Flesh on the spine

Gaspar Becerra,A flayed man holding his own skin, 1556

I remember the UKIP manifesto of 2010 all too well. I remember it because I had to defend it, and because later Nigel Farage stood up and called it drivel, which was a relief, since by then I had run out of ways of not saying so myself. It was 486 pages of things that people had been fond of, stapled together. Nobody had costed it. Nobody had asked whether one chapter contradicted the next. It was a manifesto in the sense that a jumble sale is a shop.

I mention this not to be unkind to the politically dead but because of what has happened in the last eight days, and because the thing that was wrong with that manifesto was not what people think.

That 2010 document was uncosted, which was bad, but plenty of costed manifestos have been rubbish. What it lacked was anything to cost against. There was no overarching idea sitting above the chapters, so nothing could be cross-checked. The transport chapter and the environment chapter and the whatever-it-was-on-page-300 chapter were all written by people who liked the thing they were writing about, and nobody had the standing to say that page 300 could not be true if page 40 was. A jumble sale has no guiding principle. That is why it is a jumble sale.

Family, Community, Country is the mantra Farage has been repeating for eighteen months. I have heard the complaint, mostly from people who would complain if it were a hundred pages long. But a slogan repeated for eighteen months by a man who means it is something else. It becomes the test. Does this policy serve the family that works? Does it serve the street, the town, the country that pays for it? If not, it does not go in, however fond of it somebody is.

That is a spine. And what we have been watching this August is the spine acquire flesh.

Three policy papers. Welfare, from Robert Jenrick and Richard Tice, a £50 billion saving built on barring foreign nationals from almost all benefits, narrowing disability support to those who cannot work, and restoring the two-child cap. Apprenticeships, from Suella Braverman in Enfield, with the taxpayer meeting 30% of the wage for a 16 to 18 year old, a £2,000 bonus for the small firm that keeps its apprentice two years, and 600,000 extra places over a first term, costed by the party at somewhere between £1.5 and £2 billion across a parliament. And housing on Monday, Tice again, 50,000 social homes a year without new tax or borrowing, a suitability test in place of a needs test, married couples with children and veterans to the front of the queue, foreign nationals out, and a Right to Buy discount of 30% at five years and 40% at ten.

Read them one at a time and you have three announcements. Read them together and you have a guiding idea. Foreign nationals out of benefits. Foreign nationals out of social housing. Disability support for those who cannot work rather than those who would rather not. A suitability test, which is to say a test of whether you have earned the thing, in place of a needs test, which is a test of how loudly you can say you want it. Two different front benchers, two different briefs, one principle, and the principle is that you contribute before you draw. Then turn to the apprenticeship paper and find the other half of the bargain, which is what the state owes the eighteen year old in Grimsby or Stoke who is willing to contribute. A wage. A trade. A firm with a reason to keep them.

That is a theory of reciprocity, and it is the first time in my political life that I have seen this movement produce one. The welfare paper is about the family that works and the neighbour who does not. The housing paper answers a question the other parties have not dared to put in twenty years, which is to ask, then state who the state’s houses are for. Nobody in 2010 could have written these three papers, because nobody in 2010 had a theory. They had 486 pages of enthusiasm.

You may quarrel with any of it. Shelter has, at length. Labour’s spokesman called the lot “unserious and unworkable”, which is what you say when you have not read it and have no intention of doing so.

Nor are the papers completely finished. The welfare one has already been through a visible revision on child support. A party that changes its mind in public when the evidence changes is doing something a good deal healthier than a party that never puts anything in public at all. There will be more of that. There should be.

But look at the shape. Each paper has a cost. Each has a mechanism. Each is the work of a named front bencher speaking to a named brief, released in sequence, over a week, with a press conference, a document and a broadcast round. That is how governments in waiting behave.

Here is some heresy for a party man. I don’t mind when the others nick our ideas. I’ve never minded. I’ve sat in rooms where colleagues raged that the Conservatives had lifted a policy wholesale and I’ve thought, good, that is what it was for.

Because the point is never ownership. The point is that the country should be better governed. If Kemi Badenoch stands up in October and says something about foreign nationals and benefits that she wouldn’t have dared say in June, then Jenrick has governed a little without winning an election. If some junior Labour minister quietly finds that the two-child cap is defensible after all, that is our paper working through the plumbing. For fifty years policy in this country has moved one way, and every incoming government has accommodated itself to the last move rather than reversing it. What the three papers do is put a hand on the ratchet and turn it the other way. Once it’s turning, it matters a great deal less whose hand is on the lever.

