With Nigel Farage’s surprise return to frontline politics and Reform surging in the polls, there is increasingly fevered speculation as to how much damage Reform will do to the Conservatives in the election, and whether they will even overtake the Tories in terms of vote share.
The polls don’t look reassuring for Rishi Sunak, with some suggesting that as many as one in three voters who backed the Conservatives in 2019 now back Reform. But at the same time there is still a lot of uncertainty, and any predictions come with health warnings.
We’ve looked at what would happen to the Conservatives if Reform replicates the performance of Ukip from 2015, when the party secured nearly 4 million votes – 12.6% of the national total.
