Get the Bloody Tories Out!
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week is America's Independence Day holiday week, so I'm hopping across the pond to the mothership, Great Britain, which is holding its national parliamentary election on July 4th. I'll be joined by two conservative commentators who will explore with me the sources of the impending Tory disaster and speculate about the future of British politics. Let's dive in.

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One of the things that you're going to see is that there's not going to be an ad of the week this week because there are no television ads in Britain. That's right. They are banned by law. So there aren't 30 second ads. Instead, what you have is regular campaigning, the old fashioned way through door knocking. People do use social media and there are short ads, but for them, a short ad isn't a 30 second hit. It's like a two and a half minute clip.

They also have five-minute party broadcasts, which are mandated by law and allocated to the parties, which traditionally have been where the parties put their big efforts into. But I'm not going to devote five minutes of your time to listening to something that ultimately is not decisive. What's decisive is the daily to and fro that is covered in the news. And people do follow the news to some degree more closely than they do in the United States.

So what are we going to see on Election Day over in Britain? Well, Britain has 650 members of the House of Commons. They are elected in single member districts, just like we elect our house. And they are elected in one round first past the post. Whoever gets the most votes wins, whether it's a majority or not, just like the United States House.

But that's where the similarities end. And that's because, as they say in the Ted Lasso show, how many countries are there in this country? The answer is four. Northern Ireland elects 18 members. They have an entirely different party system. There, the fracture is between Catholics who want to in some way rejoin with Ireland and Protestants who want to maintain the union. And each of those divisions is subdivided into two separate parties with one centrist party, the Alliance, that is trying to bridge the gap.

None of this is going to matter much because the Sinn Fein members, the Republicans in the Catholic neighborhoods won't take their seats even as they win them, because that would mean pledging fealty to a British crown that they don't think is legitimate. And the unionists who once supported the Theresa May Tory government won't come into play this time because the Tories are going to be gobsmacked losers.

Let me jump there to that overall assessment. The polls have been showing since the beginning of this campaign that this is going to be a massive labor majority. The labor government

that is going to come in will come in with arguably between 400 and 500 seats in the 650 member seat comments. They won't get it with a huge electoral landslide. The polls show that they're getting anywhere between the high 30s and the mid 40s of the vote. But when the vote is split so many ways, as I'm going to get to in a minute, that means that they can win a lot of those marginal seats with 33, 35, 37 percent of the vote.

Why is it split? Well, first of all, let's go to those other two countries. In Scotland, the Tories are an afterthought. The Conservatives are polling in the low teens. They might win a seat or two in the 50-something that Scotland elects. But there the question is between the Scottish Nationalist Party that wants independence and the Labour Party. There the question is who wants to continue the fight for independence and who wants to be part of a governing English-British majority.

It looks like Labour, which traditionally had been a power in Scotland, is going to regain the majority as the Scottish nationalists have lost steam. They will still win a minority of seats, but it looks like Labour is going to win the vast majority of seats in Glasgow, and the industrial belt, which has been their heartland when they do well. So then we go to England and Wales. Wales elects 32 seats, and there it's going to be almost exclusively a Labour victory. It's always been a Labour victory.

because of the coal mining industry. A couple of seats on the fringe will go for the Blyde-Cumry party, which is the Welsh National Party. Some...

People say that the Tories won't have a single seat. They might win one or two very rural areas, but it's going to be a massive labor majority. But most of the seats come from England, and this is where it gets interesting. Because in England, there are four parties. There's the Labor Party, there's the Conservative Party, there's the Liberal Democrats, and there are Reform. There is a Green Party that's expected to win a couple of seats and get 5% of the vote. But

The polls show that in England, the Tories are running in the low 20s. Reform is running in the high teens and the Liberal Democrats are getting 10 percent or so of the vote. Who are these parties? Well, reform is basically a populist conservative party headed by Nigel Farage that is attractive to the sort of person who likes politics.

Populist conservatives everywhere. They are economically downscaled. They are less educated They tend to be in smaller towns or in places where the future happened yesterday places that were once vibrant and are now Struggling the Liberal Democrats are the polar opposite of that They draw most from well-to-do suburbanites who don't want to go all the way over to labor but find the Tories to be too conservative and

The polls suggest that while the reform will get more votes, the Liberal Democrats will get more seats. Why? It's because their support is concentrated in areas of the affluent suburbs of London and in the southeast, whereas reform is relatively spread out.

But if you believe the polls, then what you're going to see is, as I said at the top of this, that Labour wins a lot of narrow victories because of this multiple-way split. And then you have what's called tactical voting, which is, say, in some of these suburban seats, Labour voters will vote for the Liberal Democrat because that's how they beat the Tory. In some of the other seats, Liberal Democratic voters will vote for Labour because that's how they will beat the Tory. The animosity, as we will explore in our interviews with my friends and associates from Britain,

Between the reform voting and the conservative voting, former Tory is so deep in this election, there will be no tactical voting to help either. In fact, the point is to beat the other side. So what we're going to see, if the polls are correct, is one of the historic elections in British history, with the British Conservative Party set to do the worst in their story.

storied history, a new party reform, to do one of the best first-time efforts in British history, but perhaps not winning many seats, and a Labour majority that will be one of the largest, if not the largest, they have ever held.

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And here to talk with me about this and other things about the upcoming election is Tim Montgomery. Tim once was the chief of staff to the conservative leader of the House of Commons, founder of Conhome, columnist of Times of London, frequent media personality who has tracked the ins and outs of the Tory party for his entire adult life. Tim, welcome to this side of the pond on Beyond the Polls.

It's wonderful to be with you, Henry. And what you haven't, of course, said is that we're also friends.

And you haven't revealed to your listeners what my nickname is for you, because you have an unofficial knighthood from the old country, don't you? Well, that is true. I mean, it has to be unofficial because our Republican Constitution forbids us from taking any sort of titles of nobility. But I am going to say we have been friends for well over a decade, and you have helped me in many occasions, giving me entrees to...

British politics and publishing me at some of your entities which you have run. But since you are my liege lord, and to which I owe many peppercorns, I know I'm many overdue with my peppercorns and lilies and the medieval brands. I think you should tell my listeners what my nickname is in the fair kingdom.

Well, there was this football pundit who used to know all of the football statistics in a Premier League that I know you love. You understand, like few Americans do, that football is football, not American football. Soccer, I think, a lot of your colleagues call it. And this person was called Stato. And I call you Sir Stato.

knighted for service to political statistical commentary. But we should probably stop indulging ourselves now and get down to business, shouldn't we? Yes, well, I think any of my listeners would recognize the statto and they forgive the knighthood that has been conferred. Tottenham Hotspur, go. But...

You and I were together in 2019. I was then working for the Washington Post. I convinced my editors that the coming election was going to be big news, in part because it was going to presage the demographic shifts in the American election. It was 10 o'clock at the Harry when the polls closed and the BBC listed the exit poll. Stonking majority. Largest since the Thatcher era. The Tory era was in.

Let's start on a high note. Why did that happen? Well, some of your listeners might remember that Britain had been through an extraordinary period. Brexit had passed by the 52%, 48% in 2016.

And Parliament, this is my account of it, others would say it was a little bit more complicated than that, but basically what happened was Parliament refused to implement the results of that referendum. And the Parliament was in deadlock, basically.

