They’re not laughing now. On his eighth attempt, Nigel Farage is now an MP. Reform UK won over 4 million voters and delivered 5 MPs, and came second in 98 seats. A fragile Labour landslide, a grim inheritance, and a bleak international picture: could these enable a 2029 Reform breakthrough – taking Farage where Giorgia Meloni and Geert Wilders have so boldly gone before?
The idea seems fanciful, but not quite as fanciful as it did only two months ago. As I predicted during the election, Reform have only so far succeeded in making Britain less Conservative. According to More in Common, the Tories would have won around 40 more seats had Reform not stood, and only an additional 12 if Farage had not returned as leader. Still worse than 1997, but still a tenth more than what we actually managed.
Unsurprisingly, the question of whether to make plans for Nigel squats over the ongoing shadowboxing of the Conservative leadership race. Britain is said to suffer from a split Right as readily as it once benefitted from a split Left. Just as Labour’s divisions helped enable Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s landslides, the Tory-Reform split seems to have delivered a Starmer uber-majority on a pitiful third of the vote.
Leaving aside that had the SDP not existed Thatcher’s majorities would have been just as healthy, it seems the Conservatives now have two options: to either murder Reform UK or merge with it. Do the Tories damn Farage and all his works, blaming him for their defeat while condemning his party as a cadre of fruitcakes and loonies? Or does it roll out the red carpet, and admit him, just as many want?
Both approaches are flawed. The former does not take Reform seriously enough; the latter takes them far too seriously. If the Conservatives genuinely hope to challenge for government in 2029 – and I believe they can and should – they need a strategy by which they listen and adapt to the concerns of Reform voters, while keeping its volatile leadership at arm’s length, and keeps those 6m or so voters it still won.
Not the easiest of balancing acts. Lying behind my party’s record defeat is its impressive capacity to alienate everyone but its core vote. Both the 2015 and 2019 electoral coalitions are equally disillusioned. We have been reduced to a rump of aging homeowners in a limited number of rural redoubts. Reform, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens will all look towards our remaining seats covetously.
We’ve also done little to cover ourselves in glory in the twelve days we’ve been out of power. Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch have been throwing accusations at each other, with Robert Jenrick caught in the crossfire. We’ve got from being a party leading a G7 country to one that can’t run an election for a committee chairman. As we dawdle over timetables, CCHQ’s coffers become emptier.
Nonetheless, the night is darkest just before the dawn, and catastrophe has been swerved. The Tories did not come third. 121 seats is an awful lot more than Reform’s 5. To suggest that a party that can date itself back to the Exclusion Crisis should take the knee to some Barbour-wearing TV upstart would suggest we have very little self-respect – and would ignore the tensions within Reform itself.
One wouldn’t suggest Farage is disappointed not to be Reform’s only MP. After all, if he really does aspire to be the Leader of the Opposition, he is going to need one or two followers on the Commons benches with him. But Farage has a very long track record of falling out with or dumping allies and compatriots at the point at which they cease being useful to him. Ben Habib is the latest of them.
Until last week, Habib was Reform’s Deputy Leader under Richard Tice. But with the MP for Boston and Skegness being shunted aside by Farage’s return to the top, Habib has had to make way for his consolation prize. Unsurprisingly, he isn’t happy, and has complained about Reform being ‘a limited company controlled by…Farage’ with a ‘glaring democratic deficit’ that cannot be ‘taken seriously’.
Strong stuff. Reform’s unique structure has been a source of some fascination. It doesn’t have a membership; it is an extension of Farage’s will. Tice was only leader on sufferance, until the point where a little contemplation encouraged Clacton’s new MP to enter the arena. Tice aims to turn Reform into a mass movement of Tory-style constituency associations. Will Farage be keen on diluting his power?
How will he adapt to life as a constituency MP? Farage has received criticism for planning to hot foot from the seaside to stateside, a privilege extended to the MP for Holborn and St Pancras but not that of Fareham and Waterlooville. It’s unsurprising: Farage always aimed to campaign in America and has no desire to abandon his media career. His best transatlantic pal has just survived an assassination attempt, after all.
