On Sunday, Tobias Ellwood MP tweeted his displeasure at a story in the Sunday Times that Nigel Farage planned to ‘take over’ the Tories. ‘History shows’, Ellwood wrote, that ‘a centre right Party appeals to the wider electorate and wins elections.’
Which rather raises the question: does Mr Ellwood feel like the member of a centre right party appealing to the wider electorate and winning elections?
The tweet then continued with a warning against Farage entryism, cautioning that the Man of Brexit ‘wants IN to shift the Conservative Party to the unelectable extreme’. Finally, Ellwood added that this shows ‘how fragile democracy can be when populism gathers pace threatening the political balance.’ The day after, Nigel Farage announced he was returning as Reform leader, creating the worst possible scenario for Tory election planning.
I don’t want to write about how Farage’s announcement spells catastrophe for the Tories, because it doesn’t. Catastrophe was already writ large; Farage returning is simply a punctuation mark on a sentence already written. It has reduced the Conservative Party’s chances of avoiding electoral annihilation.
Farage’s return, in fact, puts replacement of the dominant party on the right, in the style of Canada in 1993, very much back on the cards. Under Richard Tice, as I wrote for The Critic, Reform had drifted. In fact, they were rubbish:
A historic collapse in the Conservative vote, mass disillusionment with establishment politics – it’s difficult to think of more favourable conditions for alternative right-wing parties. How, then, do they stand to capitalise on it all? The answer is almost laughable: Reform’s national polling numbers haven’t yet broken into double figures, and its plan to stand in every constituency is expected to win exactly zero seats.
But now he departs, as Gibbon wrote of the Emperor Justinian, ‘neither beloved in his life nor regretted at his death’. And whilst many of Reform’s problems – a top-heavy structure, patchy talent, lack of ground game, data and volunteers – remain, with him departs the major barrier to Reform’s success. Tice’s problem was that he didn’t share or understand the values and concerns of his potential voters and, thanks to the party’s structure, had no feedback loop to correct him. Farage, however, is blessed with a natural understanding of his electorate and the charisma required to lead a breakthrough movement.
In fact, Farage’s return suggests that Reform may be taking the possibility of a right-replacement strategy seriously. He has signed up for five years, far beyond the immediate needs of the election, and he will be fishing in fecund waters.
Reform’s voter base, after all, is not just made up of disaffected Tories. First as UKIP leader, then as the Grand Old Man of Brexit, Farage has gradually built up a network of support that includes Workington Man as much as Waitrose Tory. That is why Hartlepool has developed into a prime Reform target seat.
Reform’s rise has capitalised on a long-term process of voters becoming disaffected with Labour, driven by a feeling that it was no longer ‘their party’. As Steve Rayson writes in The Fall of the Red Wall: ‘Labour was losing Leave areas before Brexit was even a politically salient issue… Four in ten of those who voted Labour in 2010 and Leave in 2016 had already been lost to the party in 2015′.
This was also the wave of voters that backed Boris, although he failed to exploit this realignment. UKIP served as a gateway drug for the 2019 Red Wallers, its focus on Europe and immigration appealing to culturally conservative voters who were reticent of going directly to blue.
Workington Man is still not keen on returning to a party that speaks to Haringey more than it does to Hartlepool, and research from Onward shows the vast majority of the Conservative Party’s lost voters have simply drifted into ‘don’t know’. Once voters have switched, research shows it is far more likely they will do so again. With Farage in the frame, will they make Reform an electoral force? Anything is possible.
But to play devil’s advocate, I believe it’s just as likely that Farage will use this election to push the Tories only to the brink of destruction. Perhaps Tobias Ellwood was right; perhaps Farage does intend to reduce the Conservative Party to a rump in order to seize control of it.
If this is his intention he may, in fact, be signing his own death warrant. According to research from Tim Bale and David Jeffrey, the worse the electoral result for the Tories, the more entrenched centrism will be. The centre, as it turns out, can hold. As William Atkinson explains: ‘their bleakest scenario – a Labour landslide with only 106 Conservatives left – would leave 49% of MPs as having backed Sunak in October 2022, compared to 43 per cent now. By the fruits of Sunakism you shall know it.’
Regardless of power politics, Farage’s re-entry into the fray will shape the fate of Tories not only at this election, but beyond. By virtue of never having held office, he is still unblemished by the realities of government, and after 30 years seeking to disrupt Westminster is still seen as an outsider. Should his bid for leadership of the British right succeed, it will be a political earthquake. Should he attempt to seize the Conservative leadership and fail, his populist credentials will be irrevocably damaged.
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