Rofe in conversation with Clouston

9 Nov 2026Video25 minFilmed 28 September 2026

William and I had worked together for a while, on the party’s funding pitch and on the Clacton by-election. Just before I launched my campaign, we sat down and recorded one of our conversations, about the country, the party and where it goes next.

We talk about a Britain that can, what the state is for, globalisation (and my nan), why I joined the SDP, Clacton, funding and telling the truth.

Prefer to read? The full transcript is below.

Transcript

Lightly edited for reading ease. Captions are also available in the player.

0:00Why I’m here

Eleanor: I’m sure that people will consider me delusional, but the way I look at it and the way I’ve analysed it, the SDP is the only party that can actually grow and be strong enough and resolute enough and have a clear enough idea of its direction to help fix Britain. So that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m in it.

0:22A Britain that can

William: Right. Eleanor, you’ve talked about a Britain that can rather than a Britain that can’t in lots of aspects. You know, we can’t do a lot of things and we ought to be able to. Can you just expand on what you mean by that?
Eleanor: I was trying to encapsulate the problems Britain has. When I was younger, when I was growing up, if you worked, you could find work for a start. You could build a life. You could start a family. You could generally get a home. It wasn’t perfect for everyone, but there was a sense of possibility. And on a sort of institutional basis, you could trust the police. You could speak your mind. There was just a possibility and the country itself could defend itself. It could actually manage a border. And in the intervening 20 years, we’ve become a country that can’t. Now people cannot start a family. Young people cannot find work. Graduates are unemployed. People can’t feel free. They can’t feel safe on the streets. They don’t feel like the police will come when they call them. And the country clearly can’t defend its border. It clearly cannot manage its defences or supply its energy at a reasonable price. So that things can actually function. And I think that’s when I think about the SDP and the policy and the political philosophy, it’s really about creating a Britain that can. It’s about governing in the national interest for the benefits of Brits and the country and our communities and institutions so that things actually function again.

1:54State competence and the football pitch

William: A lot of this gets back to state competence, doesn’t it? Which the SDP has always talked a lot about. I think we’ve been the most state-focused party in terms of, maybe that’s a criticism. We can talk about that later maybe. But state competence, a state that allows the citizen to flourish. What’s your view on that? I mean, it’s got to be a focus, hasn’t it, for any potential government, what the state does, how well it does it?
Eleanor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you don’t get a country that can’t do anything without rampant state incompetence. And, you know, there’s obviously state indifference or even hostility to the country and people, but the incompetence has been rampant. And I think that’s partly why there’s always been people who want a small state and a big state. Some people want a small state because they’re so sick of the incompetence that they don’t want the state anywhere near their lives.
William: It’s understandable.
Eleanor: Yeah, completely. Some people are trapped by that incompetence and they want a state because they can’t build a life. They need benefits or they need some way of functioning in the world. And what everyone really is seeking, I think, is just competence and ability to run the country. You do have to think about what the state is there to provide, what it should be doing. So when we were working together, I liken this to a football pitch.
William: Yeah.
Eleanor: The state maintains the pitch and the infrastructure around it so that the people, the businesses, the communities of Britain can play on that pitch.
William: I thought it was wonderful. I mean, we did work very closely on the funding pitch and I thought it was probably in the years that I’ve been involved, the best metaphor that I’ve ever seen. So thank you for that. The pitch metaphor. Yeah, which is very social market. It’s very, if the state gets the basics right, like housing, grid energy at affordable rates, transportation, then pretty much the citizens get on with it, like households and companies can get on with their lives. Yes. But we have a big state. We don’t have a competent one, do we?
Eleanor: No. And that’s partly short-termism, right? So if you think about, someone was talking about how businesses are much better at planning or preparing things because they have market signals. That is true in certain instances. But if you think about it, for the past 20 or 30 years, there have been vanishingly small numbers of businesses saying, by the way, immigration is going to harm the social fabric of the country. And as it harms the social fabric and it harms the economy of our country, my business will suffer. Because their short-termism doesn’t think about what’s happening 20 years down the line. And that’s where the state has a function, which is to be thinking further ahead. But we have, you know, I always think of the SDP as a party that is unfashionably wedded to long-termism, governing for the next generation, not the next election.

