What’s the story?

There's a sense of despair but a better future is possible. The Tories must offer the restoration of cultural coherence, and the transformation of our economy – a quest for community, and opportunity

“Politics is about making and winning arguments,” wrote Fraser Nelson in his Times column recently. “All else is bureaucracy.” He was reporting from the Reform conference and Nelson argued “as long as Farage is the only leader telling a story, we can expect what he calls his ‘turquoise tide’ to keep rising.”

There was some dissonance between Nelson’s account of the Reform surge and his insistence that mass immigration has been a boon for Britain. But this observation – that Farage has a clear story to tell, while the parties he is challenging are struggling to produce and communicate their own – is surely true.

Labour are staggering around the ring like a boxer who has taken too many punches, beaten by the realisation that they have no plan to turn the country around. The so-called “Ming vase” strategy before the election was no clever ruse to minimise political risk while a radical plan was prepared behind the scenes: it was cover for the fact that there was no plan at all.

Beyond plotting to increase spending eight times more than they promised, and to increase taxes and borrowing accordingly, they had little idea of what they would need to do. The assumption that Labour would get more out of the civil service than the Tories and more from European countries – simply because they were the better people, with better morals, building better relationships – has proved to be utterly risible.

Labour are not only incapable of telling a story – with their policy direction changing daily, and at random thanks to the Prime Minister’s lack of core principle – they are not even good at the bureaucracy. They promised to close the asylum hotels, only to take to the courts to keep them open, said they would cut quangos, but opened 27 of them, and made such a mess of the public finances the Chancellor was reduced to tears – while a junior minister is writing the Budget for her.

And this is before we consider the stench of sleaze emanating from Whitehall under Starmer’s leadership. The one thing the Louise Haigh, Tulip Siddiq, Angela Rayner, Peter Mandelson and all the others have in common is the misjudgement and poor leadership of the Prime Minister himself.

My party – the Conservative Party – is still developing its story. A little more than a year since the worst defeat in our history, we have much to do to convince the country we have understood why we lost so comprehensively, and that we have the humility, seriousness, ideas and plan to be trusted with political power again.