The Birmingham reggae band UB40 began as a quintessential product of the troubled era when Margaret Thatcher was the UK’s prime minister, archly taking their name from the “attendance card” needed to claim unemployment benefit, and singing songs about life at the sharp end of her rule. Their peak period lasted until the early- to mid-1990s.
In 2008, there came a rupture – due to “management and business disputes” rather than anything musical – which opened the way to the choice that now confronts their remaining fans: whether to go and see a new vehicle for the band’s former lead singer called “UB40 featuring Ali Campbell”, or stick with the outfit that still trades under its original name, and includes his estranged brother Robin. For the time being, there seems to be space for them both.
Given their staunchly anti-Tory roots, I’m not sure any of the musicians involved would appreciate comparisons that involve such politicians as Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. But the drama currently gripping the people and parties vying for leadership of the British right fits the UB40 model like a glove.
Here, after all, is the story of two estranged groupings that now have almost exactly the same worldview: a deep attachment to Brexit, the secular religion of Thatcherism and a modern fixation with immigration and the wider culture wars. Their battle is driven by animosities that seem to be as much personal as ideological. But with every defection from the Conservatives to Reform UK, the sense of blurring has been accompanied by a mounting feeling that there can be only one winner. Politics is not like the market for ageing reggae acts: at the key points on the ideological spectrum, there tends to be room for just one viable force.
Last week’s drama – Badenoch’s discovery of Jenrick’s planned defection, his brisk sacking, and the same day’s Farage-Jenrick press conference – took the battle for supremacy to a new level. Over the weekend there have been no end of stories and briefings, including Jenrick’s claim that he had left the “Tory posh party” and realised it is “out of touch with the people I grew up around in Wolverhampton” (he is, let’s not forget, a privately educated former corporate lawyer), and reports that the plan for his defection included the suggestion that he is “the new sheriff in town”. Farage, meanwhile, tried to steady the nerves of Tory-sceptic allies by insisting that his party isn’t a “rescue charity for every panicky Tory MP”, and saying there would be no more defections after 7 May, while Badenoch said Jenrick’s sacking is part of “cleaning out the rubbish” from hers.
What these rather camp pronouncements – note Farage’s less-than-exacting deadline – actually underline is that this is a feud within the same political family. And it may well end with a reconstitution of Conservatism. A kind that mixes hard-right, authoritarian, nativist ideas with the usual belief in laissez-faire economics, but a reconstitution nonetheless.
Farage’s political roots, let’s not forget, are stereotypically Tory. His first political epiphany came in 1978, when Thatcher’s ideological guru Keith Joseph came to Dulwich College – and, according to Michael Crick’s peerless Farage biography One Party After Another, lectured his audience about how people and the market could look after themselves. Farage became a Tory member the following day, and finally departed in 1992, but he remains a cultural Tory to the soles of his feet, as evidenced by his association with no end of Conservative totems and institutions: the City of London, mustard-coloured trousers, members’ clubs, foxhunting.
In 2013, he said that he was only the British politician “keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive”; in 2022, he greeted Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s great ripping-up of fiscal orthodoxy – the credo of the blessed Margaret gone kamikaze – as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”. Note also the substance of a piece he published in Saturday’s Daily Mail. Reform, he said, was now a “centre-right alliance” that would fix Britain by being “shamelessly pro-business and pro-entrepreneur and putting in place measures that will make wealthy people want to return here and businesses want to invest”. Those are not so much the words of a populist as the kind of boilerplate rhetoric Thatcher disciples have been coming out with for at least four decades.
In the case of his lieutenant Richard Tice, the sense of ingrained Toryism is even stronger. His own website says he only called time on his longstanding Conservative membership in 2019. He may have flirted with the nationalisation of British Steel and Thames Water, but a speech he gave late last year at the London HQ of Bloomberg bigged up fiscal conservatism, cited the City of London’s liberalising deregulatory big bang as the best inspiration for modern economic policy and looked ahead to a “flatter tax system”: as stereotypically Tory a set of messages as could be imagined.
So what drives his and Farage’s animus towards the party they once supported? One answer could be the wondrous political opportunity they have spent years working towards: a fight with a drastically weakened Conservative party, and a chance to remake rightwing politics in their own image. But there is also a story to be told about the years when the Conservative party was remodelled by David Cameron and George Osborne. Much of what happened back then amounted to a visceral insult to hard-right conservatism: the deal with the Liberal Democrats, the embrace of social liberalism – and, running through everything, the capture of the Tories by the Oxbridge-educated Notting Hill set.
The people in charge of Reform are not from that layer of Tory society at all. Farage did not go into higher education; Tice has a degree in quantity surveying and construction economics from the University of Salford. Neither are urbane metropolitans: as Jenrick’s “posh” attack on his former colleagues shows, part of their mission appears to be to get conservatism back to the demotic belligerence of the Thatcher period, and forget all about the attempt at “modernisation” that eventually followed it.
Since 2016, of course, many Tories have moved in the same direction, which invites an obvious question: what exactly is the difference between them? On Friday morning, the new shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy was presented with a different version of the same point by the BBC’s Justin Webb, who pushed him on a couple of specific issues: Jenrick’s opposition to illegal immigration and “the rise of Islamism, as he would see it, as a threat”, both of which are positions that meant he could effortlessly slide into his new life as a Reform politician. Did Timothy and Jenrick differ on either of those? “If you want the real deal, then … you vote Conservative for those things,” he said. Metaphorically speaking, he was agreeing that there are two bands with the same songs, but insisting that the Tories just play them better. That does not sound like a winning script.
And so the feud continues, between two foes who have a lot more in common than they admit. That is not to deny the dire dangers of a Reform UK government, nor that there are still Tories who are keenly aware of them. But UK conservatism has been shifting rightwards for a decade now, and if Farage and his ever-increasing band of ex-Tory colleagues become its new standard-bearers, that may not signify an ideological rupture, but something both ardent rightwingers and UB40 fans both long for: a reunion.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