If Donald Trump is re-elected, Farage will once again be closer to the President of the United States than any other British politician. As enjoyably embarrassing for David Lammy as this will be, it does raise the question of just how many hats Farage can wear: MAGA, TV host, party leader, constituency MP and TikTok superstar. That’s a workload that would almost make George Osborne blush. Almost.
How will they hamper Farage’s efforts to transform Reform into something that really could replace the Tories as the party of the British Right? Not only has that job been made harder by a slightly-better-than-apocalyptic Conservative result, but because the election highlighted the inadequacies of Reform’s own organisation. Ignore his sounding off about Ukraine and focus on the hopelessness of his candidates.
As well as demonstrating an eye-catching common desire to spontaneously mention der Führer, Reform’s would-be MPs made for an embarrassing crew. From blaming Margaret Thatcher for the Falklands War via vaccine scepticism and complaints that Muslims would ‘inter-breed’, many followed their leader in demonstrating a happy willingness to go entirely off message. The list is so long as to merit a piece in itself.
Farage distanced himself from plenty of his own candidates and blamed the failures of a vetting company that Reform had attracted. But for many Conservatives, he confirmed their worst suspicions: that Reform is not a long-lost member of the Tory family, but a collection of oddballs, loons and weirdos who most would have little interest in dealing with. Pax Logan Roy, they are not serious people.
The Conservative Party may not have entirely covered itself in glory in selecting candidates. But Reform has set its bar far lower. It’s no surprise that Tory voters give one of their major reasons for not supporting Reform as concerns that ‘some candidates and party members are racist’. A similar rationale explained why, by the campaign’s end, Farage’s candidates were defecting to the Tories, not vice versa.
An equal share, according to More in Common, worried about Farage’s support for Trump, something that might be communicated to the former MP for South West Norfolk. But a 30% share were also bothered by what has long been my complaint about Reform: that they have no experience in government. Farage has never had any responsibility. He is only a tribune, and a conduit for protest.
Confront him with the Whitehall machine and he’d be downing his sorrows in The Red Lion in a week, using copies of his wish-list manifesto to dab the eyes of his disappointed acolytes. Now he is in Parliament, will he deliver for his constituents, and for those millions of Reform supporters? Or will he find spending his weekends in Clacton too much like hard work? Do Mar-a-Largo’s comforts beckon?
Perhaps they don’t want him to spend his time asking questions about bin collections. Maybe the people of Clacton have sent Farage to the Commons as an act of national service, to air the complaints of a tranche of voters that have gone ignored for so long. Reform’s voters were angry about immigration levels, the cost of living, and the NHS. Few are better than Farage at making a noise and getting interest.
But will he change anything? He might hope that Labour struggles just as much on the major issues of the day as the Tories did, leaving him to sneak through in 2029. But that leaves himself vulnerable to being outflanked by a Conservative Party that can understand the concerns of his voters but show a greater chance of delivering them. Both UKIP in 2017 and the Brexit Party in 2019 were outflanked.
Of course, in 2019, the Tories benefited from Farage standing down across seats they already held, to the chagrin of much of his party. Such has been his continually quixotic relationship with his former party, that Farage has, in recent months, gone from being mogged at its party conference, to floating his interest in leading, to claiming he wants nothing to do with it, especially amid its current squabbles.
Fortunately for Farage, Conservatives want nothing to do with him either. By a slim but significant majority, ConservativeHome panellists rejected any form of deal with Reform. Polling suggests that while 2.8m Reform voters would back a combined Tory-Reform party, 2.3m Conservatives would not. A Tory recovery requires winning Farage’s voters, not kissing the ring.
The route to doing that will hardly be easy. But already the analysis exists of what went wrong, and what needs to change. Our problem was not one of being too left-wing or too right-wing, but incompetent. We imploded in government. Labour might yet. And I wouldn’t rule out Farage doing so in opposition. Reform have highlighted voter hunger for a revolution, but will struggle to enact it.
In which case, the proverbial dog returns to its vomit, and the Conservative Party takes up the cause of the British Right again. Reform have given us a decent fright, but we Tories have got staying power.
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