Earlier this week, Dr David Starkey and I addressed a packed meeting of the New Culture Forum in Buckinghamshire. Along with a number of other PopCon speakers, we have been criss-crossing the country talking to pretty much anyone who will listen to us and can muster an audience of centre-right voters.

Since January 2025, we have spoken at dozens of meetings from Newcastle to Cornwall and Cheshire to Kent. We have communicated our message directly to about 5,000 people face-to-face and many thousands more have watched footage of these events online.

Most campaigning organisations would now say, “And our message is clear….” and go on to list some soundbites. However, I’d concluded before even launching PopCon just over two years ago that our own message was really rather complex and it would take time and patience to bring clarity to it.

In essence, our assertion is that the United Kingdom has been subjected to constitutional vandalism since 1997, with power bleeding away from Parliament in two directions. On one side of the ledger, to a vast number of “independent” supposed expert bodies or quangos and – on the other side – to an enormously politicised judicial system. Our contention is that this isn’t merely a minor bureaucratic inconvenience or irritation. In fact, it is the root cause of the vast swathes of social and economic problems experienced in Britain today.

Ludicrously high taxes, runaway public spending, uncontrollable debt, an exploding welfare system, an erosion of basic freedoms, ever more red tape and regulation, climate change catastrophism and an almost total inability to control our borders – these all stem from an underlying constitutional problem. We have steadily morphed away from being a democratic country to being a bureaucratic one. This long list of problems can’t be successfully tackled one-by-one, you will have to reset and repair the British constitution to have any meaningful chance of tackling them at all.

We aren’t seeking to shoehorn in a specific policy pledge into one page of a political party’s manifesto. Our challenge is rather greater than that. Instead, we assert that a constitutional restoration and a complete rewiring of our government machinery must be the central mission of any incoming government for it to have any realistic chance of success.

Our strategy and activity to date has been based on the belief that this analysis and prescription required both dialogue and discussion. We felt sure we had the right overall recipe and most of the key ingredients, but we weren’t going to claim that we had an “oven ready” plan.

So, for many months now, we have criss-crossed the land putting forward the key ideas behind the “Starkey thesis” and subjecting them to inquest, cross-examination and refinement.

Almost without exception, we have found centre-right audiences are united in the belief that something substantial, deep and underlying has gone badly wrong in Britain and a comprehensive “fix” is required that involves much more than a mere change of personnel in the higher echelons of government.

In addition to our large-scale public meetings, we have also met individually with senior figures in Reform and the Conservatives to press our case. The response has been the same – a dawning understanding that a great restoration and repeal will be required to get Britain back on track.

I certainly don’t claim that we have yet conclusively won the argument. But we have at least started a meaningful discussion and, I think, we are slowly but surely winning it.

Behind my strategy was a realisation that according to orthodox campaigning techniques, we were approaching things in “the wrong order”. Usually, you would publish your policy ideas, analysis or vision in some form of book or pamphlet and then march around the country selling it and promoting it.

Instead, we decided to road test and fine tune our concepts first and then write it all down afterwards. Which takes me back to last Tuesday in Buckinghamshire. This will be the last time David and I speak together at a public meeting until September. From Easter and over the summer, David will be committing his great ideas to paper and pixel. I have set myself the more modest task of producing a short book which will act as a primer – an introduction to popular conservatism as a concept and what it means in practice. I think the quality and impact of what we can now produce will be measurably enhanced thanks to the many events, debates and discussions we have participated in over the last eighteen months or so.

Our online PopConversation events and our (almost daily) national media appearances will continue unabated, but we will also be turning attention to expanding our list of contacts and our database of supporters. You will be hearing from me in the coming weeks about how I need your help to achieve this.

In our mission to restore and rescue Britain, stage one is now complete. We have stress-tested our ideas over hundreds of hours of public discourse. We are now going to get them written down so there is tangible and compelling documentation to support our case and that this material gets into the hands (and minds) of tens of thousands of influencers and campaigners.

Last week a very senior politician told me of their approach to winning any battle of ideas. “Content is king. But distribution is queen. And she wears the trousers.”

We have honed the content and will now get it written. We will build an even greater network to spread that content to every corner of Britain – through bricks and mortar events, one-to-one meetings as well as through online content and the mainstream media.

I think we now have a fair to decent chance of ensuring that our next government puts a well-constructed plan for constitutional restoration at the heart of its programme. But I want to spend every day dialling up that percentage chance. The (maximum of) three years between now and the next election will disappear in a flash.

Thanks for all your help in supporting PopCon – I’m going to need even more of it in the months ahead.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!