LBC's Matthew Wright spoke with Tim Barnes, Prospective MP for the Cities of London & Westminster earlier today.

Listen to their interview, or read it below.

Well, Tim Barnes is the Conservative parliamentary candidate for the Cities of London & Westminster, and delighted to say joins me first to discuss. Good day to you, Tim. 

Good morning, Matthew. How are you? 

I'm very well, thank you. And I'm intrigued by this. I think it's a really interesting political story of our times, because if I was Rishi Sunak, I can’t deny, I would be very tempted to try and do a deal with Nigel Farage because I think Reform is going to be a massive problem come election time.

So I can't really see that this is something that is likely to happen, in any sense. You just spent the last hour talking about the Honours System and now you basically putting forward an idea that it should be used to bribe somebody to not run a in a political activity. That doesn’t seem likely to me. 

Edward III would love that.

Yes, but we don't have a direct monarchy these days. Things have moved on somewhat in the last 650 years. Of course, there have been people who are supported in those communities. And indeed, after the Second World War, one of the Labour Prime Ministers, in the 1970s, Jim Callaghan made his son-in-law the ambassador to give him something to do. So there are precedents for this, but I can't see that it's a good idea electorally.

I can't see that it's a good idea morally, and I can't see that it's a good idea for the Conservative Party. If you want to reward somebody like Nigel Farage who, after all, owns another political party, as I think you just pointed out, how can you ensure that they will be a Conservative? The Conservative Party has always been an open and welcoming party, the most successful Western political party of the 20th century in terms of the number of elections won and the number of years that it's had in power.

It had a great sense of what people are looking for and an ability to reinvent itself as culture and generations change. 

But the answer for the future cannot be Nigel Farage. He is somebody who is a proponent of the big idea of the last 25 years, maybe, but not necessarily about where things are going. But a larger proportion of backbench MPs fancy him as a Tory party leader in the future.

I didn't really think I necessarily buy this kind of, you know, media stories. And this is one of a large group of Conservative Party MPs say. With 350, 360 Tory MPs there and you have five or six people who regularly come out saying that they have a different view. A tiny proportion of what the bulk of the party in Parliament think and not necessarily the bulk of the party or Conservative voters think elsewhere.

There's no doubt about the fact that he can be a consummate media performer. He's a populist. He's somebody who's able to attract votes in difficult and just attract votes. He can attract listeners, which people find LBC giving them a job, which is more than the Tory Party did though. So there's a certain amount of value that you can see in this being a story.

But it seems to me that there's a reason why predominantly it's in the left of the media, the Guardian and the Mirror, who continue to recycle this story rather than anybody who's got actual credibility or well-conceived and well-informed sources from within Conservative ranks. 

You haven’t read The Daily Telegraph of late if you think you know about The Guardian. 

Just indulge me, if you would. Sure. 

I agree on every word you’ve said.

But let's just imagine if you were Nigel Farage having lost seven elections on the bounce, would you want to do it again? Would you risk an eighth loss if there was the possibility of a cushy job somewhere else, I just want to explore the idea of whether as a man he might be tempted to forego Reform at this stage in his life.

I don’t think Nigel Farage is somebody whoever wants to have to live with the consequences of his own actions. And indeed, it's great if you are a campaigner. It's great to lead a minority partner where you get huge amounts of exposure and airtime. It's great to be able to offer different points of view, but when you actually come down to the hard yards that come from being in any position on an electoral authority held to account, you have to make choices and priorities and that means you have to disappoint some people.

You actually have to think that the quick argument you've come up with, which sounds like ‘man in the pub’ in the common sense, might not actually work, is it just something he doesn't want to have to live up to and deliver on? So I think he's got a highly lucrative career acting as a warm-up act at Donald Trump rallies, speaking on GB News and elsewhere.

And I'm not entirely sure that from Nigel Farage’s point of view, that’s worth trading in or having to admit that if he runs something, it isn't quite as easy as he made it sound. 

Sage words. Sage words. I enjoyed that conversation. Tim Barnes, Conservative Party Candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster.