Michael Ashcroft

And the Tory party, I think, is now, you know, there's a big debate in the Tory party as to whether it's going to be worse to have a Labour government or a reform government.

And we know from Lord Ashcroft's polling that if Kemi and Nigel agreed on a pact before the election, there would be a huge tranche of Tory voters who would leave for the Lib Dems.

That's the reality.

This is not a really conservative party.

Uh, we can see that the Tories are on 20, Reform are on 22.

Uh, I can find an opinion where the Tories are, are quite a bit back from Reform, uh, but I can find, uh, a more in common where the Tories are leading Reform, and I can find a Lord Ashcroft where the Tories are leading Reform.

So, you know, the, you could argue that, uh, that it's a kind of photo finish for second place between the Tories and Reform.

Uh, so in the locals, uh, the Tories got twice as many votes as Reform, um, in, in, in Camden, and, uh, now they're doing better in the nationals.

If you move to the future, the Conservatives tend to do a little bit better.

I think that's the way Lord Ashcroft does his polling.

He asks, who would you vote for in a future election? That does seem to give the Conservatives a bounce.

But I think until, as I say, until the Conservatives can convince right-leaning voters that They are their best bet of defeating Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

So basically, System1, I don't like their bullying, um, attitude towards, um, uh, takeovers.

And of course, Lord Ashcroft, as we talked about last week, has been v- highly critical of them even though he's a big shareholder in both the companies.

So who knows? I, I don't think it really matters if the, if System1 is left in limbo because it's obvious from reading both companies' RNSs that the two companies, Brave Bison and System1, are very closely linked and are working together commercially already.

So Brave Bison will almost certainly end up owning it.

But also every Restore voter should vote for reform because we're basically the same anyway.

But what about reform and the conservatives? Can they unite instead? Well, of course it's the dream of Lord Ashcroft who would like to see nothing more than a Yoruba woman elected prime minister of the United Kingdom.

When presented with a conservative and reform pre-election pact though, Labour's potential vote share goes up to almost 50% due to tactical voting.

So what ends up happening is, if you say the Conservatives and Reform should unite as a united right, as the slot merchants of the Telegraph keep suggesting in their attacks on Restore Britain, what ends up happening is you galvanise the left behind Andy Burnham and make it much more likely that you get a Labour supermajority, again, than you do combining the Conservative and Reform vote.

And those are the people that Reform, well, at one point at least, were most likely to win back.

but have now been sequestered firmly in the Restore camp as cemented by the constant attacks by Stand Up to Racism, which, until just last week, Reform were tacitly cheering on by saying, well, Restore's rhetoric basically invites this kind of violence.

And Lord Ashcroft found this.

He found there are fewer Conservative fair-weather voters, mainly because it's an older party, it's a part of older people's identity, there are plenty of Conservatives like David Starkey, for example, who acknowledges all the problems the party has, but in his soul still wants to be called a Tory.

Obviously, we have lots of friends in Restore as well.

Interesting, though, of course, if you look at Lord Ashcroft's polling, if the Tories and Reform did a pre-election pact, apparently they would end up with fewer votes than if they didn't have a pact.

So it just goes to show you, if you're going to have an alliance, it does need to be with Restore.

rather than with the Tories.

I think maybe they need to stop trying to be quite so aggressive.

And that was the advice from Lord Ashcroft, wasn't it? Anyway, very interesting.

But, as I've flagged here, Brave Bison are sitting on a very nice profit.

for their system one shares.

Uh, so I left, and then they made a few more acquisitions.

And then John left, and then Michael Ashcroft stepped in and bought about 40% of the company.

And because he, 'cause of his political background.

Mm.

We don't really know what's going to happen here.

And one of my readers, I'm grateful to, I can't remember the name, who linked to some extremely critical comments that Lord Ashcroft had made about Brave Bison's management.

Now, bearing in mind, he's a substantial shareholder in both Brave Bison and System One, he has vehemently uh criticized brave bison for its approach and its attitude and towards the director so i was staggered at that uh that's really bizarre isn't it i mean he is an odd character let's be clear but uh even by his standards that struck me as a pretty remarkable uh thing for him to say so uh

Yeah, no, it's a really, really good point that your reader flagged, because what that means to me anyway, is that basically Theo and Ollie Green of Great Bison have actually tried to put, you know, would like to put more cash on the table to actually get this deal over the line.

I mean, lots of Liberal Democrat votes are now on the left, but you can see there's a chunk willing to vote on the right.

The, the other thing that I think is interesting is that this week, along with this, there was some polling from Lord Ashcroft, which I thought was very interesting, which looked at a Tory Reform pact.

And what really struck me, again, I think it backs up these numbers, is the number of Tories who say they wouldn't vote for that pact.

They wouldn't vote for the party in those circumstances.