To Buckingham, for a blast of soundness at the annual Margaret Thatcher conference. Star of the show was David Frost, the guest speaker at last night’s dinner. And the Tory peer has certainly been brushing up on his political bon mots, judging by his lines to the 200 attendees. Frost compared the ‘amateurish farrago’ of Labour’s early days in office to his own attempts at ‘assembling Ikea furniture. I sort of get everything out of the box, chuck away the instructions, try and put it all together, and then when it’s all a bit of a mess, turn to my wife and say, “Well, where’s the plan?”’
Keir Starmer, he joked, is the ‘human equivalent of one of those terms and conditions… irritating, verbose, boring, and with something rather unpleasant hidden down in the verbiage. And certainly, the British people clicked on those terms and conditions a bit too quickly I think last summer.’ Frost is not buying the recent commentary about the Prime Minister’s rightward turn: ‘I’m afraid I can’t take it seriously’, he told the audience. I’m reminded of Churchill’s comment about Baldwin that he “Occasionally stumbled over the truth but picked himself up and tried to carry on as if nothing had happened”. I’m afraid that’s what we’re going to see from Labour.’
Instead, Frost said, the Prime Minister’s election echoes a line from Eric Ambler’s book The Mask of Dimitrios: that ‘in a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.’ Ouch! But the noble peer’s most interesting comments came – inevitably – on the perennial question of a potential merger between the Tories and Reform. The Conservative peer said that:
We need, I suspect, to let this competition play out. If we get to within 12 months of another general election and we’re still divided 50/50 or thereabouts, then obviously pacts, arrangements will have to be on the agenda because we can’t go into an election divided again and losing, but we’re not at that point at the moment. We do need competition. We do need to show who is the most fitted to hold out on the right… We are going to have to work together at some point, whether it’s in two parties, whether it’s in one party, that’s still to be decided. But the people, us, all of us as people on the right are going to have to work together, and we need to act in ways that makes that possible.
In the follow up questions, Lord Frost was asked about claims by Reform UK figures that the party would ‘destroy’ the Conservatives. He replied that ‘It is important to try not to say things that are difficult to come back from and to focus on the ideas’. Frost added that, given the consensus between many figures in both parties on how to fix the country, ‘We’ve got to try and build that movement if we can together and not say things that make it more difficult going forward.’
As the former Brexit negotiator, Frost had some words of wisdom to Kemi Badenoch on party management too. Asked how she can prove that the Conservative party is conservative again, he suggested that:
I do think we almost need a kind of statement of what conservatism is that people have to sign up to. And if you can’t sign up to it, then you shouldn’t be in the Conservative party. And if we lose a few MPs on the left, then maybe that’s the price to pay for getting the party in the right place. And, you know, I don’t wish it, but I think it might well be inevitable. And if it is inevitable, I think it should happen on the leader’s terms on the issue she wants it to happen on, and something that delivers political momentum for the party and for the right generally.
Food for thought perhaps for the Leader’s Office…
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