Leadership Quote by Francis Maude

“The problem we have is not Labour, in however it is configured” is the kind of line politicians reach for when they want to sound brutally honest without actually surrendering any tactical advantage. Francis Maude isn’t praising the opposition; he’s demoting it. Labour, whether as Blairite modernisers, trade-union traditionalists, or some stitched-together electoral machine, is framed as a constant background condition - not the active threat. The real danger is implied to be internal: complacency, muddled purpose, factionalism, or a governing party that has started arguing with itself rather than with the country’s problems.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “The problem we have” is a confessional collective, pulling listeners into a shared diagnosis while keeping the speaker above the scrum. “Not Labour” denies the easy scapegoat that animates partisan politics; it signals seriousness, even maturity. Then comes the oddly legalistic “in however it is configured,” a clunky clause that functions like a net. Whatever shape Labour takes, Maude says, it isn’t the variable that explains the current predicament. That’s a message aimed less at voters than at colleagues: stop obsessing over the enemy’s rebrand and start fixing your own offer.

Contextually, it sits in a familiar Conservative tradition of warning that elections are lost through self-inflicted errors rather than opposition brilliance. The subtext is a rebuke disguised as strategy: if you’re relying on Labour’s weaknesses, you’ve already conceded you don’t have a compelling story of your own.