People were angry. Relationships between families were being broken. You couldn't turn on the telly without Brexit and the implementation of the referendum being a subject of enormous controversy. And Boris Johnson came along

And he promised to end this mess. And the Tory party went from being absolutely defeated in the European elections of 2019, actually finishing with single digits in the opinion polls, to actually winning, as you say, perhaps the largest parliamentary, well, the largest parliamentary majority for the Conservatives since Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s. And, um,

Boris Johnson seemed to get that the political tectonic plates were shifting, that, to put it crudely, poorer people were moving right and richer people were moving left. And he promised to equalise politics.

to some extent, the divisions in the UK. London is one of the United Kingdom's great assets. It's a global city in a relatively small country. But because it's in a relatively small country, it means that a lot of life and economic growth is sucked into the southeast, away from the rest of the country.

And although people like me and lots of people did vote to leave the European Union because of reasons of sovereignty in 2016, a lot of other people just wanted to reset the United Kingdom. They wanted a different economic settlement. And Boris Johnson promised to give them that. And he was helped in winning that election by the fact that the Labour leader then was someone called Jeremy Corbyn,

who was the most left-wing leader, the most anti-British leader that the Labour Party had put forward in two or three generations. So we have a situation to earn my title of nobility, is that for the history of public polling, the Tories had a sloped support base, which is, say,

In Britain, you poll and ask people and group them into social class, AB at the top, DE being the most disadvantaged, and it was always a straight slope, that the AB was the best, the DE was the lowest, and the level might go up and down depending on how well the tourists are doing, but the slope would be the same, pretty steep.

And by 2019, it inverted. That for the first time in polling history, the Tories got slightly more support at the lowest end of the socioeconomic structure than at the upper end. Demonstrating that the people had heard on both ends, which is to say the people at the upper classes who saw that

If the Tories won, their ox was going to be gored a little bit or their oxen were going to be reined in a little bit. And the people on the bottom who believed Boris when he said he was going to build 50 new hospitals, 50,000 new police officers, they're levelling up, all the stuff that I loved, very frankly, to put my cards on. Henry, was that an attempt at a Boris Johnson impersonation? It was a very bad one, don't you think? Yeah.

It was as bad as Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, I think, trying to impersonate a Cockney chimney sweep. This is the problem. So much of American understanding of British accents either comes from Alastair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre or Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.

To which I can simply say that Rex Harrison, as Professor Henry Higgins, had it right when he talks about English. You know, why can't the English teach their children how to speak? And my fair lady says, whereas in America, they haven't used it for years. So fast forward, Boris is toppled as leader through a series of attacks.

political missteps and prevarications with his conference. You have Liz Truss, who is the Prime Minister of 48 Days, who famously could not stay in office longer than a head of lettuce could wilt on the internet. And Rishi Sunak takes office basically promising to reset. And instead, the polls say, as I said in my introduction, that the Tories are going on track, if they are to be believed, for the worst loss in their

180 year history why how did the promise of 2019 unravel to go from the highest of highs to absolutely the lowest of lows well how long have you got henry the the the the collapse 45 seconds and then we have to cut the commercial it's america

The collapse of the British Conservative Party is going to be studied for many years to come, I think. It really is unprecedented. We like to think of ourselves, I'm still a Conservative, we like to think of ourselves as one of the most successful political parties in the Western world, if not the most successful. We have governed the United Kingdom for two thirds of the post-war period, roughly. Now,

There may be, and this is my theory, there's lots of ways of answering your question, but here's one. Is there a relationship between the fact that the Conservative Party that used to be the most successful is now declining faster than almost any other mainstream political party? And I would say there absolutely is. And it's almost like the things that serve the Conservative Party electorally for a long time

like narrow targeting, like pragmatism when it comes to beliefs, like a politician trained to speak to the 24-7 news cycle, like a party that...

did an awful lot of targeting in how it approached elections. I think the things that worked for a particular climate have stopped working. Voters see through these skills now. And we can look at specific failures of the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson, although he's still loved by a lot of people on the right,

He was one of the people that broke the immigration pledge, which is probably the biggest pledge broken by the Tories over its 14-year period in office. David Cameron, who came to power in 2010, beginning the period of conservative rule, said that he would reduce immigration from the net hundreds of thousands a year to the net tens of thousands. Will immigration levels have become higher

since we left the European Union. They're higher than when Tony Blair, the Labour leader, was in power. So there's all sorts of things that have gone wrong. Liz Truss took risks with the economy. Rishi Sunak wasn't very good in politics. There are lots of individual reasons why the Tories have failed, but I would like to suggest that it's something in how the Conservative Party works

operates that certain political skills have stopped working and i think in in in sort of support of my argument i would say look at what's happening in france at the moment look what's happening in your own country look at germany look at italy most of the mainstream political parties have got used to doing politics in a certain way they're all failing

And so it's easy to be parochial about the British Conservative Party. And I can list many reasons why the British Conservative Party has failed. But Henry, this is where you've been brilliant over the years, is you've charted the rise of populism. And I think people keep thinking it's gone away. It hasn't gone away. Not at all. Because the mainstream political parties still keep behaving differently.

not just how they always have, perhaps worse than they used to. And when they get a sort of populist have a setback, they almost revert. Well, they don't almost, they do revert to their old ways and practices.

Yeah, I wrote a copy when you founded UnHerd and I worked for you. I wrote an essay called It's No Longer Left Versus Right, It's Ins Versus Outs. And this is 2017, talking about how upper class people were congealing together, even though they differed on things, and lower class people were congealing together. And one said the system is basically...

and we need to defend it, and the other said the system is basically not. And one of the examples I used was Emmanuel Macron, who, despite his apparent large victory, actually got very lucky, and time has run out on him, as we saw in the French elections over the weekend. Why? And what excited me about 2019 as a personal conservative, although I try to be very non-concerned

not let my personal wishes interfere with my Stato abilities, is that it seemed that finally the established center-right party had adapted to the realities of a large number of people, many of whom formerly were on the left, but many of whom were their loyal supporters, who said, "This isn't working anymore. We need a reset."

Why is it that almost as soon as the pandemic got got solved the Tory leadership under Johnson not just on immigration but on things like taxing the working class to limit the amount of money that rich upper middle-class people paid for Long-term elderly care which you called social care in Britain in other words reverse redistribution was the

of the Tory party. Why did they throw it away so quickly, having been so easily, not easily, but so almost put to the death in 2019 with the loss in the UK elections, looking at a death experience coming back, and then within 18 months seeming to just revert to old habits and thinking, nothing to see here. We're the party of the ends, always have been, always will be.

I think because there are all sorts of explanations, but I would go back to that point I made about the Conservative Party governing Britain for two-thirds of the post-war period. So basically, if you are someone in politics who is ambitious and wants to join the political party that will most likely get you into office or into parliament, you join the Conservative Party. Now,

Some of those people will be conservatives, but some may just be careerists. Some may be opportunists. Some may be pragmatists. But I think we reached a tippy point. This is back, which I perhaps haven't particularly well explained, but this is back to my point that the parties, the reason why the party's success are now reasons why it has fallen so fast is that that pragmatism, those...

Those people who looked like they were good at being ministers, those people that sort of protected the consensus and the successes of Britain suddenly became a problem when actually you needed something different. And we do need something different in the Western world at the moment. The Western world is failing. Its economy is getting slower. People don't like the settlement that they're getting from the welfare state.

And we're putting masses of money into university, but we're not putting it into vocational education, for example. The climate change agenda that's almost completely accepted by the elites, just as immigration, hurts the poorer communities that voted for Brexit. And what we had really was we failed to really understand why people were voting the way they were.

And although the parliamentary party eventually was forced to pass Brexit, it still had all its old beliefs. There weren't enough sufficient conservatives, there weren't a sufficient number of new conservatives. You had all sorts of people who were still completely signed up to the climate change, high immigration, tax, tax the income of people but not the assets of people. You had people completely sort of

dislocated from the new constituency that was so angry. And, um,

I think that failure, really, for the Conservative Party to, the personnel of the Conservative Party to get it at a core level explains why, you know, in part we're in the mess we are about to be in two or three days' time. And I think it's true of a lot of the mainstream parties throughout the world. They don't get it. They're living off an ideology that is no longer appropriate for our times.

