It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. In politics, no organisation knows this better right now than the Conservative Party. Between 2010 and 2024, much was airily promised by successive Tory Prime Ministers – and not enough was delivered. Under David Cameron, immigration was to be brought down to the ‘tens of thousands’. The Conservatives left power with record numbers of people coming to Britain. Boris Johnson insisted that his levelling up agenda would spread success across the country. Geographic inequalities remain deep-seated. More recently, Rishi Sunak pledged to halve NHS waiting lists. He failed.
The result at the last election was a historic defeat, and a landslide for Labour. Yet now Keir Starmer is in power, Britain’s disillusioned voters can already see that little looks likely to improve. Where do the millions of voters battered by the 2008 crash, the Covid pandemic and the subsequent false promises of prosperity turn to? Enter Reform UK.
Reform are filling the void left by the failure of mainstream politicians. Led by Nigel Farage, the party returned five MPs at the last general election but have dominated the airwaves since.
In the weeks following the election, Farage was undoubtedly the party’s main source of appeal. His victory in Clacton-on-Sea, close relationship with Donald Trump and prowess at castigating the Tories in the media have won him high levels of support – even making him the most popular politician in the country (as long as you only look at the number of people who love him rather than loathe him).
Yet Reform is no longer exclusively the Farage show. The renewed coverage of the grooming gangs scandal has got the party even more attention, with Elon Musk reposting Rupert Lowe MP’s call (and Kemi Badenoch’s) for the Home Office to conduct a national inquiry into how this travesty came to be.
How have the Tories responded? Not all that well. Over the Christmas break, news broke that Reform’s membership had overtaken the 131,680 figure reported by the Conservatives last year. Badenoch took to social media to accuse Reform of fudging the numbers. It came across as the outburst of a sore loser – and it gave Farage and Richard Tice the opportunity to laud their popularity over the Tories and portray themselves as the sprightly, energetic heirs to the British Right.
One can understand why Badenoch might feel disconcerted by all of this. For centuries, the Tory Party has been the vessel for conservatism in Britain, allowing its leaders to focus their efforts almost entirely on fighting their ideological enemies in Labour and the Liberals. Reform, on the other hand, poses a fairly novel threat for the Tories – even compared to UKIP or the Brexit Party, Farage’s previous vehicles. Countering it requires a two-pronged approach.
Task one is articulating clearly why the Tories were unable to deliver positive change on so many fronts (and why they failed to gain enough credit for their successes, such as in education). Reform’s rise is most obviously read as a reaction against mainstream political stagnation. Aside from major shortcomings in controlling immigration, fixing state institutions and increasing economic growth, there is also a pervasive feeling that politicians have neglected the smaller things too. A revealing study from Stonehaven published last year showed that what united the seats which swung to Reform was that they all had a ‘missing road’ that would easily connect them to the outside world.
A paper published by Badenoch’s campaign in October 2024 on the growth of the bureaucratic state does a good job of outlining the barriers policymakers face in delivering change, but explaining why her party was unable to dismantle these structures for so many years must play a more salient role in her leadership.
Task two is beginning to develop a plan for delivery. Thus far, Badenoch has argued that it is too early to provide granular policy detail on what a Tory government would do if re-elected, given that the election is so very far away. That’s certainly a decent argument, but the Conservatives are operating under a unique set of circumstances. Labour might be faltering, and Reform may not yet have a fully-baked plan for government, but their rise shows no sign of abating. A recent MRP poll conducted by More in Common has the right-wing upstarts dethroning the Liberal Democrats as the UK’s third party at the next election.
Phase one of the plan is, in some respects, the easy part. A healthy session of pride-swallowing would go some way in conveying an image of a party which takes the challenge ahead seriously. The second phase requires real guts. Andrew Lilico wrote in CapX this week that the Conservatives have ignored their intellectuals for too long, leading to a deficit of bold ideas within the party. He’s right. In journals, newspapers and think tanks across the land there are smart people with innovative solutions to Britain’s problems. In the 1970s, when our country’s issues were similarly intractable, Margaret Thatcher listened to and surrounded herself with the thinkers of the Right.
Badenoch is someone with an intellectual hinterland. Indeed, while the Tories were in power, and in particular during her first leadership contest, she chafed against the party’s refusal to do the hard thinking that was required to address Britain’s problems. If Badenoch wants to devise a plan for quelling Reform, then she needs to show voters that she has the answers to their problems.
The alternative is to leave a gap on the Right which Reform will do its best to fill. At best, this will split the conservative vote at the next election, and help Labour cling on to power. At worst, it risks the unravelling of the world’s oldest political party.
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