Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Will Tanner Director Onward

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: Now you might not recognise the man sitting opposite me but there aren’t many people who have worked more closely with Theresa May. Will Tanner was her Deputy Director of Policy, he is now setting up a new centre right think tank with the help of Michael Gove and Ruth Davidson. Hello and thanks for being with us today. So why do you think the Conservative party needs a reboot then?

WILL TANNER: Well I think the politics is at an incredibly critical and febrile juncture at the moment. The Labour party has abandoned the mainstream and retreated to a kind of reheated tried and failed socialism but the Conservative party is still struggling to win over groups of the electorate that frankly it needs to if it is going to survive long term, groups like my own generation, younger people, people who in their 20s and 30s, people from black and ethnic minorities, people who for example might rent their own home or have graduated from university. These are all groups that are growing as a proportion of the population.

SR: So why don’t they like the Conservative party then?

WILL TANNER: Well I think the Conservative party needs to speak much more directly to those people and actually needs to develop policies which respond to their everyday concerns, so things like how to achieve affordable housing, how to have a secure job, how to reduce the cost of childcare which in this country is the highest in the developed world. We need to be much more focused on those everyday issues that ordinary people, especially young people, face in their everyday lives.

SR: Previously you have written today that the average of a party member in the Conservative is 72, I mean how serious is this? As these people die out could the Conservative party die out with them unless it does something?

WILL TANNER: Well this is exactly why we are setting up Onward because we think that the party needs to reach out to a much broader range of people. I think actually if I look at the people I was at university with, people of my own age, lots of them have instinctively Conservative principles, they believe in things like entrepreneurship, in hard work, in family, community but actually they are instinctively not very happy with the Conservatives and they certainly wouldn’t tell anyone that they were a member of the Conservative party and we need to change that by making the argument …

SR: So they are embarrassed to basically come out as a Conservative?

WILL TANNER: Well there is a long standing brand issue with the Conservative party and I think that is particularly true of my generation. I don't think it is actually rooted in the real values of the party and I think the party needs to do much more to develop policies which speak to those people.

SR: Just to go back to my original question, is this like an existential crisis almost for the party? Do you think it’s the survival of the Conservative party that’s at stake?

WILL TANNER: So I think it’s a challenge, it’s a serious challenge that the party needs to take seriously. I would actually try and see it as an opportunity, there are lots of disillusioned Labour voters, there are lots of young people who are, as I say, instinctively aspirational, that the party should go out and try and win but at the moment we’re not developing policies which appeal to those voters and we need to do much more to do so.

SR: So if there was an election tomorrow would the Conservative party lose then?

WILL TANNER: I’m not sure. Actually at the last election we grew our share of the vote significantly …

SR: Come on, you’re not in Downing Street anymore, you can say what you really think, it’s all right!

WILL TANNER: Seriously, there were serious gains in the last election, we won the largest share of working class voters since 1979.

SR: So why bother setting up this think tank than if everything’s okay?

WILL TANNER: Because we want to go much further. I think the return of two party politics, the fact that Jeremy Corbyn has united the hard left, means that you need to get significantly more of the share of the vote than you ever did previously. If you think about it, in 2015 David Cameron got 36% of the vote and he had a small majority; in 2017 Theresa May got 43% of the vote and got a hung parliament, we need to go further.

SR: Yes, but that’s because other parties, we had a return to two party politics, it’s not like a great example of Theresa May’s brilliant electioneering is it?

WILL TANNER: Well I think actually the party did quite a lot in that election to win over voters who had never considered voting Conservative before but we need to do that with new voters too, that’s not just the former working class kind of Labour strongholds in the north and the Midlands, it’s younger urban voters who want a party at ease with the modern world too.

SR: There’s only so many UKIP voters to go round basically, I understand. Now sorry in advance for asking this question but are you really the best person to set up this think tank? I mean you were very closely associated with Theresa May at the Home Office and Number 10, you seem to think that the last election was okay but most people seem to think it was a bit of a disaster, particularly that manifesto, so why are you the person to turn the fortunes around?

WILL TANNER: Well firstly it’s not just me, we have a generation, a new generation of MPs on our board, people like Kemi Badenoch, Ben Bradley, Neil O’Brian, young energetic MPs who represent a completely different face of the Conservative party and secondly I think actually people like me and some of the other people involved are experienced political professionals who have been involved in politics and know how to develop policies that work and policies that can really speak to everyday working concerns. So I do think there is a huge opportunity here but we need to grasp it and we need to be prepared to face up to some of those tough choices in doing so.

SR: So what are some of your big policy ideas then?

WILL TANNER: So we’ll be focusing on issues like housing, how to build many more houses and make them affordable especially for younger generations; how to retrain workers who might be displaced by automation and technology. Actually you were talking to Margot James just now and we’re focusing on harnessing technology, both in terms of using emerging tech, Britain’s amazing heritage in innovation to power the economy but also to harness some of the social consequences of that technology too. So things that are actually of the moment, future facing issues which are optimistic about how Britain can grow and be better in future.

SR: I think one of the things that is quite intriguing about your think tank is the two people at the kind of forefront of it, Ruth Davidson and Michael Gove, both of these two people touted as future leaders of the party, one from the Brexit side, one from the remain side, do you think they could be the ultimate dream ticket of the future? Maybe Michael Gove’s Chancellor to Ruth Davidson’s Prime Minister?