Yeah, I do not want to blame the Conservative Party exclusively. It's just, it's frustrating that it actually seemed to have solved the problem and then threw it away, whereas most of the parties in the world have never really adopted the compromise solution. So they've been rejecting it throughout. But yes, this is a problem, particularly on the right, but also on the center-left, that faces its own out-populism. You know, you take a look at France, where the new popular front is...

if not dominated, strongly moved by Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, which is effectively a left-wing Marxist-derived populist change-the-economy party, as well as change the culture and so forth. They're the mirror image of Le Pen in politics.

of the existing consensus, even as they offer wildly different policy prescriptions. So no, I do not want to single out the Tories. Everybody doesn't get it. This is a global problem in the West. And it's why populism keeps rising, because as long as you have democracy, people who are willing to give you some time to adapt when they see you're not going to adapt eventually say, well, to heck with you. And I would have said a stronger word if we weren't being...

Record it. And this is this, though, gets to the next question, which is that if the reason why they couldn't have done it is fundamentally they refuse to see it and they don't want to because they're the old whether they're ideologues attached to an old system or they're pragmatists who are careerist and their career, frankly, is focused on the ins and not the outs.

It's almost as if it was inevitable that this would happen to the 2019 majority, that you really had to understand what you had done in 2019 in order to continue it. And fundamentally, you thought it was just a minor tactical blip, and then the old ways come back. You were never going to solve the problem. The magnitude of the defeat may not have been as great, but it was always going to happen.

I think that's right, yes. I think it may have taken us longer to decline, but if fundamentally we didn't understand why people were unhappy with the settlement that they had, it would eventually come unwound. There are particular reasons why the Caserta decline has been so acute that are different from the general global situation. The Casertas have been in power for 14 years.

Five years, those were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats at first. But any project that goes on for 14 years, people get lazy, they get complacent, their sleaziness increases. And that has been particularly the case with the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson, he made his own particular contribution to this decline because in a way he was quite a Liberal Metropolitan. He

He had views on climate change and immigration that were far removed from the base. It helped him win London as mayor, but wasn't suited for the rest of the country. The challenge for the Conservative Party going forward, Henry, you don't quite know the scale of the defeat that's about to come, but it will be the biggest error in British polling history if we get anything other than a massive Conservative defeat, is I'm already hearing certain Conservatives say, well, she's never got rid of Boris.

or Liz Truss was let down by the Bank of England. She wasn't that bad after all, or, you know, Rishi Sunak was all him because, you know, he wasn't very good at politics. The fact is that

There are multiple failures by multiple people in multiple ways. And one of the reasons why I hope that the Conservative Party will not rush into choosing a leader is because there isn't a messiah waiting in the wings. It isn't just about a leader. It's about policy. It's about organisation. It's about strategy. It's about intellectual engagement with the country's problem. And we need to pause and rethink our whole structures, our whole outlook. What is conservatism?

in 2025. At the end of this decade, it will be 50 years, 50 years since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. And if they were alive today, just as they did in the 1970s, they would be absolutely undertaking a massive intellectual exercise with think tanks internationally, with authors, to think about

what conservatism should be now. So much of the movement, I think, in your country, Henry, as well as mine, they wouldn't be Thatcherites or Reaganites. They don't sound Thatcherites. Yeah, they are... Let me put it this way. Mrs. Thatcher's, the second volume of her autobiography, Path to Power, written just a few years after she left office, was already examining what she'd got wrong.

and was talking about what was missing. There was a chapter on social factorism, talked about the rise of crime, talked about the breakdown of the family, talked about the fact that working class voters hadn't been included enough in the housing settlement that she...

She was already modernising. And if she'd been at the height of her powers now, they would not be arguing now for what they did in the 1970s. But people who think that they are the standard torchbearers of these two politicians are stuck in 1970s thinking. We have to get a move from that because they would have been removed from it themselves.

No discussion of the coming debacle on Thursday would be complete without talking about the party that is luring a large number of 2019 Tory voters, and that's reform. In the United States, casual conservatives know Nigel Farage. They don't know Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss. They think that he is...

indistinguishable from a conservative, have a difficult time understanding why he's got this separate party. Tell us about reform and tell us why, you know, if the polls are right, reform plus the Tories will be roughly equal to labor. And the polls tell us that something like 75% of reform voters come from 2019 Tories, which is a clear sign of the split of the 2019 coalition.

How did this party come to be? And why are so many 2019 Tories voters flocking to it? I think immigration is the big issue.

the Tory failure to control immigration that I've already mentioned. I think it's a sense that the people who lead the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak, all the rumour, I think you're in California at the moment, aren't you? I am. Yes, I am. And all the rumours are that when Rishi Sunak loses the general election on Thursday, he's going to be heading your way.

You know, he's got a house in Santa Monica and he's a very wealthy, very clever tech pro type person. He used to work at Goldman Sachs. And there's a sense amongst a lot of conservative voters, not just towards Rishi Sunak, but towards a lot of the conservative leadership, they're not really on our side. They don't really get us. They don't understand our problem. They're too wealthy. They're too internationalist. They're too metropolitan.

They don't understand how hard life is for us, particularly outside of London. And Nigel Farage, uh,

probably the man who's most responsible for Brexit happening, the nearest I think we have in Britain to a Trump-like figure, even though he's privately educated and used to work in the city, he gives the impression that he's not one of the elites. He talks like normal people talk. A lot of politicians, the most successful politicians, they have a prop, and Nigel Farage's prop is a pint.

of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And he's, during the England games that have been taking place in the Euro championship, you know, he's mobbed in pubs by people wearing England shirts, football, you know, he's a man. And he is saying to the conservative voter, I'm the real thing. And the people who currently say they're conservatives are not. And so, yeah,

One of the reasons why the Conservative Party was as successful as it has been over the last 70 years was generally in Britain, the right's been united and the left have been divided. There's been three or four parties on the left and only really one party on the right. Even when Mrs Thatcher was winning her big majorities in the 1980s, she was only getting the low 40s percentage point. Whereas if you added up the Liberals, the STPs, they then were the Social Democratic Party, and Labour, they were getting well over 50%.

in total. And so if the right is divided in Britain, then that Tory success story of decade after decade is lost. And so the primary task, as soon as defeat happens on Thursday, will be the re-knitting of the centre-right vote.

Well, my penultimate... Well, that was actually going to be my penultimate question, is if the reason why the split happened is because the people who hold the high command and roughly, you know, probably a third to a half of the Tory voters...

actually don't want the alliance with the working class if it means significant compromises on things like maybe I need to spend more money to help them rather than to help me. Maybe I need to get rid of some of my quaintness of my villages so that housing can be built near economically vibrant areas. If the problem is actually that the Tory elite doesn't want the alliance,

How can you get the alliance back together?

