Whatever happened to Nigel Farage and his allies is a question neither of the main political parties care to dwell on. It is painful for Conservatives because they set the terms of the 2016 referendum, ultimately resulting in a loss for their then leader and much subsequent turmoil. It is also an allergic topic for the urban, Remain-minded top tier of Labour (aka Team Starmer), who saw their voters turn out to be more “Brexit-y” than they hoped. The Opposition’s 2019 defeat happened in part because of Jeremy Corbyn’s unpalatable offer but also because many in its heartlands did not relish being told to vote again on something they thought they had already decided.
Two factors have now resurrected Farage’s kinetic force, albeit in the guise of a movement dubbed, blandly, Reform UK, formerly known as Ukip via an incarnation as the “Brexit party”. After more schisms and leaders than Guns N’ Roses have had line-up changes, it is under the tactical leadership of Richard Tice and the talkshow papacy of Farage, and the febrile events of this year have launched a new Farage-and-co album. A message of “Brexit betrayal”, combined with a preoccupation with the lack of control of the country’s borders (aka anti-immigration, with scary noir images of undesirables on the website), lead the charge. The new assault is that the Tories, their estranged cousinage, have failed to deliver on both counts.
After the chaos of the Truss era and the tentative rescue mission of the Sunak-Hunt duet, Reform is gaining members — on its count, just under 10,000 from a shrinking Tory base and a polling rise averaging around six percentage points. As The Times reports, fears are spreading in the rattled Tory ranks this week that the Farage machine going “all in” at the next general election would cause additional strains on the Tory vote in Red Wall seats. Some 17 per cent of voters who opted for the Conservatives at the 2019 general election plan to vote for Reform, according to the YouGov poll. Put aside whether this snapshot works out when we get into the real two-party scrap for power.
In fact, the oddity is that the best hopes of Reform lie with a Labour victory. Tice tells me that the party’s intention is to “stand everywhere, but will focus on previous Brexit areas”. In terms of funding and credible candidate base (vetting is something of a headache to keep out the crazies), this is not likely to happen on the scale he proposed. But the nascent party, channelling the many disappointments of Brexit, could still split the vote in key Tory target seats and hope Labour wins power without an absolute majority —and then races to deliver proportional representation.
That outcome would aid the Labour-Lib Dem desire to break a stubborn Conservative grip on power, based on a majority in English seats. It would also benefit smaller parties and Tice thinks the Lib Dems may do better than expected via tactical voting.
My only problem with this scenario is that it is too surgically convenient to be what actually happens in the sound and fury of an election in the future (timing kills a lot of smart theories). It is, however, a credible enough risk to the Tories to prompt them to shore up support on the Right of the party with a renewed push to limit asylum and immigration. Reform is the place for people who think Suella Breverman is not going at it hard enough.
A final driver is anxiety within the Conservatives over economic and tax plans, which in Reform-party language rank as “socialist”. That might come as a shock to the reassuringly true-blue Sunak and Hunt but it points to a wider disquiet among Tories: namely, that the short-term outlook is a “high tax-low growth” medicine, widely shared with Labour and thus suspect. Additionally, any move Sunak makes to offset the many trade disadvantages of Brexit with Europe can be portrayed by Farage loyalists as an impending ‘betrayal’ of the 2016 result. So Reform is a quiver full of arrows aimed squarely at the Tories by their own renegades. It is not yet the wildly successful insurgency its leadership boasts. But the recipe from the Farage kitchen is a potent one and the ingredients include sundry new grievances for the pot. So best assume that for all its shortcomings and contradictions, it won’t go away.
Anne McElvoy is senior editor of The Economist