4:41Realism and optimism

William: We’ve always tried to be realistic in the party. Truth-telling and realism is part of our DNA, I think. But do you think we are, in the political world generally, too pessimistic about the country’s prospects? Because it’s true that obviously fiscal deficits are huge and getting bigger and they seem to not get control of them. But actually, on the optimistic side, households and corporates are quite well financed. And if only the state were better, more competent, actually the future is very bright. Do you agree? I mean, so what about the optimism and pessimism question for us?
Eleanor: Well, I suppose you do have to be realistic. And for good or bad, that is a USP. Because selling false hope constantly is what’s damaging people’s trust. It’s damaging people’s sense of well-being, actually, in the country and a sense of being able to, a sense that they belong to a nation, rather than just something that’s just ruled over by spivs and chancers and bullshit artists, frankly.
William: Spivs and tarts.
Eleanor: Spivs and tarts, yeah.
William: Yeah, yeah.
Eleanor: So you do need some realism. But, I mean, my view, if you step back, Britain has built itself across centuries. And actually, by trial and error, that’s how we work as Brits, is trial and error.
William: Pragmatists.
Eleanor: Yeah. Pragmatists. We make mistakes. We’ve had some people who’ve been obsessed with certain ideologies and stripped things back to something abstract and it doesn’t work for us. But across the course of centuries, a few decades of idiots doesn’t have to ruin us. We do have a huge amount of human capital, ingenuity. The innovation sector is incredible. There are some structural issues that need to be fixed and some attitudinal issues that need to be sorted. But no, I think we can. It’s not that it’s all fixed tomorrow. But we absolutely can.

6:36The border

William: One of the areas that we can definitely improve vastly is what I would say the basics. And most people in pubs and cafes around the country would agree with us. It’s basic things like border control. Yeah. So how, I mean, if, what would happen to the morale of the country if you got a secure border and you stopped the mass migration experiment? What do you think?
Eleanor: I think it would massively increase. Yeah. Because it’s not just, oh, we’re so incompetent we can’t hold a border. It’s, this is the foundational duty of a state and they’re refusing to do it. There has been a strain, I think it goes back to Gus O’Donnell, of, oh, we will govern for the global good. And that sounds great. You know, globalisation has lifted millions out of poverty. Fantastic. But someone in Doncaster has one vote and one government that is meant to look after them. Yeah. And if they vote for their national interest, their own interest, and that government says, sorry, but we’re not playing that game anymore, then you’ve just disenfranchised people. Yeah. And that’s effectively what’s happened with immigration.
William: You’ve demoralised them, haven’t you? Yeah. That’s the other thing. And I’ve said I wouldn’t vote for Trump personally, but he’s proved one thing in the West, which is that if a Western state wants to get control of its border, it can. Yeah. So with the will, I don’t, yeah. And back to where we started, can rather than can’t. You see, you speak to all these people, no, you can’t. We can’t do that with all these laws and international legal agreements. We can’t do that. No, a sovereign parliament can do anything, can’t it?

8:05Blair and “inevitability”

Eleanor: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the greatest tricks that the devil, Tony Blair, ever played, was making everything seem inevitable. This just, oh, globalisation’s inevitable. All the decisions I’m making, they’re not even my decisions. I’m just sort of channelling some higher power here, which you probably did believe. But, you know, everything’s just inevitable. And so anything that happens from this, just you have to accept it.

8:27Globalisation, and my nan

William: You can’t question it. Yeah. So you’ve talked, you talk quite a lot about the local and the global and you’re quite hostile, aren’t you, to what you would call rampant globalisation. Do you just go into that?
Eleanor: Well, I think when you, when it starts, it sounds great. Actually, funnily enough, my nan, old Irish matriarch, chain-smoked and she used to roll the polythene or the, whatever the wrapper is around the bag. She used to sit there and roll it and chain-smoke and rail about globalisation. And this was in the nineties.
William: Really? Farsighted.
Eleanor: She was really ahead of herself. I was like, oh, nan’s off again. She was out there ranting. But she was right on certain levels. If you gut the government’s power, if you remove infrastructure and leave it to other states to run it or sovereign wealth funds or private equity or whatever, if you hand over your industry and your ability to make things and do things, you’re effectively outsourcing your responsibility for a start.
William: And your safety.
Eleanor: And your safety. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to be realistic. It’s not saying, oh we will be isolationists. You know, you have to have an internationalist outlook because the world is more connected now. Just technology has done it. You can’t, you can’t deny it. But there’s also, there are some sort of deep immoralities that have been foisted on the world because of this. If you look at the fact that we have outsourced industry to a country that produces human rights abuses almost as fast as it produces tat to sell on Amazon.
William: It’s not free trade.
Eleanor: It’s not. No, it’s not free trade. Someone in a factory in the north of England or wherever in England is not able to compete with the slave labour in Xinjiang.

