How Labour and the Tories are playing politics like losers in the online game Risk
If Labour and the Tories simply ignore the growing strength of Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party are going to win
In 2024, an American chess coach called Jonathan Schrantz posted a video on YouTube entitled: “I’m quitting chess.” This came as a shock. I’d been watching his entertaining videos of opening gambits for a while and they seemed to be the work of someone who was enjoying himself.
Instead, Schrantz started focussing on videos about Risk, an online version of the board game in which people compete to take over not just the world, but a whole array of different maps, real and fictional, including the Roman Empire, Feudal Japan, Atlantis, the Battle of Waterloo, and something called the Fungle.
Those videos encouraged me to start playing and today, thanks largely to the cheerful Schrantz’s advice, I find myself with the grandiose Risk title of ‘grandmaster’, something I could never hope to achieve at chess.
The psychology of winning at Risk
At its heart, it is a game about psychology, and it is one that politicians would do well to learn how to play. Victory depends as much on avoiding conflict and de-escalating tense situations as it does on conquering territory.
There are lessons for international relations. For example, making an alliance by doing a favour for one of your opponents – there are usually five – is among the most powerful things you can do.
One of the most common and biggest mistakes a player can make is to become locked in a cycle of violence with another, as they end up becoming weaker with each passing round until eventually a third player is able to move in, easily defeat both and, most likely, win the game.
At times, feuding players become so preoccupied with their rival that they stop paying attention to the bigger picture and seem oblivious to the point of delusion about the danger they are both in.
READ MORE: Here's my vision of Britain under Reform UK in 2029. You can decide if I'm a new Nostradamus
Labour infighting
Something similar is playing out in British politics today. Labour’s supposedly ‘landslide’ victory in the 2024 general election appears to have convinced their MPs that they are in a dominant position – rather than the fight of their political lives – which has allowed factions to develop.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s call for Keir Starmer to resign, briefing about alleged plots by Health Secretary Wes Streeting, blocking Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s attempt to become an MP, and various backbench rebellions are all evidence of internal feuding.
And while Labour tears itself apart, the Conservatives are doing what the Opposition is – usually – supposed to do by knocking lumps out of the government. But these are not usual times.
Both Labour and the Conservatives have been losing support and becoming weaker. In the 2024 general election, Labour got 34 per cent of the vote – hardly a landslide – with the Tories on 24. According to Politico’s Poll of Polls, these parties are now on 19 and 16 per cent respectively.
Reform UK’s growing strength
The big winner over the past year and a half has been Reform UK. In the election, they received 14 per cent of the vote but are now polling at 28 per cent. Despite this doubling of support for Nigel Farage’s party, Labour’s near-constant infighting and Kemi Badenoch’s focus on attacking Labour suggest old rivalries are more important than seriously confronting the new threat on the horizon.
This has been made worse by the Conservatives’ strategy of trying to win back defectors by presenting themselves as a ‘Reform lite’ party and hoping their hard-right rivals turn out to be as comically dysfunctional as Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left ‘Your Party’ party. The problem is that, until Farage and co fall out with each other, essentially saying ‘we agree with Nigel’ will only be good for Nigel.
Just as the Tories need to be directing their fire towards Reform as much as Labour, Labour’s rebels must urgently stop fighting amongst themselves and start working together.
Epstein files to oust Starmer?
It may well be that Starmer has to go but, if this is to happen, it should be done with the least amount of collateral damage possible – ideally with his agreement but, if not, by the swiftest of coups. Making peace necessarily involves compromises, acceptance of what you regard as faults, and forgiveness for mistakes and even insults.
Katrin Bennhold, host of a New York Times newsletter called The World, pointed out this week how strange it would be if Starmer was forced to quit because of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
“As far as we know, Keir Starmer never met Jeffrey Epstein. He never went to Epstein’s island and never sent him raunchy emails. He might be brought down by the Epstein files anyway,” she wrote.
“... He won decisively in 2024. Now, few analysts see him lasting until the 2029 elections. It’s a striking outcome. At their origin, the Epstein files are an American scandal. Why have they become a crisis for Starmer – but not for President Trump, who was a close friend of Epstein’s?”
The reason is not so much Starmer’s bad decision-making in appointing Peter Mandelson, a friend of Epstein, as ambassador to the US, but the use of this mistake as a weapon in the infighting within Labour, for which Starmer obviously shares a degree of blame.
Too great a risk
What is clear is that if Labour’s various factions continue to fight among themselves and the Conservatives continue attacking only Labour and basically supporting Reform, they are all ultimately going to lose the ‘game’ to Farage.
Except, of course, this is not a game, it’s deadly serious. This country’s future prosperity and security – both heavily reliant on alliances with fellow democracies like the members of the European Union – are at stake.
A Reform-led UK Government that allied itself with the US under Donald Trump or a like-minded successor, as they pursue dubious territorial claims in the Americas, could make Britain a pariah on our own continent. And that’s a risk we simply must not take.
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