Reform threat presents us with ‘fight of our lives’, admits top minister

Published

5 months ago

May 8, 2025

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Sir Keir Starmer sent his chief cabinet “fixer” to attempt to calm down jittery Labour MPs in a mutinous mood after last week’s elections drubbing by Reform.

But instead of calming nerves, cabinet office minister Pat McFadden warned Labour were now facing “the fight of our lives” against Nigel Farage and his party.

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Rebel MPs claimed Mr McFadden, who spoke to up to 100 Labour MPs in a Commons committee room for an hour, was acting as a “human shield” for the embattled prime minister.

The showdown came as the fury of Labour MPs over winter fuel payment cuts reached a crescendo, after Sir Keir emphatically rejected demands for a U-turn.

The emergency meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, called at just a few hours’ notice, was officially billed by the party’s high command as a briefing on their “plan for change”.

But it was also intended to head off a mutiny by Labour MPs after shock victories by Reform UK last week in county council polls, mayoral elections and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.

No sign of a winter fuel U-turn

Some Labour MPs were privately critical of Sir Keir for not facing his backbench critics. Others stayed away, claiming the meeting was pointless because the government was not listening to their concerns.

As a result, many of the party’s most high-profile rebels on winter fuel payments, benefit cuts and other issues were absent. Veteran left-winger Diane Abbot attended but left before the end, refusing to talk to journalists.

Many of those attending were younger MPs elected last July and so the mood was not as acrimonious as the leadership might have feared. Mr McFadden was applauded at the end of the meeting.

Speaking with Treasury ministers Darren Jones and James Murray alongside him but no Rachel Reeves, who was visiting Scotland, Mr McFadden gave no hint of concessions on controversial policies.

‘Battle for the future’

Instead, he launched an attack on Mr Farage’s Reform, which senior cabinet ministers acknowledge is now a real threat to Labour and may become the party’s main rivals.

According to a government source present at the meeting, Mr McFadden began his speech by saying: “The big point I want to make to you is that a new fight is taking shape.

“It’s a fight between our values and a nationalist politics of the right. It’s a battle for the very future and the heart and soul of our country.”

Mr McFadden was said to have criticised Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the new mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, who in her victory speech vowed Reform would “reset Britain to its glorious past”.

‘We have to win’

“That is not our project, and it won’t be our project,” Mr McFadden said, as he said Labour was focused on the country’s “glorious future”.

He added: “Labour is always at its best when we look to the future. This is the fight of our lives, this is the generational fight in this new political era.

“I want to tell you we have to take on this new fight for the future – and we have to win.”

Mr McFadden addressed Labour MPs after Sir Keir dismayed many Labour MPs in a clash with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch at PMQs by refusing to admit he was wrong to remove winter fuel payments from millions of pensioners.

Politics

Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last

Published

2 hours ago

October 9, 2025

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Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last

There’s no question that Kemi Badenoch’s on the ropes after a low-energy first year as leader that has seen the Conservative Party slide backwards by pretty much every metric.

But on Wednesday, the embattled leader came out swinging with a show-stopping pledge to scrap stamp duty, which left the hall delirious. “I thought you’d like that one,” she said with a laugh as party members cheered her on.

A genuine surprise announcement – many in the shadow cabinet weren’t even told – it gave the Conservatives and their leader a much-needed lift after what many have dubbed the lost year.

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Ms Badenoch tried to answer that criticism this week with a policy blitz, headlined by her promise on stamp duty.

This is a leader giving her party some red meat to try to help her party at least get a hearing from the public, with pledges on welfare, immigration, tax cuts and policing.

In all of it, a tacit admission from Ms Badenoch and her team that as politics speeds up, they have not kept pace, letting Reform UK and Nigel Farage run ahead of them and grab the microphone by getting ahead of the Conservatives on scrapping net zero targets or leaving the ECHR in order to deport illegal migrants more easily.

Ms Badenoch is now trying to answer those criticisms and act.

At the heart of her offer is £47bn of spending cuts in order to pay down the nation’s debt pile and fund tax cuts such as stamp duty.

All of it is designed to try to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence, against a Labour Party of tax rises and a growing debt burden and a Reform party peddling “fantasy economics”.

She needs to do something, and fast. A YouGov poll released on the eve of her speech put the Conservatives joint third in the polls with the Lib Dems on 17%.

That’s 10 percentage points lower than when Ms Badenoch took power just under a year ago. The crisis, mutter her colleagues, is existential. One shadow cabinet minister lamented to me this week that they thought it was “50-50” as to whether the party can survive.

Ms Badenoch had to do two things in her speech on Wednesday: the first was to try to reassert her authority over her party. The second was to get a bit of attention from the public with a set of policies that might encourage disaffected Tories to look at her party again.

On the first point, even her critics would have to agree that she had a successful conference and has given herself a bit of space from the constant chatter about her leadership with a headline-grabbing policy that could give her party some much-needed momentum.

On the second, the promise of spending control coupled with a retail offer of tax cuts does carve out a space against the Labour government and Reform.

But the memory of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, the chaos of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and the failure of Sunak to cut NHS waiting lists or tackle immigration still weigh on the Conservative brand.

Ms Badenoch might have revived the room with her speech, but whether that translates into a wider revival around the country is very hard to read.

Ms Badenoch leaves Manchester knowing she pulled off her first conference speech as party leader: what she will be less sure about is whether it will be her last.

I thought she tacitly admitted that to me when she pointedly avoided answering the question of whether she would resign if the party goes backwards further in the English council, Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd elections next year.

“Let’s see what the election result is about,” was her reply.

That is what many in her party are saying too, because if Ms Badenoch cannot show progress after 18 months in office, she might see her party turn to someone else.