Many Tories are remarkably chipper given that their party has suffered the biggest defeat in its history.
They point out that no political party has achieved power in modern times with so small a percentage of the vote as Sir Keir Starmer‘s Labour. They say, rightly, that only around 20 per cent of the electorate voted for his party.
Another morale-boosting statistic, which is pretty incredible if you think about it, is that Jeremy Corbyn got more votes in 2017 and 2019 than Labour did last Thursday.
All this is true. Sir Keir has a massive majority but his electoral base is fragile. It will surely start to crumble once his honeymoon is over, and people wake up to the reality that most of the things that annoy them so much — uncontrolled immigration, high taxes, a dysfunctional National Health Service, ubiquitous potholes — haven’t gone away.
In fact, my bet is that in 18 months or so Labour will be shedding safe seats in successive by-elections, and many of its cheerleaders in the media will have a noticeably hangdog look.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK split the centre-Right vote on Thursday, probably depriving the Tories of 80 or 90 seats in return for just five because of our first-past-the post system
No political party has achieved power in modern times with so small a percentage of the vote as Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour
Why, then, don’t I share the widespread optimism in Tory circles that, so long as the party can get its act together and find a personable leader who doesn’t frighten the horses, it will be knocking on Sir Keir’s battered door in a short space of time?
It is because of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. It is because Reform split the centre-Right vote on Thursday, probably depriving the Tories of 80 or 90 seats (because of the quirks of our first-past-the post system) in return for just five. It is because Reform won about 60 per cent of the votes that the Conservatives achieved.
Unless some solution can be found so that the Tories and Reform stop fighting each other as separate parties, the danger is that Labour will be returned again in five years’ time, even if it is looking distinctly shopsoiled.
There appear to be at least three different strategies for dealing with Reform UK. Two of them can be easily dismissed. The third, though plausible, will be far from easy to accomplish.
The first non-starter is to hope that voters will grow tired of Mr Farage, and recognise that his party’s talent pool is about as thin as that of the Central African Republic’s ice-hockey team, and, moreover, is partly composed of misfits and racists.
The liberal media will continue to try to represent Reform in the most lurid colours but I doubt it will work. During the campaign, Mr Farage weathered widespread criticism of comments he had made that were sympathetic to Putin, while the outing of a handful of cranky extremists didn’t derail him.
Farage is, after all, an alluring character, who conceals a heart of steel with a huge smile and a pint of beer in his hand. As Suella Braverman wrote of him in a newspaper article yesterday: ‘He has no record in office to defend. He can just say the right things.’
Starmer with his wife Victoria as they enter No 10 after Labour won the General Election last week with a landslide victory over the Conservatives
Nigel Farage will not wither or grow stale as he plays the part of a loquacious and acute critic of Starmer’s prospective litany of failures.
Non-starter idea number two for dealing with Reform is for the Conservative Party to merge with it, or perhaps form an electoral pact, as the SDP and the Liberal Party did in the 1980s. Why on earth would Farage want to do that?
He despises and dislikes the Tories, and having won nearly two-thirds of their vote, believes he has them on the run. He also knows that many of his supporters feel just the same way, and can’t risk annoying them. He wants to destroy the Tories, and only then fold the bedraggled remnants into his own victorious party.
His ruthlessness can be glimpsed in the way he treated GB News co-host Jacob Rees-Mogg. The two men are peas in a pod. They customarily josh amicably as Farage hands over to the Moggster in the programme schedule, stressing their mutual admiration and the closeness of their views. Rees-Mogg has declared that they should be in the same party.
Yet Reform UK put up a candidate against him in North East Somerset, taking enough votes from the Moggster to hand the seat to Labour. If Farage can do that to his Tory friend, imagine what he’d like to do to the much larger group that he regards as his Tory enemies.
There is no prospect of an entente cordiale between the Conservative Party and Reform, at least for the foreseeable future, and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
Suella Braverman is abrasive and divisive — the Tory Party’s answer to Nigel Farage without the charisma, writes Stephen Glover
GB News co-hosts Jacob Rees-Mogg and Farage share a close relationship – often stressing their mutual admiration and closeness of their views
So we come to option three — difficult to achieve, full of perils but just about plausible. Put simply, it is that the Tories should shoot Farage’s fox. As we live under Sir Keir Starmer’s fox-friendly anti-hunting regime, I had better put that differently. Incapacitate Farage’s fox.
In other words, the Tories must, after 14 years of promising to reduce mass immigration, at last give the electorate reason to believe that they really would do something about it.
They must champion low tax and warn about spiralling welfare payments. They should no longer be ashamed of Brexit, and robustly defend it against the incremental encroachments planned by Starmer, who dreams of returning us to the paralysing grip of Brussels.
The Tories need to pitch their tent defiantly and unashamedly further to the Right, on ground that has been bagged by Nigel Farage. Tony Blair famously embraced ‘triangulation’ — borrowing policies from his Right-wing opponents for a centre-Left movement.
The Tories should attempt some triangulation on the Right, adopting some of Farage’s agenda (actually authentic Tory measures) in such a way — and herein lies the danger — as not to antagonise centrist voters, without whose support they won’t be returned to power. Reform would be squeezed.
I don’t pretend it’ll be easy to persuade disaffected voters that the Conservative Party understands their concerns. Young people, for example, have entirely given up on the Tories. Yet according to a poll last week by JL Partners, 23 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds (to whom Starmer wants to give a vote) support Reform.
Obviously the Tories need to find the right leader to bring about this shift to the Right. I don’t know who it should be, but I can say who it shouldn’t. Tom Tugendhat is too much in the tradition of stuffed-shirt, one-nation Tories to convince anyone that the party has changed.
By contrast, Suella Braverman is abrasive and divisive — the Tory Party’s answer to Nigel Farage without the charisma. She would be apt to turn the Conservative Party into a kind of shrill, hardline sect, terrifying to centrist voters.
What a delicate operation this is! A Tory leader is required who can claim back some of Farage’s policies — re-occupy some of the territory he has colonised — without appearing extreme.
Nigel Farage and Reform are the problem: it’s as simple as that. He won’t go away, and he can’t be bought. Unless the Tories succeed in making him redundant, this country could be ruled by Labour for a very long time.