Well, that's a huge question, and you're right. There was a by-election, which I think will be seen to be one of the more famous ones in this sort of whole history. It was in Chesham and Amersham, which is a sort of a Tory seat, or was a Tory seat, in the prosperous south of England. And the Tories lost it badly when the MP, after the MP, Cheryl Gillan, died. Won by the Liberal Democrats, who basically opposed house building. And they also opposed that signature issue of

Boris Johnson, which was called levelling up. And levelling up was meant to say, we're not going to take money away from you, we're going to build everyone up to your level. But voters smelled a rat. And they said, this is inevitably because the economy is not necessarily fast growing, you can take money away from us, and you're going to give it to your new voters. And the Tory party immediately started to get scared and thought,

Can we afford to lose our traditional voters by wooing our new voters? And there hasn't been really a serious attempt to reconcile those two things since that by-election. And Henry, I don't know the answer to your question. I don't know whether we can do it, but I'm not sure we've ever even tried. Well, I'm going to, my final question is going to be prediction. You know, the American, I know that you,

find it difficult to understand our national game baseball and you much prefer your very simple easy to understand game of cricket but I'm going to I want to press leave now at this disgusting disgraceful remarks you've made but out of our friendship I will forgive you on this occasion thank you my liege I'll put some peppercorns on a baseball bat when I deliver them but

The American baseball catcher Yogi Bear once said that predictions are difficult, especially about the future. But I'm going to ask you to make a prediction about Thursday night. It's going to be 10 o'clock your time. I don't know where you're going to be, but you'll be watching the BBC for the exit poll. And they're very good. They won't get the exact number of seats, but they get the magnitude pretty darn close.

What share of the vote will the Tories get? What share of the vote will reform get? And how many seats in the 650-member House of Commons will the Tories win? They have, what, 338 right now? 340-something? Are you going to answer your own questions after I've answered them? Um...

Yes, I will. I will do that. I haven't. I'm going to do Mr. Stato work and publish it on Thursday morning when I do my work on X. But I will jump the queue and make a rough prediction now. OK, well, mine's going to be very rough as well. And I think and you may think this is a cop out.

But in our last worst ever defeat, well, 1997, when Tony Blair won his landslide, the Tories were reduced to 165 MPs. One thing I'll say with absolute confidence, you can remind me of these words now they've been recorded, is we'll definitely be below that level. This is going to be a worse defeat than then.

And so when that Big Ben even bombs on Thursday night and the exit poll is announced, I wouldn't be surprised if we were anything between 50 and 150 seats.

And below 50 would be even worse than I could imagine. Above 150, I will be jumping for joy because I just don't think the conservative party can get that. And if you wanted to press me and say, come on, that's a range of 100, that's not good enough, I'd go for 150.

the mean and say the median and say 100 seats. And share the votes? The Tories will be low 20s. Maybe there's a little bit of a sign. You're asking me three days ahead of polling day what I think. There is a little bit of a sign

amongst neighbours, for example, here in Salisbury, where I live, in the West Country of England, people who told me they would never vote Conservative at this election are now saying, OK, I am going to vote Conservative. There's a little bit of an uptick in the opinion polls for the Conservatives. So I think the Conservatives could get above closer to 25% than 20%. I say that incredibly cautiously. I think reform will be a good 10 points behind reform.

the conservatives um and i i'm going to be a little more pessimistic but i see everything that you've been saying um i uh i'll give a little narrower range which is i think the tories will be in the 20 to 23 percent range i think reform will be in the 18 to 21 percent range oh wow uh that uh the tories will be somewhere in the 75 to 100 seat range

Okay. The reason why I think you might be being a bit too optimistic about reform in particular, although I'm not going to quarrel with anything much you said with any confidence, but I think if you look at, for example, the number of by-elections which reform have contested, the opinion polls always suggest they'll do a little bit better. There's a

As you know, in America, the get out the vote operation really matters in British politics. And it's the busiest day of any political member, activists, electoral cycle. That day when you go knocking on doors, check your votes out, send them direct mail, send them emails. Have you voted yet? Ringing people up. Have you voted yet? Making sure your pledges go to the polling booth.

Reform do not have that kind of operation. And so I think the opinion polls flash them a little bit. And I think there has also been quite a number of pretty strong negative stories about reform in the last week. And I'm not sure the opinion polls have fully reflected the impact of those stories either. But maybe I'm hoping too much. And you're the number cruncher, so I'm cautious.

Well, certainly I have seen the uptick in the last three polls that have been released that all show a one or two point rise for the Tories and a one or two point drop from reform. But the most sophisticated polls, the MRPs, have yet to be released. And I will be guided in part by them as well. Well, Tim, this is, as usual, been a fascinating conversation. I always enjoy chatting with you. Where can my follow my listeners follow your work?

I think the best thing is on Twitter, sorry, Elon Musk on X. And my name, my handle is Monty, M-O-N-T-I-E. And I there link to the broadcast I do. And tune into Times Radio. If people want a nonstop 24-hour-a-day podcast,

insight into British politics and public life, Times Radio, the radio wing of the Times of London, although why I say the Times of London, there's only really one Times newspaper in my book. It's the Times of London Radio.

And there'll be extensive coverage, particularly on election night. It's sometimes difficult to get access to UK television and radio services from America, but you can get access to Times Radio for anyone who wants to follow events as they unfold.

Yes, well, I hope to be able to jump the pond and offer you my long overdue feudal offerings and buff a couple of loggers with you soon. That would be good. And as long as you don't take me to Tottenham Hotspur and make me endure watching that game again.

That team again will be... I wanted to take you to Holy Ground once in the hope of a spontaneous conversion, but I see that you are hopelessly devoted to that team that is an example of American capitalism, rapaciously gone wild, the Glazer-owned Manchester United. Henry, it's been lovely talking to you. Cheers. I'm Victoria Cash, and I want to invite you to a place called Lucky Land.

where you can play over 100 social casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. So what are you waiting for? The best way to discover your luck is to spin. So go to LuckyLandSlots.com. That's LuckyLandSlots.com. And get lucky today at Lucky Land. No purchase necessary. VTW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply.

Well, the British election is obviously one that's not only going to feature a stonking Labour majority, but one which has seen something that has not been seen in many years and perhaps never as seriously as we're going to see at this time, which is a fissure on the right. Here to talk with us about that is Matt Goodwin, professor of politics at the University of Kent and the author of Matt Goodwin's Substack, which is one of the biggest substacks in the United Kingdom and an invaluable source of information about politics.

British politics and especially national populism and its impact in the United Kingdom. Matt, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Great. It's great to be with you. Thank you for having me. Well, we kind of start this story back in with Brexit and the shock to the elites that the Brexit referendum, in some sense, we start before that. You were one of the early people who noted the rise of what was then the United Kingdom Independent Party with your

with your 2014 book, was that when you came out? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Revolt on the Right. Yeah, that's basically the first book that looked at the rise of national populism in the UK, really through the prism of data and polling.

Yeah. I mean, heaven forbid what you might learn if you actually look at facts as opposed to talk with reporters in SW1. Well, absolutely. I mean, it's actually also that was really the book that took me on into the field in terms of actually interviewing Nigel Farage a lot, interviewing a lot of the the activists who really helped get.

the Brexit, what was then, you know, the emerging Brexit movement going through the 1990s and the 2000s. These were people who'd come of age under Margaret Thatcher, who'd gone through, you know, the 90s. And I interviewed a lot of those activists for that book. So for a lot of activists too, it's, you know, it was a bit of a, it was an important book, I think, for many people, because it allowed them to kind of look at all the things they've been working on over the years.

