A lesson from Canada

Staying with Canadian politics, James Vitali has an interesting Critic piece on lessons the UK Conservative party could learn from Pierre Poilievre. Mildly depressing though, because it highlights how far adrift we are under Starmer’s Labour.

What the Conservatives can learn from Pierre Poilievre

The Tories can take lessons from Poilievre’s ambition and openness

Although Reagan and Thatcher had probably already met in the early 1970s, their first recorded one-on-one conversation took place in 1975, shortly after the latter had become Conservative Party leader.

There was, Thatcher recalls, an immediate chemistry between the pair. Reagan, the former sports commentator with a reputation for political communication that had been firmly established by his “Time for Choosing” speech in the 1964 election, had “charm, sense of humour, and directness”. For some, that charm betrayed a superficiality — a lack of substance perhaps typical of someone who had built a career in Hollywood.

But “The Great Communicator”, as Reagan has come to be known, was great because of the substance of what he was communicating. “I wasn’t a great communicator”, he said in his 1989 farewell address, “but I communicated great things,” which were informed by “our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.” “What I said”, he wrote elsewhere, “simply made sense to the [man] on the street”.

It isn’t easy to see the Conservatives coming up with both a communicator and a political ethos to compare with Pierre Poilievre and his message to Canadian voters. Reform seems much closer, but the whole piece is well worth reading as a diagnosis of our UK problem.

So it is no surprise that the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have met with Poilievre in recent months. And stylistically, his example is more intelligible to a UK audience than a Trump or a Milei.

But style, really, is of secondary importance. Poilievre is such a good communicator because of what he is actually communicating — a compelling diagnosis of Canada’s ills, and a political economy that Canadians earnestly believe will make them more prosperous.