Is this the start of post-woke politics?

Holly Valance's comments have set the internet on fire - but they're also a warning to the big political parties.

“Bored housewife”.

That is the common response to former pop star turned new darling of conservative politics Holly Valance who has made headlines in recent weeks for her outspoken political views about everything from crime to climate change.

She has spoken numerous times to GB News, a network she calls a “friend”, on a political podcast and following PopCon, a movement established by former UK prime minister Liz Truss aimed at “restoring democratic accountability to Britain and delivering popular conservative policies”.

“I would say that everyone starts as a leftie and then wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realise what crap ideas they all are. And then you go to the right,” Valance – appearing to riff off that famous (yet misattributed) Winston Churchill line – said in a clip that has now clocked up more than 122,000 views on YouTube alone.

The former Neighbours star is now a mother of two and married to billionaire luxury property developer Nick Candy.

The 40-year-old is now earning a fresh reputation akin to former (and prospective) US president Donald Trump.

A man she’s met and calls “fabulous, extremely warm, extremely gentlemanly”.

Her comments have been a lightning rod for the online commentariat, (present company included) but also serve as a warning to political parties as Millennials – set to soon be the biggest voting cohort to weld a mini pencil – start to flex their electoral muscle around the world, abandoning the major parties and being captured instead by populist leaders and fringe parties.

Valance is either “telling it like it is” or “someone ignorant of their own privilege” when it comes to socialism, activists like Greta Thunberg, Andrew Tate and her home country Australia which has “really gone big on woke stuff” especially in the education system.

“The stuff they’re teaching in school. I don’t think sexuality and children should be in the same sentence. I don’t think anyone’s sexuality is anyone’s business. You don’t know about mine. I don’t know about yours, why would we?” she said.

She hit out at Thunberg, claiming “the demonic little gremlin” has been made a “goddess in classrooms”.

“All the kids are all coming home with depression and anxiety”, she said. “Why would you go to your music lesson or bother doing your homework or get out of your bed if you think we’re all going to be dead in five years anyway?”

Valance, who confirmed she also “started out a leftie”, was born in Melbourne (a place she now calls a “nanny state”) and quit Ramsay Street for LA and London in her early 20s to pursue her career.

She tried things out in Hollywood, but realised quickly she wouldn’t be making inroads in LA as she refused to “go to the parties and sleep with the right people” so returned to the UK. There she all but disappeared from the public eye and married Candy in 2012 in a lavish ceremony where the couple were serenaded by Elton John while the bride wore a bespoke J’Aton Couture gown hand embroidered in fine silk.

Holly Valance and Nick Candy arrive for the Conservative Summer Party at the V & A Museum in 2022. Picture: Getty Images

You’d think appearing on right-leaning TV network and attending a conference headed up by a former conservative leader and marrying Candy, a major Conservatives donor, would mean Valance would be a rusted on Tory?

Not so.

Instead she is abandoning it and will instead vote for the insurgent Reform Party established by Nigel Farage at this year’s general election in the UK.

“Last time I voted Conservatives. Next time I’ll be voting Reform. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome and I’m sure as hell not going to Labour,” she said.

It’s an unpopular opinion in her adopted home. According to some of the recent polling, Labour – after being declared “unelectable” in 2019 – are ahead of the Conservatives by about 24 points.

Opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer is preparing for a sequel to Tony Blair’s success in 1997. Back then, however, Blair had a plus-22 approval rating. Right now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s net approval is minus-43, Starmer’s is minus two.

An Ipsos voter intention poll published last week showed Reform UK has gained four points in support since January.

This isn’t the 1990s anymore.

Cool Britannia is now freezing due to exorbitant utility prices, the shrinking economy, a government and broader society that has more dysfunction than Take That and Spice Girls before they broke up.

Where Blair was brave with his election promises and policies, Starmer is playing a small target game – much like Anthony Albanese did in 2022 – in a bid to win at all costs.

Cue Vogue fashion shoots, titled “Keeping Up with Keir”, and mornings spent with other women’s fashion magazines where he pledged to end the war in Gaza, despite facing rebellion in his progressive ranks for refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire.