10:08Why I joined the SDP

William: Let’s talk about the party now. So what made you join the SDP?
Eleanor: Well, I joined X. So it was a great channel to see lots of people with SDP in their name and think they make sense. I joined X first because I was searching for someone who was talking sense about gender ideology. Yeah. Because everywhere I looked, it felt like people had lost their absolute minds. And I sort of followed breadcrumbs and found people and thought, oh, well, I’ll have to join this terrible place where it’s, you know, filled with doom. And then I found people having really interesting conversations. And every time I saw someone with SDP after their name, they were really smart and interesting. And then I watched you, which you’re like the normal funnel in.
William: Yeah. Quite often.
Eleanor: And it just felt like, it felt like a party that hadn’t existed for a long time, you know, in that it was, it was reality-based. It clearly loved our nation without being tub-thumping, you know, the Tories the Tories wave the flag or even Reform and that, but they’ll sell out the country from underneath it. Whereas, you know, the SDP just felt like a genuine deep-seated love for the country, a reality and a commitment to that. And it, you know, just made sense to me.

11:25Members and the public

William: Some people think, you know, the party is its members and they have a slightly inward-looking view, you know, say inward to the members rather than outward-looking to the public. And I’ve always tried to, in my time, always try to look out to the public, to the general public, because that’s who we’re serving. Is that your take basically?
Eleanor: Yeah. I mean, I don’t, I don’t think it has to be either/or. I think we have really smart members. We have incredible people who can contribute ideas and actually part of the reason I think we need funding is because it’s very hard to manage that if you don’t have people who are paid to do it, because it’s everyone’s, you know, it’s too many pieces. It’s time-consuming stuff. But no, I would, and not just public-facing, but actually inviting the public in. I, if I was researching X topic, I don’t know, law and order, I would be saying, right, if you are a policeman or woman and you are in an institution and you can see chaos around you, you can see the dysfunction, you’re frustrated, you want to do your job properly and it’s not happening, come and talk to us. We’ll make sure it’s, you know, secure and you know, anonymous.
William: It’s like a whistleblower almost.
Eleanor: Yeah. Like a whistleblower, but institutional intelligence.

12:36Clacton

William: Now we worked together on Clacton, on the Clacton by-election. We did. And you chaired kindly a public, big public meeting we did together. What are your reflections on the election?
Eleanor: My reflections, firstly, it was just delightful. I mean, the results weren’t, but the process of it was, it was, it was fabulous. I got to meet a lot more SDP members. You and I got to work closely again together, which was fabulous. And it was a beautiful summer. Clacton was great.
William: Beer was good.
Eleanor: Beer was good. Yeah. Yeah. I had an inkling, you know, that Clacton was not going to be this hellhole that is depicted.
William: It’s beautiful.
Eleanor: It’s beautiful. It’s so lovely. Yeah. It’s so lovely. And exceptionally friendly. This idea that, you know, you, it’s almost like a journalistic rite of passage, as far as I can tell, that someone goes down and drinks in the Wetherspoons and moans about tattoos and people having rough accents or being on mobility scooters or whatever. And acts like they’ve gone to some kind of feral other world. But I loved it. It was really nice.

13:32Any differences with the SDP?

William: Before finishing the, this section I thought I should ask you this question. Do you think you have any ideological differences from your position to say what the SDP has been in the last few years?
Eleanor: There’s probably some policy nits I could pick up on or whatever, but that’s the nature of being in a party. What I think when I, I’ve done a lot of analysis of the political landscape and the parties in it. And what I think you’ve built uniquely among British parties is something that has solid foundations, something that has a clear philosophy and that’s what’s drawing people to it and understanding of, you know, whether it’s the role of the state or the role of reality, you know, or cultural, you know, traditional, but not cruel. There’s, it’s just beautifully balanced. I think my job as leader would be to build on the foundations that you created. And I think it’s unique. If I look at some of the insurgent parties we see, they don’t have those foundations and you see them wobbling because of it.
William: Incoherent. Yeah.
Eleanor: They’re incoherent. And if you look at, I mean, the legacy parties are even worse because they’ve just sold off bits of themselves to factions and donors and activists and voting blocks. So, and I think globalisation probably did that to them since globalisation, since Blair and then the Cameron years, et cetera, you have a Labour Party that’s abandoned labour and a Conservative Party that’s conserved nothing. They’ve destroyed their own basis. And I think I’m sure that people will consider me delusional, but the way I look at it and the way I’ve analysed it, the SDP is the only party that can actually grow and be strong enough and resolute enough and have a clear enough idea of its direction to help fix Britain. So that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m in it.

