Reflections on politics of the week
A collection of issues which are worth drawing attention to: a minister falls foul of the Grenfell families; appeal to those eligible to vote for you; history isn't inescapable
It is a function of being politically obsessed and argumentative that there are often observations I want to make about events or media stories, and would like to give people the opportunity to read, but they aren’t necessarily important enough—or important enough yet—to have an editor commission them or to make into a stand-alone essay here. So, as in the past, I will bundle a few of them together here, which hopefully some readers will find useful, informative, entertaining or a combination of all three.
As ever—and perhaps I should make this clearer—feedback is welcome, in terms of structure and content: I suspect a lot of people who write on Substack do so largely instinctively and with a purpose in mind but much less of a procedure. The benefit of it is that it is unedited and therefore unfettered, but up to a point the customer is always right.
Be careful of the company you keep
It was revealed by The Sunday Times that Rushanara Ali, the minister for building safety and homelessness at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is to relinquish her responsibilities for building safety and issues connected to Grenfell Tower. This comes at the insistence of survivors and families of those killed in the Grenfell fire, and it is alleged that Grenfell United, an organisation representing them, issued an ultimatum to Ali’s ministerial boss, Angela Rayner, to remove Ali’s responsibilities before it made the issue public.
The reason for their demand that Ali be relieved of responsibility for Grenfell-related issues is that she has regularly attended the Franco-British Colloque, an annual gathering for politicians, civil servants and business leaders of both countries, which was co-chaired from 2012 to 2024 by Pierre-André de Chalendar, chairman and formerly CEO of building materials producer Saint-Gobain. In 2012, Saint-Gobain bought the UK manufacturing interests of an American firm called Celotex Corporation, and it was Celotex which made most of the flammable insulation material fitted to Grenfell Tower. The inquiry into the fire at Grenfell Tower found that Celotex had manipulated a test in 2014 to ensure its product was certified for the lucrative high-rise market and then concealed this fact.
Grenfell United’s view on that connection between the minister and the fire was this:
Any Minister that went to events held or chaired by an organisation who had a hand in Grenfell should never have been put in charge of building safety. This is yet another example where government has failed to do their due diligence and the skeletons will continue to come out.
Ali conceded the effect of this disapproval.
Trusted relationships between ministers and the Grenfell community are essential for this department… I understand that perception matters and I have therefore concluded that the building safety portfolio would be best transferred to another minister.
Rushanara Ali attended the Franco-British Colloque 10 times since 2013, including this January, and received at least £9,140 in free hospitality, and six of those attendances came after the Grenfell fire and after the role of Celotex’s insulation had been called into question. (This was all declared in the Register of Members’ Interests.)
It is slightly difficult to understand exactly what accusation is being made here. Ali was not the only MP to attend the Franco-British Colloque. The value of the hospitality she has received over 10 occasions is presumably accommodation and food and drink, and it was declared to ensure that there was no impropriety or suggestion of covert influence. I don’t think that Grenfell United has argued that Ali is likely to be subject to undue influence by Celotex on the basis of the chairman of their parent company having co-chaired the conference.
Obviously the deaths of 72 people in the Grenfell Tower fire is a tragedy, exacerbated by the fact that it was in some senses avoidable, as revealed by the public inquiry chaired by Sir Martin Moore-Bick. If companies were criminally responsible for any aspect of the fire, then of course they should be held fully accountable for their actions.
But the objection seems to be that Ali attended a conference with people connected to a company which was partly responsible. That in itself is the offence, not that this attendance could make her unable to fulfil her responsibilities properly or fully. As Ali herself said in her statement, “perception matters”. The simple connection between her and Saint-Gobain is enough for her to be removed.
Having worked in reputation management as well as politics, I understand entirely that perception does matter and cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. But in this case the government seems to have accepted that it not only matters but is overwhelming and unanswerable. A stakeholder group involved—of course an important one which deserves enormous sympathy—disapproves of the company a minister has kept, and so the minister loses her responsibilities.
Now, I accept that it might have been easier not to appoint Rushanara Ali to this specific portfolio: she had no outstanding expertise in the field, having been a shadow minister for investment and small businesses (2023-24), education (2013-14) and international development (2010-13). (She was briefly a member of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in 2016-17.) But for the prime minister, the chief whip and anyone else involved in making decisions on very junior ministerial appointments after the election to make a connection between the Grenfell Tower inquiry and the Franco-British Colloque so strong that it ruled Ali out of consideration for the post would have been to expect quite a lot.
Having appointed Ali, however, the prime minister has effectively had a mini-reshuffle forced on him because of perception. I don’t want to overstate the disruption of this: it will simply mean a rearrangement of some ministerial responsibilities within MHCLG, which does have a complement of seven ministers in total (one is unpaid). Ali will presumably be given some new duties, since her portfolio is a little slender once building safety has been removed. She has clearly not done anything wrong, otherwise she would presumably have been required to resign. The conclusion is simply that her responsibility for building safety “looks bad”.
I’m aware that thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments are not always strong or reasonable, but it is valid to wonder how far the principle underlying this affair goes. How powerful a factor is “perception”, and how do we measure the extent to which “perception” is valid and should be taken into account? How closely should every encounter an MP or peer has ever had be scrutinised and measured against potential presentational embarrassments? Sir Keir Starmer may find (though as a lawyer he should be acutely aware of this) that precedent is powerful and often difficult to answer. Now that he has accepted the insistence of one campaigning group, how easily will be resist any requests by others?
Winning is contextual
We are now in the last stage of the Conservative Party’s leadership campaign, and the party membership has begun voting for either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick. For all the weary sighing, the contest has been invaluable for journalists and commentators, because it has been ever-present since July and they can always turn to it for content if the news agenda is otherwise uninspiring.