So we go from the shocking victory to increasing chaos in British politics as the Tories either were unable to or refused, depending on who you talk to, to implement the mandate of the referendum, followed by their stunning collapse in the 2019 European elections and their decision to avoid death as a party to make Boris Johnson their leader, which led to their

for biggest victory in 2019 of any conservative victory since the Margaret Thatcher era. What did the 2019 Tory majority signal had the Tories really understood? Yeah, I mean, I think essentially the 2019 big majority for Boris Johnson showed that there was enormous appetite in the country for what we might call a realigned conservative movement, a movement that basically took Brexit seriously,

that took people's desire for lower immigration seriously, that took their desire for stronger borders seriously, that took the talk of popular sovereignty seriously, the idea that true power, authority and legitimacy rests not with the elites in Westminster, but with the people in the country. And the Conservatives under Boris Johnson at least briefly tapped into that. And that's why they won this ABC majority. Now,

obviously in the five years that followed you not only had the coded pandemic and the war in ukraine but more fundamentally to this story you had a conservative party that inherited this political realignment and then showed itself uniquely incapable or unwilling to really hold on to that realignment and what you then saw over the five years from 2019 to today was really a liberal conservative party

that struggled to understand and connect with the more conservative voters that it had won over in the aftermath of Brexit. And that is essentially the backstory to what is happening this week at the general election. Do you think, looking back, obviously the pandemic arose within three months or four months after the majority completely collapsed.

put the government into reactive mode rather than proactive mode. But then they come out of the pandemic relatively early, thanks to the vaccines. And within a year or so, you can see that they either have no interest, no capability or both in actually implementing the 2019 manifesto that was the union of old Toryism with the new voting class.

Was it that they couldn't or they wouldn't? I think it was a bit of both. I think the Tory parliamentary party has always, especially in recent years, leaned more to the cultural left than the average voter. And that's especially true in the post-Brexit era, where the Conservative Party, a bit like Trump in the U.S., hoovered up a lot of working class, non-degree voters.

uh non uh big city living voters most of the people that rallied around boris johnson had voted for nigel farage in the past they came from small towns rural areas coastal communities they were often not always blue collar they typically had not gone to university many of them were middle-aged elderly very culturally conservative they want a lower migration they want to end

the illegal migration crisis on the border. They're very pessimistic about the direction of society. And so what happened essentially is they really lent their vote to Boris Johnson and said, look, you're going to now be the voice of the forgotten majority. And Johnson basically, not only was he operating in a party that was more liberal than its voters, but Johnson himself was basically a bohemian liberal. I mean, he did not really

care about anti-immigration in the way his voters did. He was pretty cosmopolitan. He liberalized the whole migration system. He certainly didn't really level up the left behind regions in any meaningful way. I briefed Boris twice. I walked out the room on both occasions feeling as though

He didn't really understand who was voting for him. He was focused on London, on pleasing liberals. He certainly didn't show much of an appetite to shake up the status quo. And so what you saw during that 19 to 24 parliament was a steady drip, drip, drip decline in levels of support for the Tories among those voters they'd won over in 2019, so much so that today,

Only about 35, 37% of them are currently planning on voting Conservative at the election this week. And about one quarter of them have fully defected over to Nigel Farage and the Reform Party. And an even larger number have actually now drifted into apathy, saying they're not going to vote at all. So what I'm saying to you is, in the space of five years, we've gone from a masterclass in how to produce a political realignment

to witnessing a masterclass in how to completely lose touch with a political realignment and breathe new life into the populist revolt that of course first exploded onto the horizon in 2016. So before we get to reform and what it is, what it represents and Nigel Farage's key role in being a catalyst, although not exclusively,

Tell us about national populism. You have another fabulous book explaining national populism. We're recording this against the backdrop of a massive first-round victory by Marine Le Pen's national rally, Rassemblement National, in the French legislative elections. Giorgio Maloney is prime minister of Italy, a party that had 2% less than a decade ago now runs...

Italy, Geert Wilders has gone from being an outcast to being the main force in the Netherlands. National populism is multinational. Tell us what's going on in our world.

Yeah, well, so in 2018, I published a book called National Populism, The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. And the argument in that book essentially was that these movements, like Trump in the US, like Marine Le Pen in France, like the Alternative for Germany, Giorgio Maloney in Italy, Nigel Farage in the UK, we argued that these movements essentially were only going to get more popular as time went on, largely because they were tapping into voters who really felt fundamentally disillusioned

with the direction of travel in Western societies. What is national populism? It's a movement that prioritizes, above all else, the culture and interests of the national majority against what it argues are self-serving, corrupt, neglectful minorities, especially political minorities in capital cities. And so we're not talking... Stop there. We're not talking about racial and ethnic minorities. We're talking about

minorities that are well-educated, well-connected, economically well-off, who hold, in the national populist view, disproportionate power within their countries and don't care about their fellow citizens.

Yeah, we're talking about an elite minority, essentially, that dominates the institutions, that uses those institutions to basically project their minority values, their socially liberal, if not radically woke progressive values onto the rest of the country, who have lost touch with many voters in the rest of the country, who have become, you know, pretty insular and I would argue since 2016 have removed themselves even more from the wider community. You know, they've become consumed by,

these comfort blanket explanations for what's going on around them, that this is all about Russia or Vladimir Putin, or this is all about what's happening on social media or big tech. And the argument in our book, at least, was actually, well, if you step back and you look at Western democracies, it's pretty clear what's going on. Record levels of migration and demographic change

combined with institutions that don't represent many people in the wider majority, combined with some fears over the relative decline of the majority group compared to other groups in society, have really made a perfect cocktail, if you like, a perfect storm

for national populist parties that are really now able to break through as well because they are operating, campaigning in a much more volatile political environment. So, I mean, if you take France as an example,

The idea that Marine Le Pen could be polling 30 to 35% of the first round vote, even five years ago, 10 years ago, nevermind 20, 30 years ago, really would have seemed far fetched. But because we're in this much more volatile environment now where we don't have tribal allegiances between voters and parties, we do have very strong concerns over immigration, Islamist extremism, and woke ideology. And we have a political elite that continues to refuse

continue, sorry, to refuse to, refusing to address these concerns, whether it's on the southern border in the US, whether it's on the small boats coming into Britain illegally in the Channel. And this is just simply creating an enormous open goal for

for national populists to kick their football into. That's a British analogy. The Americans might not get that. An open goal is when the goalkeeper's not there and you can just keep kicking your footballs, or as you'd call it, the soccer balls, into the back of the net. And that's exactly what populists have been doing across Europe recently because...

I would argue elites have really refused to actually address the reasons why people are voting for them. Yeah, and all of this is fueled by economic decline or stagnation among these voters. You take a look at the exit poll that Ipsos ran of France, and

You know, you see the typical breaks that you see for national populist movements, likely more men than women, high education stratification. But they ask questions about, are you satisfied with your life? And the less satisfied you are, the likely you are to vote for national rally. And they ask, how are you doing? Are you comfortable? Are you saving a little? Do you live paycheck to paycheck? And the worst economically you're doing.

the better you are or the likelier you are to vote for National Rally. So, you know, to me, I take a look and I say two years ago, National Rally got 18% in the first round, you know, which had been a record high. There's something else going on, though, if I could just jump in. There's something else too, right, which is, you know, if you went back 10, 20 years, you'd be sitting on social media and a lot of my academic colleagues would be telling you that this was mainly about angry old white men who were

who basically are refusing to get on board with the diversity train. And I think actually, if you look at the data in terms of what's going on in Europe and the UK at the moment, it's really striking just how much these parties are now drawing support from younger voters. In fact, as I'm speaking to you in the UK, we've just had a poll, which is our 16 and 17-year-olds.

who they would vote for at the election because, uh, if we have a Labour government after this general election, one of the first things they're going to do is introduce votes for 16 year olds. And actually what this poll by JL Partners, a good pollster, they do a lot of stuff in the US, uh, the poll finds that Labour are first among 16 and 17 year olds, 39%. But Nigel Farage and the Populist Reform Party are number two and are actually joint first among 16 and 17 year old men. Uh,

So they're on 35% among those young men. And, you know, I could show you similar data on Marine Le Pen in France, Georgia Maloney in Italy, Sweden Democrats, among others. The idea, you know, beloved by many people in the media, that is, you know, these parties are simply going to run out of steam because they're dependent upon an older demographic. It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. They are actually replenishing their support among Gen Z and millennials.