“I completely understand why people have pushed hard on this and I share that emotion, but simply saying something doesn’t make it happen. And my job is to make it happen,” Starmer told Grazia about his plan for peace in the Middle East.

I changed the Labour Party and now I want to change Britain.

Great to speak to @misszing for @BritishVogue about why respect and dignity are so important to me, and how my family always keep me grounded.https://t.co/U6BH0CP32h

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) February 9, 2024

Valance’s frustration with both major parties is the one commonality between her and her peers back home.

Younger voters are not solely focused on the parties or the policies in particular, they are just looking for an alternative.

The lack of excitement many Americans feel about a US presidential rematch between Joe Biden and Trump has heightened interest in alternatives to the major-party candidates, like independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has massive appeal among voters aged 18-34.

HAVE WE ENTERED THE POST-WOKE ERA?

In Ireland, the beleaguered leader Leo Varadkar quit this week. The once staunchly Catholic country’s first gay prime minister said he was leaving to give his coalition government a better chance of re-election under a new leader as the nationalist Sinn Féin surges in opinion polls.

“My reasons for stepping down are both personal and political,” Varadkar, 45, told a hastily arranged news conference in Dublin.

Last year after losing the election, Finland’s former Prime Minister Sanna Marin, once the world’s youngest leader, also stepped down as chair of the centre-left Social Democrats.

“I support anybody who sticks to what they believe in and isn’t a turncoat, doesn’t do a million flip flops and U-turns, even to the nutters on the other side, if you stick to what you believe in and you keep reiterating that over years and years, I can always respect that. I might not agree with you but I get that more than the changing of minds, the flipping around and never having any conviction, not being staunchly for or against something. That’s confusing and I think people are sick of that.”

Valance is the exception to the rule of that famous (yet incorrect) Churchill quote: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”

“She’s one in five. Twenty per cent of her generation and younger will vote conservative,” RedBridge Group Australia director Kos Samaras told The Australian.

“When Boomers enrolled to vote at the age of 18, around 53 per cent of them were voting for Labor. By the time they get to their 60s, only 35 per cent are voting for Labor and the reason for that is that the biggest driver of that has always been property ownership.”

That’s not to say it’s all rosy for the left. Labor does well in attracting the more pragmatic progressives, but only between the ages of 35 to 42 and they’re just disillusioned Greens supporters.

“They are having to do things as a generation that older generations didn’t have to do. Right now, they’re eating into their savings and sitting on mortgages and eye watering levels of debt, but at the same time they’ve also grown up in a world where everything is porous and information is at their fingertips,” Samaras said.

Sick of the same robotic rhetoric from the major political parties, the kids are eating up populism for the fact that they finally “feel seen” by certain personalities.

Valance is fine. She’s got a thick skin, a dermis lathered in La Mer thanks to her billionaire-adjacent status. Despite having a phone snatched from her pram in London’s plush borough of Chelsea, she’s doing OK for herself. The next iteration of the ‘quiet Australians’ will, according to Samaras, be those Millennials in the outer suburbs and regions who are immiserated by not having the same opportunities as their parents.

These are the ones who voted Yes for marriage equality and the voice referendum, but when you ask them about ideological stuff and drop the word “woke” into conversations “they’ll look at you a bit weird”, Samaras said.

“But if you went and spoke to them the way (anti-EU right winger) Geert Wilders does in the Netherlands you’ll get their attention and they will vote for you in big numbers.”

Something we may see play out at this weekend’s Tasmanian election.

“Non-university educated Tasmanians in the northern part of that state are voting Lambie. They’re going to vote in very big numbers for Jacqui Lambie,” Samaras said.

“They feel seen. She is not the establishment. They are anti-Establishment. That’s what drives populist leaders. They’re not exactly attracted to the populist ideas, it’s just they think the system is stacked against them. It’s the same with the major parties. They don’t talk to them. They are playing on a completely different playing field and an entirely different sport to younger voters.”

This week a company which produces satirical political videos was forced by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission to censor a video about the election due to it featuring an image of Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff.

It was removed from its social media channels as required but the sketch has amassed more than 365,000 viewers (and counting) on YouTube.

In comparison, clips by Rockcliff reached just 54 people.