Looking beyond the gossip

“What is going to happen?” 

That is usually the first line that gets spoken to a public affairs professional at this time. 

Colleagues, bosses, clients all want to hear the gossip – how many letters have gone in? Can he really hold on? Are there any more stories about to leak? 

The hardest part for a public affairs professional when working through events like “partygate” is staying focused on what our role is. Having some gossip is fun but it has about ten minutes value in the current climate before it is blown out of the water by the next development. 

Our challenge is to spot things of strategic importance that can shape how we engage with politics and policy over the coming months. 

Loyalty

If Boris Johnson can keep his grip on No.10 it will be due to the loyalty of a small group of allies. 

A handful of MPs gathered around him in his darkest period when he was being clubbed from all angles and before “wait for Sue Gray” was accepted as the point that decisions would be made. His old campaign team and his shadow whips got into action. Working through the night they ensured that MPs were peeled away from the rebels and into relative safe territory. 

At the same time as the Chief Whip was briefed against for being missing in action, MPs like Nigel Adams, Chris Pincher and Conor Burns were conspicuously pulling Johnson back from the edge. 

And we saw that loyalty rewarded this week, with Johnson’s mini reshuffle elevating those who stuck by him, with Chris Pincher becoming deputy chief whip, former chief whip Mark Spencer becoming commons leader, and Jacob Rees-Mog becoming a full Cabinet member as Brexit minister. 

2019 General Election Offer

When the pressure came on, they went back to 2019 General Election winning themes.  

Brexit optimism, Levelling-Up spending, projections of British strength abroad, the army being deployed to the Channel, announcements of funding for Gigafactories… we have seen it all in just the past two weeks. 

The closer we get to a General Election the more political the messaging becomes but the pressure of the past month has triggered the doubling down on these themes. We’ll see it in a Budget during the cost-of-living escalation, we’ll see it in the Birmingham Erdington campaign, and we’ll see it after the difficult local elections in May. 

If you want your issues to be a priority, they need to be relevant to these themes. 

Conservative Research Groups

No group of freshman MPs has mattered quite as much as the 2019 Red Wall intake.

But they shouldn’t matter: they are part of an 80-seat majority, it shouldn’t take them a few terms to find their feet – they should be behaving and looking for a Parliamentary Private Secretary job. 

They aren’t behaving. The nature of the win in 2019 means many haven’t come up in the “usual way”: the COVID-19 lockdowns meant they didn’t get socialised in the ways of Conservative MPs, they are jumpy about polls and inboxes and don’t have the confidence that comes from being a heartland MP. 

Add to this that they know they are symbolically important. They are the Red Wall, the northern change of direction, the vehicles of change that were promised in 2019 and they co-ordinate themselves to have traction with No.10. If Northern MPs (and Northern/Midland Mayors for that matter) turn on Johnson it could be a final blow. 

For every action there is a reaction: Southern MPs can see this too and have started to get their act together to counterbalance the recalibration to the North (and in reaction to the by-election loss in Chesham and Amersham). 

We live in a Research Group era and it pays to watch who is running them. 

Don’t sleep on Labour

We have around 40 successive polls showing a Labour lead, they could change but Labour figures suggest that people are listening to what Labour says for the first time in a long while. 

Labour knows it must use this window of relevance to project a Government-in-waiting and juxtapose Starmer with a chaotic Johnson. A serious person, flanked by good performers like Reeves and Streeting is pro-business, patriotic, scathing of incompetence and unrelenting with their “one rule for them” attack. 

But they recognise they still have to deal with the internal politics to ensure they can project the face they want externally. The biggest tool they have is an iron grip on selections and we should expect to see that play out from here on in – council selections in London (long the battleground for factions) will see moderates win out and we’ll see microscopic scrutiny of wannabe GE candidates’ social media to weed out those that aren’t aligned with the current direction of the party. 

Over ten years of Conservative Prime Ministers sometimes convinces us that it will always be this way but Labour has, finally, become relevant.