15:28Funding and donors

William: And I take this view on funders as well. I mean, potential funders, I would say, you know, if you agree with this, come up, come aboard. And if you don’t, bye, because there is no point in doing it unless we hold broadly to this position.
Eleanor: My first experiment with fundraising would be a completely different way of doing political funding. So raising something like a startup, the signals we have in the SDP are that people who have done well in business generally are willing to give a certain, like a mid five figures donation to the party. And those are your seed donors. They’re the people who see the vision. They understand the direction of the party and they want to support it. They’re the people that I think will get us from here to the local elections and building from there. And I would personally, and Farage has done us a massive favour with this, by the way, I would, I would ask donors to sign a transparency pledge. Yeah. And I’d say the reason I’m doing this is it protects the party, but it also protects you because you’re not going to find that your sort of status as an SDP donor is suddenly tainted by terrible scandals. So, you know, I think we can just try something different. The country needs it.

16:40No political heroes

William: Now you’ve said that you don’t have a political hero. You don’t put politicians on pedestals as heroes. Why?
Eleanor: I don’t put anyone on a pedestal. I think it’s, I think it’s the fastest way to disappointment. And actually just, we talk about reality. You have to be real. Humans are flawed people. I admire lots of people. I admire you and what you’ve built. You know, but I don’t ever, I don’t ever start raising people up.

17:09Persuasion

William: So Michael Oakeshott always had the view that politics was basically the act of persuasion. Do you agree?
Eleanor: Yes. Yes. But what we’ve had for 25 years is a lot of persuasion. Blair and Campbell and Mandelson in particular were absolutely brilliant at it. And you see a certain sort of carrying of that torch when you, when the Tories came into power. I think you do have to have responsibility and duty as well underlying that persuasion. And that’s what’s been missing. But that’s where the SDP has the foundations. We understand the responsibility, the duty, the hard thinking and work that’s required to help turn Britain around. We just, we definitely need the persuasion layer, but it is a layer.

17:58Toughness and compassion

William: SDP thinking has always had this combination of toughness and compassion in it. Do you think that’s still relevant now?
Eleanor: I think it’s probably more relevant than ever. It’s, I think what we’ve had again is empty compassion, things that sound or feel compassionate. And I have a, I have a big distinction in my head between what people consider now as progressive is really just permissiveness. And there is a huge distinction difference between those two things because the people that seek permissiveness are generally the worst people in the world.
William: Yes.
Eleanor: You shouldn’t give it to them.
William: Yeah.
Eleanor: So there’s a difference between saying everyone should be equal, you know, gay rights, for example, it’s incredibly important that we don’t discriminate against people. Yeah. But I think you hit permissiveness when people are performing sex acts on the street. And if you call it out, it’s apparently homophobia.
William: And you don’t care.
Eleanor: Yeah. Yeah. That’s permissiveness. You know, and even with things as complex as mental health, there is a kindness in having expectations of people. Yeah. In having, in saying, I believe that you can do something. Now there are extreme cases where there are, you know, is an impossibility and people really just need care. Yeah. But I know in my own life. Yeah. When I have had expectations placed on me and lived up to them, it’s been the best thing in my life.
William: Standards.
Eleanor: Yeah.
William: Raised to raise people up. But it’s right as if I, if I, it, what, what’s the thing when they have they do a word count. That’s right. On what you’ve said in documents and things. If someone word counted my work in the past, probably indifference is the biggest, one of the biggest words. I use the word all the time and it’s very much to what you say. What we see, people are very proud of being liberal. Uh-huh. And they boast about the liberalism, but actually a lot of what their liberalism is just indifference, which it is worse for, which is not caring.
Eleanor: Yeah. Well, is it, is it kindness to say, right, you’re an alcoholic, but we’ve diagnosed you with depression. You’re not going to have any follow-ups with the doctor now. And here’s some money. You’ve got no expectations on you. You’re going to drink yourself slowly to death and the state will pay for you. Yeah. That to me is exceptional cruelty.
William: It is. And it’s where indifference ends up in appalling results just for everyone. No, that’s right. But the other side, the other side of our thinking really on this is the toughness side, which there is, there is a challenge certainly with the public because you want to truth tell, you want to be honest about the state of affairs. And certainly our last green paper called for considerable sacrifices on the public’s part. But do you agree that whilst the sacrifice is necessary, a critical thing is that we all play our part. The whole of society has to pull in the right direction, right?
Eleanor: Yeah, they do. That’s much harder because society has been carved up into thousands of little pieces. And one of my, one of my biggest views in terms of as party leader is I don’t think I would ever allow, if I had the power, I would never allow factions to build. So, and no groups, no in groups, identity-based or otherwise, because to me, you have to, you have to all be saying, right, we all, we’re all pulling in the same direction. We don’t need lobbying for this one group. We don’t need, you know, this group to constantly be a permanent self-interested presence. What we need, if there are projects where you need someone, if there is a women’s rights thing and we need a defined project and we need some people with experience to work on it, fabulous. Yeah. And I think that’s where the country has become this carved up and that’s where the exceptions come, the permissiveness. Oh, you know, we’ll ban face coverings, but not for you.
William: Yes, exactly.
Eleanor: You have to pull together. You have to make things equal. That’s the entire point.

