Is there any difference between the Tory party and Reform?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week at a depleted Tory conference Kemi Badenoch must try and convince her party of its need to exist and of her own place at the top of it. The problem, though, is many voters simply haven’t heard of her. Is anonymity worse than unpopularity? And how does she make new policy announcements without sounding like Reform-lite? We talk to Luke Tryl from More in Common.
Later, what does the ECHR really do, and what would happen to Britain if we left it? Joshua Rozenberg gives us the lawyers lowdown.
Visit our new website for more analysis and interviews from the team: https://www.thenewsagents.co.uk/
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.7 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.1 | The interesting thing with Kemi Bajnock is it's not that she's unpopular, particularly with voters. |
| 0:16.6 | It's that they don't know who she is. |
| 0:18.2 | So I ran a focus group on Thursday night in northeast |
| 0:22.1 | Hertfordshire. This is traditionally a sort of true blue Tory seat. And this was with eight people, |
| 0:28.3 | all of whom were previous Tory voters, had only abandoned the party in 2024. And I asked them, |
| 0:34.8 | I said, do you know who the leader of the Conservative Party is to get into a discussion about how Kemi Bajenoch was doing? |
| 0:41.1 | I couldn't get into that discussion about Kemi Bajernok because only one of the group of eight knew who she was and that she was the leader of the party, which is pretty extraordinary. |
| 0:51.0 | That is Luke Trill from the pollsters more in Common on a focus group where virtually everyone in the room hadn't even heard of Kemi Badernock. |
| 1:02.1 | Is it worse to be unpopular or is it worse to be unrecognised as Kemi Badnock tries to lead her party into a new year of her leadership, |
| 1:13.0 | has she worked out what the Conservative Party is for? |
| 1:17.0 | Welcome to the Newsagents. |
| 1:22.9 | The Newsagents. |
| 1:24.5 | It's John. |
| 1:25.3 | It's Emily. |
| 1:26.1 | And that depleted band of brothers and sisters are heading towards Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference, |
| 1:33.2 | where they're trying to set out their distinct territory. |
| 1:36.9 | And we've heard from Milt Stride, the Shadow Chancellor today, saying we're at the party |
| 1:40.0 | a fiscal responsibility. |
| 1:41.9 | We're no longer going to pay more than we can afford. We've got to |
| 1:46.0 | have a bit of rectitude in our spending and all the rest of it. The problem with that is, |
... |
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