Yeah, and you see it in Portugal with Chega that they're doing very well with Young. And in France, the exit poll showed that when you get into the retired class, they support the established parties, that it's the middle-aged people who are likeliest to vote for national rally, not the 65-year-olds who, or, you know, plus, who are about ready to kick off if you believe the elites. So the future is not...

for actual populism. No, I don't think, and the other thing I would just say, Henry, is that, you know, maybe the US comes in here too. Look, I mean, the other reason these parties are going to do well, and I, you know, sometimes I get stick from my colleagues who are continuously pointing this out. I mean, people on the left really,

really have convinced themselves that this is simply about economic inequality. And this is, you know, if you improve the material conditions in Western societies, these parties and their support will essentially evaporate. You know, I've been watching this for nearly 30 years now. All the evidence, I would argue, points in the other direction, which is that these parties are tapping into a sense of cultural loss, not economic loss. This is really about

the ongoing effects of mass migration, of demographic change and of welcoming people into Western societies who, to be blunt, often don't integrate into those societies and basically hate who we are. And I'll give you some real world examples. You know, take Le Pen in France. In 2023 alone, the French security services foiled 40 major Islamist attacks, four zero. OK, even Emmanuel Macron in France has talked about the rise of what he calls the counter society.

mainly, not exclusively, but mainly French Muslims refusing to integrate into wider society. We've got similar debates in the UK, similar debates in Germany, lots of concern about things like low-level sexual harassment of women, uh,

violence, gang violence, particularly in countries like Sweden, mainly perpetrated by newcomers into Western societies. And, you know, I'm going to keep saying this until somebody out there begins to listen. But until we get serious about these concerns over migration and

its negative effects on Western societies, these parties will only get stronger and stronger. Le Pen will take control of France, maybe not this year, but certainly at the next presidential elections. Maloney's running Italy. I suspect Donald Trump will end up winning the White House again. Let's see. And the underlying point, the underlying, you know, the key point here is

We can choose to respond to these parties if we wanted to. We could lower migration. We could strengthen borders. We could give people more of a voice in institutions. We could...

crack down on crony capitalism. We could stop giving tax breaks to financial services and other industries if we wanted to. We could govern more responsibly and we could make sure that the wider majority are involved in the national conversation and it doesn't just reflect the interests, tastes and priorities of the elite minority. We could do that if we wanted to. Now many people are not doing that and as a consequence these parties are getting stronger and stronger.

So tell us about reform. What is the Reform Party? It has surged since Rishi Sunak became prime minister, from below 5% in the polls to now in some polls being ahead of the Tories. And the sum of polls, as you and I recorded, is that they're somewhere between 15% and 20% slightly behind the Tories. Who is reform, and why have they surged? Is it simply that they've tapped into all of this?

Yeah, so Nigel Farage and the Reform Party basically are the latest vehicle in a long line of vehicles that represent our tradition of populist Euroscepticism. So they came out of the Brexit movement, essentially the campaign to pull the UK out of the European Union, but they've now really broadened out their message

to not just only be pro-Brexit and anti-EU, but to be anti-immigration, anti-net zero, anti-woke, anti-Westminster, anti-elite. They are led by Farage, who has a long history of obviously campaigning for Brexit and lower immigration, somebody who obviously has campaigned alongside Donald Trump in the US.

He has evolved as well. He's become more interested in issues outside of the European Union. He's very interested in cutting regulation, cutting tax. You know, we're living with the highest tax burden here since the 1950s. He is somebody who looks at reform

as a movement that could potentially not just win seats, but could go on to reshape what he would argue is a broken model of conservatism in the UK. So he would say, look, what this election in 2024 is about is basically Canada 1993, where you see a more conservative Reform Party, interestingly also called Reform, emerge to replace a more liberal, progressive party.

conservative party. And Farage is basically gambling that he can now do the same in the UK, that he can basically lead reform to realign the broader right in British politics. So that raises the question is that when I take a look at British polls,

Most of Reform's voters are 2019 Tories, which is not to say that they were 2010 Tories. Many of them were third-party voters in 2010, 2005. Many of them were Labour Party voters if they're old enough. But they were 2019 Tories that they brought into the Bojo remodeling of the Conservative Party. You add them together with the current Tories,

And you get a score that is pretty much level with labor. And presumably, if they were able to do that, some of those former 2019 Tories who are voting for labor would be reattracted to the Tories. You reunite the right. You've got.

majority or at least a shot for a majority. How do you get there? Is this going to be a Canada style thing where the two wings kind of fight it out over a number of elections and ultimately re-merge, which is what the Conservative Party of Canada did reform and the old PCs became a new party that was more conservative than the old PCs and

Or is this going to end up being more like a Le Pen style, where she comes from a party that's on the fringe, and because the center-right completely doesn't understand its voters, she becomes the dominant party in her own right, just what Maloney did to Forza Italia in Italy, by co-opting the voter base and cannibalizing the old partisan structure.

I think essentially we are on the cusp of now entering into a prolonged and protracted ideological civil war within the conservative family over what is conservatism. And I think this is going to go on for a number of years, and it's basically going to be dividing two broad camps.

On one side, you're going to have what we might call establishment liberal Tory patrician conservatism that is, you know, instinctively socially liberal, southern London focus, comfortable with the status quo. Let's say it's symbolized by somebody like David Cameron, Michael Gove.

maybe even to some extent, well, Theresa May, maybe some extent as well, Boris Johnson. And then on the other side, we've got national conservatism, which is basically saying the status quo is broken. We need sharp reductions in immigration. In fact, we need to bring mass immigration to an end.

We want to strengthen the borders. We want to push back against net zero and the woke. And we want to build an economy that actually works for the forgotten majority, not just the professional class in London and Westminster. Now, those two camps are basically now going to battle it out. Farage is leading the National Conservatives from outside the Conservative Party, although there are some of them within the Conservative Party.

And whoever ends up succeeding Rishi Sunak, because my bet is the Conservatives will pivot back to the centre, they'll end up becoming the kind of standard bearer for this establishment Toryism.

But this is going to be it's going to be messy. It's going to be brutal. It's going to be combative. There's going to be no real compromise for a while. I suspect the Conservative Party might go through more than one leader in the next little while. I suspect it might end up going through one or two. Farage will not strike any compromise with the Tories because rightly, I think he's saying, why would I compromise with this party when I could actually end up winning the whole house?

And so he's banking on the fact that he could actually, if he gets elected this week, right, which is still an if, he might not win in the Essex seat of Clacton where he's standing. But if he wins, then he's going to announce on July the 5th, the morning after the election, that he's going to...

then move on to the second step of this populist revolt. He's going to not just target the Tories, but he's going to start turning his tanks towards Labour. And he's going to start making similar arguments in those working class areas in Northern England. So that's how it's going to unfold. It's going to be very difficult for the Tories. You know, even today, for example, you know, many senior Tories are saying there's no place for Nigel Farage in the Conservative Party, which I think is, you know,

personally is ridiculous. Nigel Farage is a conservative. He's a strong conservative, but he is a conservative. So the idea that he doesn't belong in the conservative tent is ridiculous. Until the Tories can accept that the world has moved on and they're sort of still living in 2010, they're going to have a very difficult time. That's the blunt reality.

I mean, one of the things that strikes me when I talk with Tories is sometimes I will pose them the question, which is, you know, after this election, it's going to be clear that you can't govern. You have two choices become the right wing of the liberal Democrats, which is to say a broadly socially liberal party that has a broad, you know, disagrees about economics, but largely agrees that

The elites should govern England in their interest. Or you have to ally or merge with reform, which is to say you're going to start moving your focus more towards forgotten England and start thinking about things like state intervention to help people who don't have university degrees. Yeah, totally.

