A quiz question for politics nerds: what connects Eastleigh, Salisbury, Bexhill and Battle, South Thanet, Bromley and Chislehurst, Buckingham and – here’s a clue – South Thanet again? The answer is Nigel Farage failing to become an MP; he has had seven rejections in six constituencies over 21 years.
It is a record of failure that hasn’t prevented Farage from being one of the most influential politicians of his generation. He didn’t need a seat in parliament to hold sway over the Conservative party, and he didn’t need to be a Conservative to ratchet Britain out of the European Union.
And yet the Commons and the Tory party are unfinished business for the former Ukip and Brexit party leader. He is considering another crack at admittance to the Westminster club, this time as a candidate for Reform UK.
A propitious target has been identified in Clacton-on-Sea. The Essex town was 70% pro-Brexit in 2016. It currently has a Conservative MP, but from 2014 to 2017 it was represented by Douglas Carswell, a Tory-to-Ukip defector (and, later, Ukip quitter turned independent MP).
A poll commissioned by Arron Banks, a financier of past Farage roadshows, suggests that Clacton would fall to Reform, but only if its founder, honorary president and controlling shareholder were named on the ballot.
Single constituency polling is notoriously inexact, especially when the proposition is doubly hypothetical – a notional roster of candidates in an election that hasn’t been called. The survey isn’t much value as a forecast of what would actually happen in a real ballot, but it is good for spooking the Tories, which is why its findings were published over the weekend.
The same goes for a nationwide survey commissioned by a previously unknown group of Tory donors calling themselves the Conservative Britain Alliance. This large-scale poll shows Rishi Sunak’s party heading for burial under a Labour landslide. The key lesson to be drawn from this doomsday scenario was outlined by David Frost, the former Brexit negotiator, in the Telegraph. He surmised that calamity could be averted by a hard-rightward swerve.
The theory is that disillusioned Conservative voters are swinging en masse to Reform and would swing back again if Sunak showed more gumption in cracking down on immigration. As luck would have it, this insight landed in the very week that MPs were due to vote on the Rwanda safety bill. What better way to woo lost Tory voters than adopting rebel amendments that would strip out any vestigial legal safeguard from an already ferocious agenda of indiscriminate deportations.
That proposition is flawed as political judgment and polling analysis. Reform is not the only destination for ex-Tory voters. As many are appalled as enticed by illiberal snarling. Nor is it safe to assume that defectors can be coaxed back with policy concessions that few will trust, if the change registers at all. Backbench Tory MPs should know better than anyone that demand for a meaner immigration regime only expands in proportion to the growing supply of repressive measures.
But it is true that a receptacle for protest on the right – a place to register generalised rage at the state of everything – can put a lot of Conservative seats in jeopardy without siphoning off that many votes. And Labour gains by default, as the party in second place.
That effect has been dulled by Reform’s current leader, the smoothly forgettable Richard Tice. The party’s double-digit poll ratings (on a good day) look flattering given its failure to win council seats or cause byelection upsets. Those are more reliable indicators of a sustainable insurgency.
Farage’s backers think his media magnetism and celebrity profile are the missing components that can upgrade Reform from fringe nuisance to existential crisis for the Tories. If he wants the leadership, there is no impediment.
One downside would be fighting an election as first among many. Farage is no stranger to extremism, but he curates his brand with a beady eye on mainstream respectability. As party leader, he would have to front an unsavoury rabble of doomed parliamentary candidates recruited from the sweaty corners of the internet where white nationalism blends into conspiracy theory. The slate would come with a scandalous cache of unvarnished social-media derangement.
Against the thankless slog of a general election campaign must be weighed the potential prize – not just humiliating the Tory party but hollowing it out and occupying the shell.
The ground has already been prepared. Farage’s decision not to have Brexit party candidates stand against Tory incumbents in 2019 laid the ideological foundations for a merger. Prior to that, there had been plenty of traffic in members and organisers from Tory to Ukip and back again.
That creeping Faragist capture is more thorough at the grassroots level than at Westminster, where the parliamentary Conservative party retains a numerous and periodically assertive caucus of orthodox Tories. They are disproportionately represented on the frontbench. The Ukip-ish cult of perpetual grievance doesn’t lend itself to the mundane business of ministerial duty.
The uneasy balance of power was expressed with the installation of Sunak as leader in 2022 by affirmation among MPs. Conservative members, having picked Liz Truss over Sunak the previous summer, couldn’t be trusted to choose a successor.
Sunak has neither reinforced nor dissolved the boundary with Faragism. He governs with as much old-school Tory pragmatism as he can fit in between regular bouts of deference to Brexit-era fanaticism. If there is conviction in the mix, it isn’t measured in courage.
His method is a system for making hybrid policy, such as the Rwanda bill, that is ideological enough to be ineffective, but not enough to earn kudos from party hardliners.
Meanwhile, the cadre of Tories who recoiled from Farage is drifting away to be replaced by cohorts who can’t disagree with him. When he visited the Conservative conference last year, he was accredited as a TV presenter but received as a kindred spirit. Asked then whether Farage might be welcome to rejoin the Conservatives (he left in the early 1990s), Sunak could say only that his party is a “broad church”.
That doesn’t leave much scope for distinction in an election campaign where Tory candidates will need to give disgruntled voters reasons not to back Reform. Their only recourse is to warn against inadvertently easing Keir Starmer’s passage to Downing Street, to which the response will be that Sunak and Starmer are two sides of the same dodgy political coin.
Farage knows there is a world of difference between Conservative and Labour governments, but the latter suits his purpose. Tory defeat – the more crushing the better – is the essential precondition to the next stage of the Faragist project.
Sunak’s party must be written off as electoral carrion before the vulture can enjoy its feast. That so many Tories think they see salvation in the scavenger circling overhead only marks them out as ripe to be picked apart.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
