Some things in life are inevitable: death, taxes, and Dominic Cummings branding the latest leader of the Conservative Party a ‘complete useless dud’.
When asked about the current plight of a party with which he has a tangled past, the Machiavelli of Durham was far from complimentary. The Tories are ‘intellectually dead’. Their new leader, just past a hundred days in her role, is ‘a bad joke’ who will be ‘got rid of before too long’. And Nigel Farage is ‘more famous than the whole shadow cabinet put together’. No Dom, tell us what you really think.
Kemi Badenoch’s supporters would obvious disagree. Operation Slow Burn needs more time, they argue. Give her a couple of years to podcast. Let Alex Burghart cosplay as Keith Joseph. Check back in 2027 and she’ll have something to say that doesn’t involve slagging off sandwiches. This party is not ‘intellectually dead’, but on the verge of a revival. Haven’t you read Thomas Sowell?
But time is exactly what Badenoch does not have. Tory MPs are already jittery. Badenoch is their sixth leader in eight years, they have long since become accustomed to regicide. And all are more than capable of reading the opinion polls and taking some very simple lessons.
Some pollsters are more favourable than others, putting the Conservatives, Labour, and Reform UK each somewhere in the mid-to-low 20s. But the general trend is clear: Labour stable, Tories down, and Reform up. Since becoming leader, Badenoch has managed to take her party from first place to third. Even against a government as unpopular as this one, she plumbs depths that Rishi Sunak couldn’t manage.
Why? Farage, of course. On this at least, Cummings is right. Reform’s leader seems to possess an energy, a hunger, that Badenoch lacks. At all hours of the day, Tory MPs find him and his motley crew taking the fight to the Government across media platforms. He may be more accustomed to the GB News studio than the Commons chamber, but more voters pay attention to the former.
Farage seems to be a black hole sucking in Tory members, donors, voters and, if rumours are true, MPs. The prospect of Reform ending the Conservatives’ 300-odd years as one of Britain’s two major parties suddenly seems realistic. For some Tories wanting to avoid that, the solution seems obvious: cut a deal.
What this looks like depends on which rumours you believe – whether it’s a full-blown merger a la their Canadian namesakes, or a similar agreement to that which CCHQ and Farage came to in 2019, with candidates stepping down in seats which the other party already holds or is best placed to win.
Doesn’t this make sense? Both parties believe in strong borders and low taxes, even if the Tories haven’t been the best at making those a reality. All agree that Keir Starmer’s Government is a disaster. If you put the two vote shares together, it would be double Labour’s. A Tory-Reform coalition could smash the Left in 2029 and implement exactly the sort of firmly right-wing agenda that Britain needs.
So far, so Panglossian. But I’m sorry to say that I don’t share the optimism. Don’t get me wrong: I agree with Reform’s analysis of #FourteenWastedYears, find Farage’s antics entertaining, and enjoy Rupert Lowe’s tweets just as much as the next terminally online Sensitive Young Man. But supplicating before Reform isn’t the answer for a Conservative Party facing an existential crisis.
For one thing, it might repel as many voters as it attracts. Simply adding together voting shares in the latest polls does not work. As Stephen Davies points out, even if lots of Tories have a positive opinion of Farage, plenty do not. A deal might prompt them to switch to the Liberal Democrats or abstain. One can’t see Farage signing up to any agreement that doesn’t leave him in pole position.
Central to Reform’s appeal is that they aren’t one of the two parties that have together misgoverned this country for the last century. Voters hate the Tories and Labour. So Farage is their obvious next step. If he cut a deal with the Conservatives, he’d prove himself to be part of the cynical uni-party establishment.
What incentive does Farage have to chuck a lifeline to a party that he has spent the last three decades campaigning against? He already has his boot on their neck. If his lead continues to widen, one doesn’t have to play around with Electoral Calculus for too long before Reform is winning a majority on a low share of the vote and consigning us to double-digit obscurity. They do not need a deal.
But neither do we. Suggesting the Conservative Party can only survive by playing second fiddle to Farage shows a curious lack of confidence in their abilities. This might be a low ebb. But Reform supplanting them is not an inevitability. Have we already forgotten how Theresa May in 2017 and Boris Johnson in 2019 converted Farage’s former UKIP and Brexit Party voters en masse?
For Badenoch to do the same will be difficult. She is out of government. Plenty of those that the Conservatives have lost to Reform are unwilling to come back, believing that they have betrayed by a party that treated them like idiots. Post-Boriswave, how can they be trusted on immigration ever again? But even if it is an uphill battle for her, it should not be impossible. Her race is not yet run.
Having been ruled out a deal with Farage, Badenoch must learn from him. She must use her mea culpa for her party’s immigration record and announcement on Indefinite Leave to Remain as a springboard to a platform on border control that makes clear that she have a genuine plan to reduce immigration. Fortunately, the Centre for Policy Studies has already done plenty of the heavy lifting for her.
Badenoch must also learn from Farage’s busyness. If she wants to convince her MPs that she is not being overshadowed by him, she will need to take a leaf out of the books of her more energetic shadow ministers – like Robert Jenrick and Chris Philp – and flood the field with content. Social media clips, articles, interviews, speeches, Tik Toks: we need Badenoch saturation.
The new leader’s greatest virtue is that the public don’t know her. When they meet her, they should (ideally) like her. That means speaking in the language of the electorate about the issues that they care about. Ignore the culture wars. What does she have to say about the NHS, potholes and bin collections?
If Badenoch can start to make a better impression on voters, she can blunt Farage’s momentum, convince her MPs not to plot against her and buy herself the time to indulge in the serious policy work and long-format interviews on which she is so keen. If she doesn’t, Tories will continue to look covetously towards Reform. Talk of a deal, however impractical, will not go away.
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