They will policy pilfer. They are already doing so, and calling it virtue. Let them. Every theft is a vote of confidence from people who can’t bring themselves to cast one.

Reform’s lack of history is what its enemies most enjoy pointing at, and they’re half right. We have no Butskellite settlement to draw on, no Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets from 1978 with our name on the cover, no forty-year archive of Fabian tracts to be mined and misremembered. We have a party that is, in policy terms, seven years old and in serious policy terms about two.

The page is blank, which is a double edged sword. A blank page has one great advantage. It owes nothing. There is no wing of the party that owns an economic orthodoxy and will sulk if it is departed from, no shadow of a previous government to be apologised for. Reform can walk down the corridor of every other party’s lockers and take whatever fits. Right to Buy was Margaret Thatcher’s. The two-child cap was George Osborne’s. The suitability test is older than either. A Conservative research department can’t do this. Every idea on its shelf has an owner objecting to its being moved. We have no shelf, so we have the run of everyone else’s, and the only question any idea has to answer is whether it will work, and whether it cleaves to our spine.

The other edge of the blade is that it has all had to be done at once, and at pace, with no institutional memory to fall back on. There is no cupboard of half-finished papers to raid. Every document has to be started from nothing, argued through, costed, tested and released, while the same people fight a by-election in Clacton, run a few dozen councils and answer the phone to the Times.

Which is why the team matters. James Orr, Amar Johal, James Graham and the others in the policy unit have in a year built something that didn’t exist, and the Treasury operation forming up under Jenrick is beginning to give it the numbers it needs. I’ve watched policy being written in this movement for a quarter of a century. I’ve never seen it written like this.

Reform has always been good at what the commentariat calls vibes. Polling, momentum, the sense that something is moving. It’s our native gift and we shouldn’t be sniffy about it, since without it nobody would be reading the policy papers in the first place. But vibes don’t run a Department. Nobody has ever sat across a table from a permanent secretary at eight in the morning and got by on momentum. What the last eight days show is a party that knows this and is changing gear, from the party that wins the argument on the news to the party that can win it on the spreadsheet.

Two audiences are watching the gear change and both have been waiting since May. The first is business, and the three papers are a part answer to the question every boardroom has been asking, which is what a Reform government would look like on a Tuesday afternoon, once the pyrotechnics have cleared, the boats have been dealt with and there’s a red box on the desk. The answer is that it would look like Robert Jenrick reading a costing, Suella Braverman in a paint-spattered overall at a training centre in Enfield, and Richard Tice saying “suitability test” to a room that had expected him to say something ruder. A chief executive in Sunderland deciding whether to build the plant can now read the document and decide. Though we have yet to deliver policy across the board, those in sectors not yet addressed can take confidence that the work is serious, ongoing and when we get to them it will be those things.

The second audience is Whitehall, and Whitehall will read the documents more carefully than the boardrooms do, because Whitehall has recently been reminded what it’s like to get a government without any.

Consider what happened in 2024. Labour won a majority of 174 on a manifesto of missions. The missions were in their own light, admirable. They had no systems attached. Everybody in the building knew it. Thus Sir Keir Starmer’s team had gone to the trouble of appointing Sue Gray. She was a former permanent secretary and the head of the Propriety and Ethics team, and the calculation, as far as one can reconstruct it, was that a permanent secretary comes with a plan in the same way that a shop comes with stock. She started in Downing Street in July. She was gone by October. There had been no stock. There couldn’t have been, because the plan was the politicians’ job, they had spent two years being careful not to have one but having a vase instead.

The country paid for that in months. Months while everyone waited to be told what the ministers were for. A permanent secretary reading the housing paper this week knows more about what a Reform government would ask of his Department than Sue Gray knew about the incoming Labour government the week she walked through the door of Number Ten. Set that against what Labour has been doing with its own August. A consultation on pubs. Something about buses. A reshuffle that told you who was up and who was out without telling you what anyone was for. The party of government has spent the summer making noises, and the party of opposition has spent it building. Nobody should be surprised. A party that had no plan in opposition was never going to grow one in office.

And there is one place where none of this is prospective. Reform has been running councils since last May, and a council is the only place in England where a party gets to find out what governing on a Tuesday afternoon is like without first winning a general election. Talking to some of our council leaders, one of the most impressive things is the way that the officers have, in the main, been accommodating and impressed. Local government officers aren’t a sentimental class. They have seen parties come and go and they measure them by whether the councillors turn up, read the papers and do the work. The word coming back from the town halls is that ours do.

Conference will bring more. It always does. But the direction is set, and it is towards office.

That 2010 manifesto is still on my shelf. I keep it as a reminder of how not to do things.