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Good morning. It’s always enjoyable to read your emails, whether they are correctives, questions or just suggestions for things I might like to see or listen to. I haven’t done a reader question for a while, so I’ve decided to take one today.
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Perception matters
I am interested in how far you think the fall in Conservative support is a reaction to having a Black leader.
On the face of it, the appointment of first Rishi and then Kemi has been accepted in a heartening way. But is there a cost in votes?
My short answer is “it’s complicated”.
It is a consistent and robust finding in political science, across various countries, that people perceive ethnic minority candidates as being more leftwing than they are. In a country like the UK, which tends to tilt to the centre-right, this is a major advantage to any rightwing ethnic minority politician and a disadvantage to a leftwing one.
As far as most voters are concerned, a rightwing ethnic minority politician will appear to be closer to the centre ground than they are, which is always a bonus. Politicians like Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch can reach voters who are further away from them politically than they would if they were from the ethnic majority, because people perceive them as being closer to the centre than they are.
I think a big part of what happened in 2024 is that Rishi Sunak moved the Conservative party away from the ground on which Boris Johnson fought and won the 2019 election, while Keir Starmer moved towards it, which predictably enough led to a Labour victory. The gap between Sunak’s policy platform and 2019 Conservative voters was a big problem for him — but that he himself had a moderate “vibe” meant that not everyone perceived the gap to be quite as large as it was. So Sunak’s shift was less damaging to the Tory party than it might otherwise have been.
The flipside to this is there are, of course, some voters who will simply not vote for an ethnic minority candidate. This true in the UK, true in Jamaica, true in Canada, true essentially wherever. When I travelled the country at the last election, I met lots of people who were not going to vote for the Conservatives because of Rishi Sunak’s perceived religion and ethnicity. (I use the word “perceived” because many of the people I met who felt that way believed Sunak to be a British Muslim, or from Pakistan, neither of which are the case.)
I think the “Sunak Effect” in 2024 was probably a wash: his ethnicity gained some votes, it lost some votes, let’s call the whole thing off.
I don’t think that is the case with Kemi Badenoch. For one thing, she just is quite different from Rishi Sunak, who was born and grew up in the UK. She was born in the UK, but grew up in Nigeria, and I think that is always going to make it harder for a politician to relate to the country they seek to govern.
She has also moved the Conservative party into a different political position, one where it is still less attractive to moderate voters who felt Sunak was their guy, and she is fishing in an electoral pool where “being raised in another country” is more of an electoral handicap.
So I think the answer is “it doesn’t help”. But frankly it is much less significant than the fact she is inextricably linked to the Conservative party’s governing record. By trying to run away from it she ends up with the worst of both worlds: neither defending the last government’s achievements nor escaping the blame for its failures.
Now try this
I saw Sinners at the cinema. As readers are probably tired of hearing, I am a big believer that you should just book things and go to them without learning all that much about them. Yes, you’ll see some absolute stinkers but you’ll discover things you love that you would never have tried in a million years.
As such, I went to this expecting a serious Western and was pleasantly surprised to see something much goofier and sillier than that. I think some of the attempts to impose a bigger and cleverer narrative on the film are working too hard, and I doubt I will ever watch it again, but I enjoyed it a lot in the moment. For those of you not worried about spoilers, here’s Danny Leigh’s review.
