Darling, sweetie, darling
When Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy Stone and her friend Eddie downed champagne at Harvey Nichols, they’d have been outraged to bump into a figure like Mike Ashley. Well, now he owns the joint. Frasers Group picked it up for just £40 million.
The low price tag is with good reason. It has haemorrhaged millions over recent years and Frasers clearly has a body of restructuring work ahead. But £40m for a near-200 year old iconic British luxury retailer standing at the top of Knightsbridge is enough to make even Patsy stop drinking.
Harvey Nichols is perhaps more valuable to Frasers than it is as a standalone business. Ashley’s operation already has much of the corporate machinery needed to strip out some backroom costs, but the key is the Group’s elevation strategy. It is admirably clear-eyed: know where you’re going, be clear on how to get there, pursue it without distractions.
In the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch may have acquired a similarly distressed asset. Years of lacklustre polling and a catastrophic result in Manchester have so far failed to extinguish the flickering candle of the Conservative Party. Kemi Badenoch’s ratings have slipped into negative territory and, to my mind, she took longer returning to first principles than the political environment really allowed.
Institutions are not straightforward things to define; indeed sometimes they are felt more clearly than they can be observed. Some councillors and a bunch of two-men-and-a-dog constituency Associations do not make an empire that will endure a thousand years. In fact, of the 544 ‘accounting units’ (roughly approximate to constituency associations) the Conservative Party reported having at the end of 2024, only 158 reported income above £25,000. That does not, on the face of it, look much like an asset.
But an ageing department store burdened by debt, higher employment costs, the loss of tax-free tourist shopping and further regulatory pressure can still be attractive to the right buyer with a strategic plan. There is an intangible notion of the Conservative Party which has bought Badenoch time through her slow start.
Compare this to a fashion start-up with a TikTok shop. No pension liabilities, no costly square footage, no legacy POS systems. Just a charismatic founder and the agility to get ahead of trends.
In this respect, Reform UK is loosed from the shackles of the legacy parties with the freedom to learn from their best practice. The Conference Business Day is a positive development for the party. But in my own conversations, some businesses have spoken about the engagement feeling too transactional: they are expected to pay up and show up. This suggests some enduring naiveté. Reform cannot rely on being the hot new thing forever and, while there are some standout operators, organisational depth thins in the middle. It’s not fatal but the burden of proof is always higher for the challenger than the incumbent so it is worth bearing in mind.
Nigel Farage remains one of the most effective political communicators of his generation, but too much of Reform’s value still resides in him personally. Around him, senior figures pick fights with journalists, Conservatives and each other to little obvious benefit. The latest bickering between Zia Yusuf and Tim Montgomerie has similarly been magnified by the cost to either man of any perceived distance from Farage.
The challenge is to turn momentum into an institution. Counterintuitively, giving more people around Farage genuine weight would strengthen him by allowing others to carry some of the load. Frankly, it would help if everyone were just pulling in the same direction.
Rupert Lowe illustrates the danger. Farage is a predator whose eyes face forward, fixed on the errant prey of ideologically soft Conservatives and hypocritical Westminster swamp dwellers. He has less of the prey’s peripheral vision for who might be stalking him and he has consequently struggled with Restore. This unusual dynamic has forced him into strategic decisions which don’t match the more finely tuned agility we are used to from him, not least the recent by-election. I argued at the time that without a proper reason it would deliver very little and it does appear to have been an exercise in motion without momentum.
Badenoch has the opposite problem: it may sound like a truism but you aren’t relevant until you are. The Conservative brand is very badly damaged and the electoral results aren’t helping. Even so, I am becoming less bearish for the Conservatives, and I note that Badenoch is now favourite to be the next Prime Minister, with William Hill offering 3/1. On those odds, a £40m stake would return £160m. Now that would be worth popping the champagne for.