And they genuinely don't want to see that. They want to pretend that they don't have that choice. Is that what you're seeing, or is this just idiosyncratic with respect? That not only did they have this stark choice, but they refused to acknowledge it exists. Do you mean the Tories? The Tories, yes. The Tories. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a refusal to kind of accept how the world's moved on. I think, you know, your standard British Tory, compare and contrast with Trump, right? Yeah.

Whatever you think of Trump in the US, my view would be he has a very strong grasp of who's voting for him and why they're voting for him. And he has leaned into the post-2016 realignment by maintaining the salience of cultural issues, migration and the borders, woke ideology. But he's also, I think, shown himself to be very...

adept at giving people a sense that they have a voice in the conversation and that he's going to defend that voice and give them some sense of respect and recognition, irrespective of his personal flaws as a man. That's how I kind of see Trump from the UK. Now, I think for the Tories, the problem is, firstly, they don't really understand who's voting for them. They certainly don't want to give them a voice.

and they certainly don't want to give them what they want. And so what you have seen is really these voters, you know, run for the hills. I don't think, you know, your bog-standard British Tory would basically say, look, the answer to this riddle is to give everybody tax cuts.

And to go back to the 1988 Lawson budget with Margaret Thatcher, because the Tories really, as we've seen during this election campaign, they don't really have much to offer the country apart from tax cuts. That's kind of what they want to do. And they've simultaneously presided over the highest tax burden since the 1950s. Like that's not going to cut it in today's politics.

where voters don't just want economic freedom from an overloaded, inefficient and highly political state. They want cultural freedom too. They don't want mass migration. They don't want radical Islamism. They don't want weak borders. They don't want their kids being taught that a boy can become a girl and a girl can become a boy. They don't want the imposition of those political projects in a top-down fashion.

And Farage has realised that. Pence realised that. Trump's realised that. British Tories haven't. And they certainly aren't going to entertain things like...

interventionism on the economy. Now there's one interesting thing happened this week, you might have picked it up, it certainly interests you, Henry. Nigel Farage critiqued Marine Le Pen this week in France, because he said, look, she will be a disaster for France because of her economics. Very interesting intervention, because what you saw there is actually the nuances and differences within the national populist family. So Farage is an economically liberal, cultural conservative, right? He's basically Thatcherite on the economy,

And he's a bit, I guess you would say almost power light on immigration and culture in terms of, you know, Enoch Powell advocating migration would be really bad and we should have less of it and so on. Marine Le Pen is economically interventionist, right? She thinks globalization is bad. She thinks capitalism can also be bad. It needs to be tamed. And she wants a principle of national preference embedded in the economy while also being culturally conservative.

And that exchange revealed a lot because Farage is instinctively an Atlanticist. He sees himself closer to Trump. But the national populists in Europe are often a bit more protectionist. Now, that is actually where the sweet spot is in British politics, is to lean a little bit left from the economy to say, actually, why is it that

Large scale industries are polluting our rivers and waters. We should bring those back into public ownership. The state should run those and we should defend our environment and improve the quality of our environment. We should use the state to do that. I'll give you another example. The state should intervene in the institutions to ensure they don't become politicized. The state should intervene to ensure that universities uphold free speech, that the civil service or the deep state doesn't become overtly political and we're not teaching our kids

contested political beliefs at school, right? So national conservatives would say, let's use the state to basically level the playing field. That would be really the opposite of what classic Tories would want to do. They want to push back the state across the board. And so I think that's a really interesting tension point because at

At some point, let's assume Farage does win election and this movement becomes bigger. As we know from the last decade, at some point he's going to have to have a conversation with working class voters and he's going to have to be saying what he really believes about the economy. And I think a lot of those voters are going to say, well, hang on a minute. This just sounds like Liz Truss, right? This sounds like a kind of hyper economic liberal who's all about slashing and burning regulations, pushing back the state.

you know, putting capitalism on steroids and letting the market run riot. And a lot of voters out there, particularly the ones now voting reform, certainly don't want that. And that's a tension within this populist revolt. I think it's a tension too, in some respects, within Trump's electorate, although it's a bit less noticeable. And I think Farage is going to have to square that circle.

Yeah, I agree completely, both with your analysis of Britain and Farage, but also with the United States. We have all of these discussions within the Republican Party. Trump's rapid victory has kind of squelched them at the 30,000-foot level, but those of us who are involved in the day-to-day know there are bitter divisions within the Trump coalition, and Trump...

manages this by giving each a little bit. He's for tariffs. He's for tax cuts. He's for deregulation. He's for intervening, you know, to stop woke ideology. He's straddling those differences, but those differences are very real, even within the Trump coalition. And that battle has really only getting started underway here. It has not been resolved and won't be resolved to any definitive way within the first couple of years of a Trump presidency.

Yeah, and I think that's what's going to be really interesting here too because Farage essentially, you know, he's, if you really want to understand this movement,

and where it's going. Reform had a document, it was called "Our Contract with You", which was effectively its manifesto, but it said deliberately it wasn't a manifesto, it didn't want to use the word manifesto, so it had this document. It went a lot further than anything Farage has done previously in terms of mapping out its economic strategy, its opposition to wokeism,

It's called to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, which would allow us to control our borders more effectively. It went much further in saying it's completely opposed to net zero and climate change policies that hit the working class. If you actually look at that document,

it's probably the most coherent document Farage has ever presided over in terms of its coherence around populism, right? I mean, it's basically from one issue to the next, it's saying, you know, remove anything that basically hits the working class

man or woman in terms of tax, in terms of regulation, in terms of mass immigration, in terms of wokeism. And I think what you're seeing, even though very few people have picked it up yet, is actually the evolution of Farage. Like intellectually, ideologically, he's beginning to evolve a little bit from where he was in the Brexit days.

His rallies are now modelled a little bit more on Trump's rallies. His language is beginning to change a little bit. He's more combative with the BBC. An interesting moment during this campaign, he just refused to go on one of our most watched BBC shows. All of our politics shows are Sunday morning here in the UK.

And Farage just refused to go on one because he felt that the BBC were biased against him. Now, that would never have happened 10 years ago. It wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. But it shows the sense of confidence he has. But also, you know, he is learning and taking quite a bit out of the Trump playbook. But look, Henry, I mean, the blunt reality here is if he doesn't win,

in the seat that he's standing in, which is Clacton, a very working class, very left behind seat right on the east coast of England and the county of Essex. And don't forget, this is a seat that has elected

Farage's candidates in the past, it was one of the only seats that elected a Farage-backed candidate in 2015 under the UK Independence Party umbrella. If he can't win in Clacton, he cannot win anywhere. So he's either going to wake up on the morning after the election as finally, on the eighth time of trying,

as a member of parliament on the green benches in the house of commons and then he can you know say that the revolt goes on the revolt continues or he's not going to do it and if he and i've been on the ground in clackton for the last two weeks and let me tell you i mean he is greeted in that scene like a rock star especially among young people i've never seen anything like him in british politics it's very trumpian in the way people respond to him but

There's very little in the way of a serious organized ground game in that seat. There's no micro-targeting of voters. The data's a bit patchy. Someone in reform said to me this week, I think it's a great quote, said, "The problem is we're building the plane as we're flying."

And I think that is basically what is going on. I mean, they have not had time to vet their candidates. So you're getting a few candidates slipping through the net who are making racist comments, inflammatory comments. They have until recently not had much money. Now they're getting a few million from £25 donations. But I mean, this is like classic startup party politics. I mean, this is, you know, amateur hour in many respects. And it's all about the air war. So it's all about Farage running this campaign,

through an air war without that detailed granular ground campaign. So it might be enough to get him elected, but underneath that, unless they start doing the kind of meticulous campaigning under the radar, they won't be able to build and roll out this thing for it to become a serious revolt.

