ConservativeHome

This is the last day of the Conservative Party conference, but also the final day of the conference season, so, uh, we've survived.

I'm joined by a very special guest now, the former chief executive of Conservative Home, director of political engagement at Total Politics, and more importantly, my husband, Angus Parsad Wyatt.

Welcome to the podcast.

Very good to be here.

The question is, can you make it 2029 rather than 2034?

And talking of fives, I mean, last night, Tally, we were both at the Conservative Home drinks, the 1922 drinks, with crème de la crème of the parliamentary party, and Kemi Badenoch, I mean, talking about the change from a year ago, was practically purring, she was so confident in her speech.

Um, tell us about that and the mood in the room.

Yeah, I mean, she, she was buzzing.

It's interesting for someone who is likely to run on a manifesto that keeps the triple lock, let alone somebody who signed off on Kwasi Kwarteng's infamous economy crashing mini budget, to lecture anyone else on fiscal prudence.

It's even more interesting for someone who in 2021 [chuckles] wrote an article in Conservative Home, where he made the explicit argument for the exact reform that Andy Burnham is proposing, claiming that uprating the state pension by either the rate of inflation or 2.5% would be, quote, "protecting pensioners against the rising cost of living whilst shielding those of working age from what would be an unfair additional tax burden", a statement that I agree with.

But how can the Tories justify to themselves this brazen level of cognitive dissonance? Well, this might have something to do with it.

If we look at this poll from last week, it shows that literally half their voters are 65 and over, with precious little support from anyone under 40, yet Labour still holds at least some sway with voters across all age demographics.

I think that's all it comes down to.

Are we kicking an industry when it's down? There was an interesting piece, which I'm going to plug, by our new spokesman, Maeve Halligan, over at our friends at Conservative Home.

And it was a piece about the Sydney Sweeney advert, which everyone is talking about.

I mean, everyone is talking about it.

So I have no idea why the Tories would ever dream of jumping into bed with the Green Party.

But I heard on Good Authority, because I was writing for Conservative Home at the time, and I was... looking at all the councils and I was doing some investigation.

I went to quite a few different council annual general meetings to write for Conservative Home.

And they told me, well, the Conservative groups there refused to speak to me because they already knew who I was from my tweets about Worcestershire.

so they did not want to speak to me if there was any rumors of them jumping into bed of the greens now none of them did it but i think quite a few parties um tory parties locally were put out and angry that they didn't have a chance to get into bed of the greens because that meant that they would have been able to get into administration and they would have been able to shut out reform uk whereas The simple thing to do, in my view, get into Bedworth Reform UK.

Now Tim's been doing the media rounds ever since he resigned from reform.

You may remember Tim Montgomery also ran Conservative Home for many years.

He was a Tory boy.

And then he suddenly left.