Reform and recession have robbed Rishi of the chance to exploit Labour chaos

Amid a blizzard of political news this week, perhaps the most telling moment came when a young man from County Durham stepped up to a microphone and spoke to the Prime Minister.

He was one of a few dozen Right-leaning voters sitting in a GB News studio for a live question and answer session with Rishi Sunak on Monday night.

“The Reform Party are surging in the polls, they’re hitting a note with many disillusioned Conservative voters like myself,” explained Jack, a softly spoken 28-year-old.

“What are you going to do to convince traditional Conservative voters that their vote is still better off with you?” The wave of applause that followed showed he was not the only one.

The Prime Minister launched into the defence, laying out a line he will use again and again in the months ahead to tempt people away from Richard Tice and Nigel Farage’s party.

A vote for Reform is simply “a vote to put Keir Starmer into No 10”, argued Mr Sunak, trying to force minds onto the reality that only one of those two men will end up as UK leader.

Yet come the end of the week there was an indicator of just how little success that strategy is having, in the form of a pair of by-election results that were Reform’s best ever.

In Wellingborough, Reform won 13 per cent of the vote. In Kingswood, it was 10 per cent. Both broadly matched the party’s nationwide polling. In other words: the surge of support for Reform is real.

Great Escape plan

When Tory strategists plot out their Great Escape plan from the bind of the current polls, at its centre is a determination to convince 2019 Tory voters not to switch to Reform.

There are few hopes in CCHQ of another grand bargain like the one in the 2019 election that saw the Brexit Party not stand in Tory seats to help deliver Brexit, an underappreciated factor in Boris Johnson’s whopping victory in that general election.

Not least because Mr Tice, Reform’s leader, appears on a one-man mission to destroy the Conservative Party. Some Tory MPs suspect hurt feelings are a factor after Mr Tice’s attempts to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate in 2018 were rebuffed.

Quite what Mr Farage’s game is remains a topic of speculation among Mr Sunak’s inner circle. He is remaining at arm’s length from Reform, putting GB News commitments ahead of the obligations his “honorary president” role might be expected to bring.

This week, he heads back across the pond to America, appearing on a line-up including Donald Trump and Liz Truss at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Mr Farage has, notably, not decided to run in this election cycle. Why? One Tory MP thinks sitting out this campaign would make it easier for him to try to rejoin the Conservatives afterwards.

“There are only two rock stars in British politics: Boris Johnson and Nigel Fararge,” the Brexiteer MP said.

“I think that colleagues, at least on the Right of the party, would love Farage to come in. The fragmentation of the party is becoming increasingly obvious. The dream ticket would be Farage and Boris.”

As the former man spent by-election night broadcasting and rubbing salt into Tory wounds, the latter was keeping his head down.

Mr Johnson, the ex-prime minister, has let it be known that if Mr Sunak really wants him to hit the campaign trail – as The Telegraph revealed last week Tory strategists hope – he needs to call and make amends.

The pair have barely talked in the past year except for a nodding hello at a Remembrance Sunday service, Mr Johnson has told others.

The Prime Minister has at least been spared one potential Boris-shaped headache. The tell-all book Mr Johnson is penning about his time in Downing Street – one with an advance believed to be in seven figures – will not be released until after the general election.

But another of Mr Johnson’s endeavours remains a potential pitfall. He and his team have been holding talks about when his new GB News show will launch, giving him a broadcast platform to question current Tory strategy.

Along with Reform, there was a second R that created the one-two blow for Downing Street at the end of this week: Recession. Or, as Labour and the Liberal Democrats have dubbed it, “Rishi’s recession” (The Mirror’s front page went for “Rishession”).

So delighted were both parties with this framing that a squabble erupted among aides about who got there first, with the Lib Dems accusing Labour of pinching their idea.

“We haven’t even noticed what the Lib Dems have been doing,” sniped an ally of Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow chancellor whose team pumped out the line.

“It wouldn’t be like Rachel Reeves to have plagiarised,” a senior Lib Dem source shot back – a reference to the fact that a book the shadow chancellor released last year was found to feature passages lifted directly from Wikipedia.

‘Recession moment’

The Labour shadow cabinet team in fact had been preparing for the “recession moment” for weeks.

Two economists working for Ms Reeves, Spencer Thompson and Neil Amin-Smith,had been working contacts in the financial world trying to pinpoint when it would happen.

When it came on Thursday morning, two quarters of negative growth last year confirmed by the Office for National Statistics, a snap press conference with Ms Reeves was called for her to hammer home the point.

In the days ahead, when people google “how much tax am I spending” or similar, Labour adverts declaring “Rishi’s recession” will pop up. They have also taken out advertising space with the Financial Times.

“It was as much a political moment as an economic moment,” said a Reeves ally of the recession declaration. “It was the chance for us to do a ruthless dissection of all the Tory attack lines.”

For the Tories, it was a case of what could have been. The two Rs switched the narrative on a week that otherwise had been politically damaging for Sir Keir, the Labour leader.

Senior Labour folk privately admit they dropped the ball by not suspending Azhar Ali, their Rochdale by-election candidate, on Sunday when his controversial remarks on the Israel-Gaza conflict first emerged.

For all of Sunday and much of Monday the party stood by Mr Ali after the Mail on Sunday revealed he once claimed Israel had “allowed” the Oct 7 attack by Hamas.

Sir Keir’s absence on Monday as his inner team huddled trying to work out what to do has prompted sniping about whether he should have been more hands-on in decision-making.

There was a speedier suspension announced when it emerged a second parliamentary candidate, Graham Jones, had allegedly made comments about Israel at the same meeting.

Dark arts

Early in Sir Keir’s leadership it had been his rapid action to reassure the Jewish community the Labour Party did not have an anti-Semitism problem, drawing a line under the Jeremy Corbyn era, that had won plaudits. Now the issue was back dominating the headlines.

Suspicion has fallen on how exactly a recording of the event found its way to the newspapers, with some Wesmtinster figures suspecting Tory dark arts.

The critical meeting in question was not a Labour Party event but a local community gathering, meaning figures with other political persuasions could have attended.

A genuine rift in the party, though, remains. Many of Labour’s Muslim voters and MPs are frustrated that the party leadership will not go further in condemning Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

It is a split the SNP will seek to reopen on Wednesday, forcing a vote on an amendment calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza – a position which goes beyond Labour’s call for a long-term sustainable ceasefire.

Squint and there are hints of polling movements. YouGov, Savanta and More In Common have all had the Labour vote share down in the past fortnight.

As for the fortnight to come, one big political moment will loom into view: the Budget.

The Treasury has been scrambling to downplay tax cut expectations this week after the fiscal headroom it is estimated to have roughly halved back to about £13 billion.

Mr Sunak and Mr Hunt have more one-on-one chats scheduled for this month, while new groups of Tory MPs will take their requests to the Chancellor on Wednesday.

When March 6 eventually arrives, Tory MPs will be praying enough money is handed out to keep the two Rs at bay.

For if recession and Reform are still dominating the headlines come polling day, their best hope left may be divine intervention.

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