Last week on Sky News’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives and one of the podcast’s hosts, remarked that Badenoch had focused her appearances in media “that is very much considered to have a high proportion of people that are already Conservative members and voters”. If she were to win, Davidson went on, she would only succeed in restoring Conservative fortunes by “talking beyond people that are already diehard Tories”.
I like Ruth Davidson, and she is far from the only person to have made this kind of observation as the contest has ground on. And it is true, to a large degree. But it is staggeringly obvious, and can encourage people to misunderstand a great deal of the current political situation, especially when it comes to the Conservative Party. On her first point, that Badenoch has limited media appearances to right-wing platforms, is no mystery: she is standing to be leader of the Conservative Party, and the electorate for that position is the party membership and no-one else. To court the approval of platforms and their consumers which are not sympathetic to the Conservative wing of politics is a complete waste of time and effort. These people cannot vote for you. Their approval (at the moment) is a monumental irrelevance.
Whoever wins the leadership and leads the Conservatives into subsequent electoral contests, beginning with the elections for county councils, unitary authorities, elected mayors and the metropolitan borough of Doncaster on 1 May 2025, will of course need to a wider audience than “people that are already diehard Tories”. That is, on a very fundamental level, how elections work: parties need the support of their core voters who will generally give them their ballot under any circumstances, but they must also, through policy and style, attract as many supporters as possible who sometimes or often vote for other parties. Otherwise the party balance would never change. This is particularly true of the Conservatives at the moment, as they won only 23.7 per cent of the vote at July’s general election on a mediocre turnout of 59.8 per cent.
Davidson can’t be held responsible for how her remarks are amplified and reported in the media. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves of very simple truths. You win elections by maximising your support in the eligible electorate. The electorate for the current Conservative leadership is not the same as that for the next general election. Badenoch understands that—I’m sure Jenrick does too—and is conducting her campaign accordingly. Politicians should always bear in mind that there is no value in electoral terms of winning the approval of those who cannot vote for you. A warm glow counts for little in the mechanics of democracy.
There is a connection here, by way of conclusion, to one of the most difficult judgements required of politicians: distinguishing those voters whom you might somehow persuade to support you from those who are irreconcilable. Early last year, in response to an article in The New Statesman, I wrote an essay which argued that the idea of “One Nation Tories” was often misused and could be a code for Conservatism as non-Conservatives wished it could or would be. Of course “big tents” and “crossover appeal” are important—just look at the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats in the 1980s—but there comes a point at which you risk seeking the approval of those who, for perfectly valid ideological reasons, will never lend you their vote. Leaders have to be optimistic, open, generous, but realistic too.
The hand of history upon our shoulder…
As the Conservative leadership draws to a conclusion, there is a view put forward in several quarters, with emotions ranging from sneering smugness to hollowed-out desperation, that the result is largely irrelevant, since the winner will never be prime minister anyway. The argument goes that the Conservative Party’s defeat was so profound and substantial that electoral recovery, if it is even possible at all, will take many years, perhaps decades. In addition, we are told, parties which go into opposition tend to cycle through a number of leaders before they choose the one who successfully returns them to power.
I’m an historian, I am fascinated by history and I think politicians should be steeped in historical awareness. But history, while it can often be a guide to the ways in which human beings tend to behave, it is not an infallible predictor of the future, or nothimg would ever change. Something which is “unprecedented” has simply not happened yet, and every precedent represents, in some way, something that once happened for the first time. So there is never absolutely certainty.
Is this argument, in any event, true? It has certainly sometimes been the case. After the Labour landslide victory of 1997, the Conservatives looked to William Hague (1997-2001), Iain Duncan Smith (2001-03) and Michael Howard (2003-05) before electing David Cameron (2005-16), who would lead them to a sufficiently strong performance in the 2010 general election that they were able to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Equally, after being defeated at the polls in 1979, former prime minister Jim Callaghan stayed on as Labour Party leader until 1980, and the party then saw Michael Foot (1980-83), Neil Kinnock (1983-92) and John Smith (1992-94) take the helm until the last died suddenly and was succeeded by Tony Blair (1994-2007).
On the other hand, in the wake of a very sound beating in 1945, Winston Churchill stayed on as leader of the Conservative Party and returned to office as prime minister in 1951. This was despite being 70 when he left Downing Street the first time and having always had a fractious relationship with the Conservatives, for whom he had first been elected to the House of Commons in 1900 but whom he had abandoned to become a Liberal in 1904. He only returned to the Conservative Party when Stanley Baldwin appointed him chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924, and even at the general election of that year he had been elected MP for Epping as a “Constitutionalist”, albeit without a Conservative opponent. Similarly, after 1951, Clement Attlee served as leader of the opposition long enough at least to contest the following general election, though he lost to Anthony Eden and eventually retired after 20 years at the top of the Labour Party. Stanley Baldwin, having become Conservative leader in 1923, stayed in post until 1937, which included two stints in opposition in 1924 and 1929-31 as well as acting as Ramsay MacDonald’s effective deputy from 1931 to 1935.
The pattern is not therefore immutable. It is true that modern political culture no longer seems to tolerate general election defeat, at least in the two major parties: if a leader loses, that is the end of his or her tenure (with the exception of Jeremy Corbyn in 2017). Before Corbyn, it is not since Neil Kinnock in 1987 that a party leader has taken defeat in his stride and continued effectively. So if Badenoch or Jenrick leads the Conservative Party to defeat in an election in 2028 or 2029, there will be enormous pressure on them to step aside. It may be they do not even get that far, like Iain Duncan Smith who never led his party into a general election. But it is not a certainty: the signs from history are mixed and, ultimately, mutable.