Editor’s view: Car-crash Coffey contrasts with slick Starmer
Keir Starmer and Minette Batters © NFU Things you expect to see on day two of the NFU Conference: Bleary-eyed attendees regretfully swapping stories of who went to bed the latest and wincing from dancing too vigorously to Cotton-Eye Joe.
Things you do not expect to see on day two of the NFU Conference: The secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs chiding Minette Batters for not running her conference on time.
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Ms Batters, now a senior officeholder for nine years, is a consummate media professional and somehow managed to remain civil, but her polite smile didn’t quite reach the eyes thereafter.
Farmers are quite content to be told tough messages at conferences.
There’s a lot of those to go around – cuts to the Basic Payment Scheme, price volatility and the monumental challenges ahead of delivering the many things politicians have heaped on our sector to help tackle climate change.
What they don’t expect is to turn up and feel disrespected. This was the line that the secretary of state crossed today.
Being a senior politician is a hard, high-wire act and it is at its hardest at the end of a long period of government.
There is a record to defend and ministers, like farmers, get ground down by never truly switching off from work.
Meanwhile, different interest groups continue to compete for your attention. Most of the decisions you make will appease one side while irritating the other.
But none of that is an excuse for talking down to your audience.
Despite delivering a reasonable speech, Ms Coffey’s hard-to-fathom responses to questions and brittle behaviour will have left many farmers in the room questioning how much she has left in the tank.
This weariness is the vulnerability that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is able to exploit.
Speaking to a rapt audience on the first day, his pitch to farmers was that current politics feels as if it is something that happens to people, not with people.
He said the current government practised “sticking-plaster politics,” lurching from one crisis to another with a piecemeal response, rather than getting on the front foot.
And he added that while for too long, Labour has come across as the party of urban Britain, rather than for the whole country, he wanted to change that by working with farmers to design policies that deliver.
Warm words but light on the detail. Yet the idea that to win the farming vote he has to produce a detailed and generous manifesto for farming (so far absent) is to my mind, wrong.
Farmers do not vote simply on farming issues, any more than a plumber would only vote on who is going to make the most favourable regulatory environment for copper pipe.
What we all want is someone who has a grasp of the problems, a set of principles that shape the solutions and an energetic appetite to get on and make things better.
They may not agree with his solutions, but even Mr Starmer’s firmest opponents in the audience struggled to say he did not manage to do the first and third of those.
He is going to be a more formidable performer than many have anticipated.
An earlier version of this article stated that Therese Coffey chided a delegate for not asking his question quickly enough. This was not the case and the article has been updated to reflect that.