As a final question, are you willing to make a broad prediction for Thursday? Vote share for Tories and reform and seat range for Tories and reform?

Well, okay. So I mean, I am a pollster, so let me give the pollsters' answer. Okay. The first thing to say is we're either heading into an enormous labour majority or we're heading into the biggest error in the history of the polling industry. And that industry began in the 1970s. And if we see the kind of error that would be required, we might as well all pack up, shop, go home with our tail between our legs because it's going to be a complete and utter humiliation. So let's assume the pollsters are right.

You're going to be looking at a Labour majority in excess of 200 seats. You're going to be looking at the Tories finishing somewhere between, my best guess, I don't believe they're going to fall to 50-odd seats, as some of the nightmare polls are suggesting. Maybe somewhere between 75 and 125. Actually, maybe somewhere between 100 and 150 would be my best guess, which is still going to be a disastrous performance for them, one of the worst in their entire history. When it comes to reform, you know, my gut instinct,

I think one or two seats, I think north of 5 million votes, I think somewhere between 75 and 125 second places, many of them in Labour areas. And I think the general reaction to that will be, well, reform have underperformed.

when in reality, actually, that's all they need to do in order to get into the next phase of their strategy. So that would be my best guess. I think Labour will re-emerge as a dominant party, not just nationally, but in Scotland. I think Scottish independence will now become a much weaker movement. The United Kingdom will be safe, although the United Kingdom now

will experience constitutional reforms under a big Labour government of the kind it's never seen before. Votes for 16-year-olds, reform of the House of Lords, much greater devolution to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the regions. We'll see the expansion of the bureaucracy of unelected governmental organisations.

So we're going to see wholesale constitutional change. Immigration will go up even higher. Labour's going to repeal a lot of legislation that has been clamping down on migration. And I think a lot of the woke stuff will be mainstream. So this election is going to be pivotal for lots of reasons. The other thing, lastly, that I think Americans will find interesting, keep your eyes on turnout.

I think there'll be a lot of apathy at this election, a lot of people just not voting at all. I suspect turnout will go low, maybe into the low 60s, possibly even the 50s. And lastly, don't wake up after this election, look at a Labour government in the UK and think, well, gee, that government must be popular because that ain't going to happen. There is no mass public enthusiasm for the Labour opposition. The old saying in British politics is that the opposition party doesn't win the election, the government loses the election.

And I think that's what we're going to see. You know, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader's ratings are weak. The Labour Party's metrics are pretty weak in polling. Do you trust Labour? Do you like Labour? Do you think Labour has the right answers? Do you back Labour on the economy? On all of these questions,

The most popular answer usually is none of them. I hate all of them. I don't like any of them, but just get the bloody Tories out of number 10. That's the basic mood in the country. Just get these guys out. I don't care who goes in. Just get them out. Oh, it's Labour. Well, I don't like them anyway, but they're better than the Tories. That's what the average voter is saying in focus groups. So that's what I would be looking out for the day after the election. And if the Tories, if I'm wrong, okay, if I'm wrong, you know, I think there are two ways, lastly, I could be wrong.

I could be underestimating the collapse of support for the Conservatives, and we could be in a 50-seat scenario, and it's like an extinction-level event. After 14 years in government, after a COVID pandemic, after austerity, after scandal after scandal, after Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, maybe the country is just saying, you know what, I've had enough of this party.

Someone said to me this week, I think it's a very good description. This election is a punishment election. The Brits are punishing the Conservatives. And maybe I'm underestimating just how much people are going to punish the Tories, but

The other thing, of course, is we've still got about 10% undecided voters. So maybe people will say, you know what, the Conservatives, the final narrative in the final days is just don't give the Labour Party what they're calling a supermajority. You know, try and just moderate that power. Don't give Keir Starmer an enormous 300-seat majority.

Maybe in the final hours as people go to the polling station with a pencil hovering above the paper, they say, "Oh, actually, on balance, I probably better go with the Conservatives. Even if Labour are going to win, we should try and kind of nip that game where we can." So those are two ways I could see me being wrong, basically.

That's interesting. We talked about Canada and France and so forth. Maybe the better election to analogize this to is Ireland 2011, where Fianna Fáil, the dominant party since the independence, collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, which first helped their traditional rival, Fine Gael.

But they couldn't solve the problems and since then we've seen populism, independence, Sinn Fein rising to become the largest party. Now we have an authentic national populist party that's already at 5% of the polls, independent Ireland. The first example in collapse and despair is to turn to the only alternative you know and then you're willing to embrace real change and that would be Nigel's hope.

man well look look i could be right the other way i can be right i can tell you i've got some polling coming out tomorrow and uh i got the numbers on my computer right now i can't tell you because it's under embargo but it's a pretty consistent story with what we got nationally and some of the polls out there i've got to say henry they still have the reform party high you know the reform party in some of these polls is still number two uh to labor um and if this is a punishment election

And people out there just say, you know what, to hell with this. I just want to really kick the whole system. I mean, Farage, there is an outside chance here. I don't think it's not a 50% plus chance. Maybe it's a 20% type chance, you know. But maybe Farage comes out of this with a massive share of the national vote, you know, 18%, 19%, 20%. That would be a big result for him. Maybe one or two seats, right? Not massive in seats, but maybe he comes out of this with 7, 8, 9 million votes and everybody is kind of stunned.

And they're looking and they're thinking, wow, you know, the populist disillusionment here is enormous. And if that happens, I think he will feel massively emboldened, even if he hasn't got, you know, five, six seats, even if it's just him, you know, Farage and 7 million votes. I mean, that would be quite a story in itself.

So Matt, you have your Substack, which has both free and paid subscription versions. You will be in the United States, I believe, in a couple of weeks. Can you tell us where people who want to follow you in the United States can follow you? And also, where else besides your Substack can they follow your work?

Yeah, I'm on Twitter and X at Goodwin MJ. I've got a small but growing YouTube presence and I'm looking forward to a trip at the late July. I'm coming through DC the week beginning the 22nd. I'm going to be giving a talk at one of the think tanks in DC. Then I'm going to head down to Miami and do some other stuff, podcasts and things.

But if people want to reach out, drop me a DM on Twitter X and I'd love to hear from any Americans. And I'd also love some Americans to answer this riddle that nobody in Britain seems to be able to answer, which is, is Joe Biden going to be replaced? Because everybody in Westminster seems to think it's only a matter of time. But I would defer to your judgment on that one.

Well, that is a topic that I could speak a lot about. But the one thing I'd say for the British listeners, because obviously, since I've got you on the show, there will be British listeners, is that this isn't Westminster. You can't.

You can't depose the leader by sending letters of no confidence to Graham Brady and the 1922 committee. He's got the conomination wrapped up legally if he wants it. The question is whether or not behind the scenes pressure can convince him that his time is up and that he voluntarily drops out of the race. And that, I think, is an open question, despite all the denials you hear from the White House.

Matt, thank you for appearing on Beyond the Polls and looking forward to having you back. Thanks. It's always great to talk with you, Henry, someone who really understands the data and the trends. So good luck to you. That's it for this week. Join me next week as we return to the land of the free and the home of the brave and look ahead to the Republican convention with Fox News' Dana Perino. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the polls.

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, for the

We watched were so gallantly streaming, and rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was fair. Was that star-spangled banner yet where?

the land of the free and the home of the brave. On the shore dimly through the mist of the deep where the party holds in dread silence reposes. What is that with the brave

or the towering sea. As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses. Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam. In full glory reflected, now shines on the

is the star-spangled banner, so long may it wave o'er the land of the brave and the home of the brave.

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