewhat depressingly, the suspect in the Golders Green attack was in fact known to Prevent, had been reported to Prevent, and this just keeps happening in these appalling terrorist attacks, and it’s a total miracle that lives weren’t lost this week, and doubtless this will happen again.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen.

Stephen Bush
I’m gonna buy John Glen, who is Kemi Badenoch’s newish PPS, so her parliamentary aid whose job is effectively to act as the eyes and ears of the leader or whatever shadow minister or minister they operate in the House of Commons.

And I think one of the striking ways that Kemi Badenoch’s parliamentary performances have improved is at PMQs, there was a long time when she’d kind of get lost in the second half of her six questions because at the first set, you know what you’re gonna say, you’ve got a pretty good idea what the prime minister’s going to answer. And then afterwards it becomes a game of how well-prepared and well-briefed you are.

And I think one of the reasons why she’s improved, and you can see this when you know, when we’re, when pops in towards your neighbour, is having a PPS who is kind of sitting there kind of whispering the back, helping with the preparation. And seeing as she will almost certainly be both strong enough and will want to refresh the top team, I would suspect she’ll be one of the people who, if she does, have a broader reshuffle, will have a higher shadow cabinet position than the one he currently enjoys.

Miranda Green
And he was a treasury minister, wasn’t he?

Stephen Bush
He was a treasury minister back. And yeah, and I think in the nicest possible way, I think one would struggle to say that Mel Stride had pulled up trees as shadow chancellor. Lucy, who are you buying or selling?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I was going to sell Eluned Morgan, the Welsh Labour leader who made an extraordinary gaffe on the campaign trail this week when she declared vote Plaid Cymru. I think her allies say she was exhausted from all the pavement pounding she’s been doing.

But I’m actually going to buy King Charles because I think he’s played a blinder in Washington this week with his speech to Congress. I don’t know about you guys. I’ve come to expect sort of bland fluff from the Royals and I thought he landed a political message really quite well, forced Trump to recommit to the UK-US relationship, even if it, you know, give it two days and he’ll be on to the next thing.

But I though it was a, you know, it was a bit of a diplomatic masterclass as some of the more fawning royal commentators called it, managing to make the point about resisting the urge to look inwards, getting climate change in there and his bravery basically in going and pulling it off without a gaffe. Robert, I’ll give you a hat tip because you said it would go off well and I think you were right.

Robert Shrimsley
So if we’re buying him, what is the position you think he could be elevated to after King?

Lucy Fisher
Emperor.

Robert Shrimsley
King Emperor, yes.

Lucy Fisher
Emperor, Emperor Gods.

Robert Shrimsley
We used to have the King Emperor, didn’t we? Yeah. I’m sure we did.

Stephen Bush
Disraeli, of course, created the title of Queen Emperor.

Robert Shrimsley
That’s right.

Stephen Bush
Was it Queen Victoria’s birthday or was it some kind of pre-election stunt? Maybe that could . . . If Keir Starmer can’t do a reshuffle, he maybe, you know, because we do still have a handful of technical imperial territories. He could become King Emperor of the Falkland Islands.

Miranda Green
I don’t know, the jokes were very good, weren’t they? So maybe he could be promoted to host of his own Royal performance at the Palladium.

Robert Shrimsley
To Disraeli, when he promoted Victoria, I think it was, so that he was asked why he’d given that extra title. He said, look, everybody loves flattery and with royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.

Lucy Fisher
Very good. That’s all we have time for. Robert, Miranda, Stephen, thanks for joining.

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Robert Shrimsley
Bye, Lucy.

Miranda Green
Bye.

Stephen Bush
Bye, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And thank you for listening. And if you have any burning questions that you’d like to put to our panel, a question about the election result maybe, or about life inside Westminster or Whitehall, then get in touch.

We’re having a Q&A special on Monday, May 11, so send me your questions to [email protected]. We’ll do our best to answer them. There are links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They’re articles that 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 Clare Williamson. Flo Phillips is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. The broadcast engineers are Andrew Georgiades and Bianca Wakeman. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.

We’ll meet again here next week.

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