Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer’s battle of weaknesses

Good morning. My thanks to Simeon, Jim, Anna, Lucy, Miranda and Georgina for filling in while I was away. (And doubly so to Georgina for both arranging cover and providing it via a fascinating piece on AI and potholes yesterday.)

As I shake off the holiday rust today, More In Common and YouGov have both published some thought-provoking new polling. Some thoughts on that below.

Lost leader

How have Kemi Badenoch’s first 100 days as leader of the opposition played out? Not well. As Lucy Fisher reveals in a terrific piece on Badenoch’s first 100 days, party figures believe she has until the local elections in 2026 to turn things around. A new poll from YouGov that was released to mark the milestone underlines the scale of the challenge.

She trails Keir Starmer, whose own ratings have hit record lows since he took office, on who would make the best prime minister, but ties with Nigel Farage. Given how important this measure has tended to be, it’s an important reminder that as it stands Labour is the best-placed political party, despite its many inherited and self-inflicted difficulties.

But the most alarming part of this poll for the Conservative leader is not how she performs against Starmer or Farage. It’s how she performs against Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader. It is very hard to see how the Conservatives can govern alone without winning back most of the 59 seats that the Liberal Democrats gained from them in England last year.

On top of that, bluntly, it’s not clear to me what the point of the Conservative party is if it can’t win seats such as, say, the six out of the 11 Surrey constituencies the Lib Dems hold. Or Hazel Grove. Or Maidenhead, formerly Theresa May’s seat. If it has lost all of its seats in Oxfordshire and now holds just two of the eight constituencies of Cambridgeshire, what is the Tory party for? Isn’t it meant to be a party that is, broadly speaking, in favour of residents in places such as Surrey, Hazel Grove, or Bicester and Woodstock and creates more people like them? The challenge isn’t just that the path to a Conservative government runs through winning back Lib Dem seats — it’s that the very purpose of such a government depends on it.

Of course, parties can win power even if they don’t have that clear sense of focus, which was lacking in both the Conservatives in 2019 and Labour in 2024, in my view. But that absence partly explains why the Tories got into difficulties last time and it is part of why Labour is struggling in office.

When I went on holiday, the Labour government was laser-focused on growth and the economy, apparently. I return to learn that this focus has some AstraZeneca-sized blind spots.

Part of the Labour government’s problem is that, in the absence of a set of clear principles and aims from the centre, inevitably, what dominates is “what do voters really care about”. Most voters do not care about growth in the abstract, and do not think it will benefit them, according to this new poll by More in Common.

To be frank, there’s little to say about this poll other than “they’re wrong!” Whether you are a pensioner voting for Reform or a graduate in the private rented sector voting for Reform, whatever you want more or less of from the government becomes more achievable if we have higher growth and higher tax revenues. But that scepticism about growth means that even easy measures to get the latter become controversial. See, for instance, public opinion on not going ahead with further plans to change the tax status of so-called “non-doms”.

Again, and sorry to be a stuck record: people are kidding themselves here! Non-doms paid about £8.49bn in tax in the year to April 2022. People do not really want to have to find £8.5bn of tax rises or of spending cuts just to feel better about fairness in the UK’s tax system.

But if your government’s only guiding principle is electoral expediency then you will end up being an administration that uses its fiscal firepower not to try and drive economic growth but for whatever is most electorally salient at any given time: even though that is no way to try and win an election that is five years away.

100 days into Badenoch’s leadership, the difficult truth for both the government and the opposition is that their biggest assets are one another.

Now try this

I had a lovely time in Sri Lanka: it really was a wonderful wedding. Also we had the delightful comedy Theater Camp among the in-flight entertainment options, so that was nice too.

Top stories today

• Moody Blue | UK Labour peer Lord Maurice Glasman has called for the attorney-general, Lord Richard Hermer, to be removed from his post, as tensions grow between the socially conservative and progressive arms of Keir Starmer’s party. In an interview with the New Statesman, Glasman said of Hermer: “He is the absolute archetype of an arrogant, progressive fool.”

• Ryan ‘deeply regrets’ comments on WhatsApp | A second Labour MP has been suspended from the parliamentary party over offensive comments shared on a WhatsApp group. Oliver Ryan was a member of the same message group as former health minister Andrew Gwynne.

• Keeping cool | The UK has played down the impact on the British economy of US tariffs on steel and aluminium, even as Britain’s steel industry warned that Donald Trump’s proposals would be “devastating”.

• I’ll be the judge of that | Assisted dying cases will not have to be signed off by High Court judges under changes to landmark legislation proposed by the author of the bill. Today, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater will submit what she calls a “judge plus” amendment to her bill and argues in a Guardian op-ed that the new measure will make it “more robust”.