The Spectator’s ‘Fight for the Right’ Debate Shows How Little Now Separates the Tories and Reform

Fortunately, the Spectator is so flush with cash these days it can afford two lecterns for the series of debates it’s been holding in Westminster. The latest, ‘The Fight for the Right’, pitted Nick Timothy and Claire Coutinho for the Conservatives against Danny Kruger and Matt Goodwin of Reform.

However, without their parties’ names being emblazoned across the front of their respective lecterns, anyone not well acquainted with the personnel of the Conservative and Reform parties would have struggled to tell the teams apart.

And therein lies the problem for the Right of British politics: it’s rapidly turning into a parody of Monty Python’s ‘The People’s Front of Judea’ sketch. If you’d switched the names on the lecterns no one would have been any the wiser. Likewise, if you’d paired Claire Coutinho with Danny Kruger and Matt Goodwin with Nick Timothy, would anyone have noticed?

Reform appears to be the Judean People’s Front while the Tories are the People’s Front of Judea. Rupert Lowe’s Restore equates to the Popular Front of Judea, while Ben Habib’s Advance might be the Popular People’s Front of Judea. Is there a Reclaim Party? A Heritage Party? UKIP? Who knows? I’ve lost track of them all! But as with the scene from The Life of Brian, while they all hate the Romans, it’s each other that they purport to hate the most!

In the midst of all this internecine warfare the Right is in danger of repeating the disaster of 2024 and handing victory in 2029 to the progressive Left.

Still, let’s get back to the debate. Debates like this are adversarial. An initial vote is taken: whom do we support, Conservatives or Reform? A second vote is taken at the end of proceedings, and the winner is the team (party) who’s gained the most additional votes.

The voting methodology presented its own issues. A QR code was printed on a card on our seats. On scanning the QR code we were taken to a webpage that allowed us to vote for Reform, the Conservatives or don’t know. In the opening vote, 54% voted Conservative, 36% Reform and 10% don’t know. In the second vote at the end, Reform had overhauled the Conservatives and won with 49% versus the Conservatives 44%, with now only 7% still undecided.

Of course, for the Millennials in the room, whipping out a phone, scanning a QR code and casting a vote took seconds. However, liberally scattered around the room were the backwoodsmen and women from places like Tunbridge Wells and Saffron Walden. Their reading glasses had long been put away in their handbags or the inside pockets of discarded twill jackets. Presented with a QR code mild panic broke out. Phones had to be switched on. Passwords remembered. Enquiries made of neighbours about whatever to do with a QR code. Needless to say, many failed to register a vote, so I’m not sure that we should put too much store by Reform’s victory.

There was also a degree of tactical voting by those who’d been to previous such debates. If you wanted a Reform victory, the thing to do was to initially vote Conservative, then switch to Reform in the later vote, or vice versa. It’s unusual for the Right to vote tactically – either principle or stupidity, you choose. Though, in the absence of Reform and the Tories sorting out some deal prior to the likely 2029 General Election, sans a grass roots tactical vote we could see Sir Keir and Lady Victoria welcoming Mr and Mr Polanski as their new neighbours at No 11.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to the meat of the evening. Why should we choose one lot over the other? Alas, the people who seemed to have the least clue were the speakers, except perhaps Matt Goodwin, who, truth be told, is a bit of a one trick pony. Everything according to Matt was down to immigration. Now, I’m not saying that excessive immigration hasn’t made most things much worse, but as everyone in the room understood the problem, what we wanted were cures not diagnoses. We all know what’s wrong, what we want is someone to fix it.

The debate was overseen by Isabel Hardman, who turned out to be made of pretty stern stuff, giving Danny Kruger quite a mauling for getting her name wrong; does she look like an Imogen? Though Kruger has the faraway look of the kind of man who gets everyone’s name wrong.

As to why you should prefer one party over the other, the arguments presented were pretty thin. Nick Timothy thought that Reform had an absence of history. He seemed mildly outraged that any of us could abandon the party of Pitt the Younger. Curiously, when asked later in the debate what he most envied about Reform he said their youth and freedom!

Claire Coutinho perhaps had the best line of the night when she pointed out that Reform now counted more Tories in its front rank who’d overseen the Boriswave, than were now in the Shadow Cabinet! I did a bit of mental maths and came up with Braverman, Jenrick, Zahawi and Kruger. She might be right, it’s a close-run thing. Either way it simply reinforces the point that, to use one of George Galloway’s more colourful phrases, they’re just two cheeks of the same arse.

After a while I switched most of my attention to the audience, minor celebrity spotting, though apart from David Starkey, it gets increasingly difficult to be sure who you’re looking at, so ravaged by Mounjaro are they! Not for nothing is Michael Gove, the Editor of the Spectator, now affectionately known as Michael Wegovy. I had my suspicions about both Danny Kruger and Nick Timothy too.

Matt Goodwin seemed to be cut from a slightly different cloth than the other three, but then he was something of the outsider, not having sat around the same ministerial table for years. But even with Matt, despite his focus on migration, he still found it within himself to distance himself from Rupert Lowe on the grounds that he is too fixated on immigration.

One might have expected the issue of immigration to be a dividing line between the Tories and Reform but that didn’t really come out in any specific policy discussions. What’s more, comments made by the rather wonderful Tory MP Katie Lam during a recent interview with Michael Wegovy and Madeline Grant (Quite Right) where she quite happily discussed the prospect of 600,000 migrants leaving these shores, suggest that on this topic, too, there’s not a cigarette paper’s thickness between the positions of the two parties.

The only substantial arguments made by either side boiled down to the Conservatives’ history of betrayal, to which both Timothy and Coutinho pleaded guilty. And for Reform, it readily agreed that it lacked experience of governing, but was working on it.

Perhaps the highlight of the night was a question from a young man (there were a pleasingly large number of young people in the audience) whose accent made Jacob Rees-Mogg sound like a docker. He asked something about the monarchy. It didn’t really matter what his question was: to hear his voice meant you knew exactly where his sentiments lay, and once again the party speakers all sang King Charles’s praises in harmony.

It was a fun night. Lighthearted and friendly, but in that very bonhomie lies the potential for disaster. There are clear regional preferences for Reform and the Conservatives. The Conservatives don’t have a hope in the old ‘red wall seats’, Reform doesn’t stand an earthly in the Home Counties.

The obvious criticisms are self-evidently true. The Conservatives are guilty of the most disastrous betrayals. Reform lacks experience. But the alternative is too awful to contemplate.

In 1909 the Conservatives joined forces with the Liberal Unionists to form the Conservative and Unionist Party. At some point in the next few years, we need to see a coming together to witness the birth of the ‘Conservative and Reform Party’. We can’t allow synthetic policy differences and the personal egos of the leaders to condemn the country to five more years of Progressive ruin.