WILL TANNER: The obsession with personality in Westminster is I’m sure very well known to you, Sophie. This organisation is not about the current leader, the former leader, any future leader, it’s about new ideas for a new generation.

SR: You may think that but I think others would perhaps take a slightly different view. Personality matters, of course it does, you know that as a political professional.

WILL TANNER: Of course it does but since setting up Onward it has been suggested to me that this is Theresa May’s think tank, it’s been David Cameron’s think tank, it’s been Michael Gove’s think tank, it’s been Ruth Davidson’s think tank. It can’t be all of their think tank – this is actually a think tank for the future. It’s about the future of the party and appealing to a whole new range of people that the party historically hasn’t really spoken to.

SR: You talked about the personalities and the fact that personality doesn’t matter but I wonder if part of the reason why the Conservatives seem to be locked in this stasis with Labour if you like, no one really managing to reach out beyond their natural voting patterns, is partly because of Theresa May. I mean David Cameron did manage to win that majority not very long ago so is Theresa May the problem rather than the policies?

WILL TANNER: So I don’t think Theresa May is the problem, I worked with her very closely when I was in the Home Office and in Downing Street, as you said, and always found her a fantastic person to work for. She is someone who understood that the ordinary voters want governments to get on with the job, be non-ideological in the way they operate and actually focus on issues that really matter to people. I think clearly the election last year didn’t go according to plans and there were lots of lessons that we need to learn from that but that doesn’t mean changing the leader. I think this is actually about ideas rather than about people.

SR: You must be frustrated though at not being able to deliver the social change that you wanted. The manifesto, which lots of people blame, actually did have some policies in there that were quite good for young people you could argue, so what went wrong?

WILL TANNER: I think we failed to make the argument and we failed to speak to those groups of people that we really needed to win over so I don't think we did enough to speak to young people during that campaign and I don't think we did enough to talk about the policies that we had in the manifesto as you say, that really were aimed to support those young people and tackle some of the things that they care about. Similarly, I think we failed to put across the message of change and optimism that actually especially young people really want to see in a government.

SR: But that Jeremy Corbyn managed to do.

WILL TANNER: So I think that Jeremy Corbyn certainly managed to promise a lot and he certainly managed to put across a message of change but it is actually a message that will actually be a millstone of debt around the generation that he purports to represent.

SR: But what I’m trying to get at is that he had that excitement didn’t he? He managed to rally young people, just the kind of groups that you’re saying that the Conservative party has been frustrated in trying to win over.

WILL TANNER: Yes, so clearly Jeremy Corbyn did much more to kind of unite the younger vote and that was borne out by the election result and some of the specific voting patterns within it but I think that isn’t something that the Conservative party should be fearful of. The Conservative party needs to do much more and actually take the fight to the Labour party around …

SR: Is Theresa May the right woman to do that?

WILL TANNER: So she’s the Prime Minister at the moment and I hope that she continues to be, she’d doing I think a fantastic job but we as a party, the entire Conservative family needs to do much more to win over those new groups.

SR: I am also intrigued as well, as somebody who worked very closely with the Prime Minister, she seems to me to be quite an elusive politician. We know that she has a hundred cook books, that she likes Jamie Oliver’s chuck in approach, we know that her husband takes the bins out but I kind of feel we don’t really know that much about her so can you give us a bit of an insight into her as a woman?

WILL TANNER: She is a very decent, hard-working, public service orientated woman. She was an absolute pleasure to work for, the best boss I could have ever hoped for and …

SR: Tell us something surprising about her though, there must be something. Come on!

WILL TANNER: I’m not going to go into the inner details of my conversations and experiences with the Prime Minister but genuinely she is a decent, honest person. I actually think when I talk to people, my friends, my family, other people I meet, people understand that and they see that in her. She just gets on with the job in front of her, there is the famous quote that she said a few years ago and I think it’s really, really true in the way she takes on the job.

SR: Do you think she’s enjoying it? Because it must be hard with Brexit, with the squabbling, factions in her own party.

WILL TANNER: I think being Prime Minister is never an easy job. She is someone who in the Home Office worked extremely long hours and gave everything to the job and I think she’s doing that again in Number 10. Clearly it’s not the perfect scenario and she doesn’t have the opportunity to be a big expansionist Prime Minister given the Parliamentary majority and delivering Brexit but she’s the perfect person to do that, she does just get on with the job in hand and does what she thinks is right for real people.

SR: Get on with the job – I think we’ve heard that somewhere before definitely. Before you go, we touched there on Brexit, do you worry about the constant rows it seems about customs unions, about single market, about max fac, about partnerships – is that putting off the voter groups who you think the Conservatives need to win over?

WILL TANNER: So I was intrigued by your film earlier in the programme which just showed that people want the government to just get on with it. That’s always been my view, as soon as the vote happened they expected politicians to get on with the job in hand and I think that’s what the government is trying to do. Clearly rows in public aren’t ideal but as long as the government delivers the end result then I think voters will thank them for it but they do need a series of other policies that deliver social and economic reform too.

SR: Will Tanner, thank you very much.

WILL TANNER: Thank you.