21:56Telling the truth

William: But the two, what you’ve just said there, the two-tier aspect of that is so demoralising. Yeah. People know that if you favour this group and you allow them licence to do whatever they like and you crack down on us for the sake, it’s just so corrosive. But I do think you’re right about the party. I mean, I always resisted it. And I think factionalism inside a party is absolutely corrosive. We just don’t need that. So the other aspect, the other major aspect of our politics in comparison to other people, other parties is reality, truthfulness. And you said the segue for you coming into the party was the trans ideology thing, which I agree with. But that’s a key thing, isn’t it? Talking truth truthfulness and talking truth to power.
Eleanor: Well, so I understand the idea of talking truth to power, but you really do just talk truth to lies. That’s what you have to talk truth to. And that’s what we’ve had for decades is politicians just lying, just delusional.
William: It’s Orwellian, isn’t it? What we’ve got, what we’ve got on the truth thing, where you’ve got a, you know, sort of 15% of hyper-progressives that run the show in the institutions and run politics to a certain extent. And they, and they basically gaslight the public with things that are blatantly untrue. But yeah, the truth, the lies that are spread propagated and spread. It is Orwellian, you know, the, probably the biggest slogan, ridiculous slogan, the diversity is strength slogan, which is obviously a challenge.
Eleanor: I made a slightly facetious post when the Jason Arday furore kicked off where I said, why wouldn’t he think that it’s okay to lie? Yeah. We’ve been told that Islam is a religion of peace, that men can be women, that, you know, immigration doesn’t impact the economy.
William: It’s good. You know, economically good, socially good. Yeah.
Eleanor: Just this huge list of outright lies. It’s, there’s a beautiful, I’m not sure if the original man actually said it, but it’s certainly in the mini-series, the Chernobyl mini-series, where they say every lie you tell incurs a debt to the truth. And sooner or later that debt gets paid. Yeah. People have been paying that debt in this country for years, whilst people who are completely removed from the consequences of their lies and their delusions carry on. And I fundamentally think that is unacceptable. There’s, there is a great stain on our country in terms of the grooming gangs and how that was dealt with.
William: Disgraceful. Yeah. Utterly disgraceful.
Eleanor: You just can’t accept that that’s what the political elite can do. They just can’t. We have to fight that.
William: And the, and the crucial role the SDP can play in this, and it is a crucial role, is just giving people a sort of beacon of truth. And the hunger for that is huge, isn’t it?
Eleanor: Yeah. Yeah. The permission structure to say, yeah, we will tell the truth and we will allow you to tell the truth. You know, we’re not going to constantly police you and tell you what to think. And we want to hear your ideas, not just shut you up.

24:43William’s endorsement

William: Look, it’s been great chatting to you, Eleanor. And I just want you to know that you have my full support. Best of luck.
Eleanor: Thank you.

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