In 1988, Brian Mulroney became the first Canadian prime minister since the Nineteenth Century to secure a second consecutive overall majority. Four years before, the Progressive Conservatives had swept into office in an extraordinary landslide, winning no fewer than 211 seats in the 284-seat legislature.
Five years later, the PCs won just two seats. That isn’t a typo. Two seats. Kim Campbell, who had succeeded Mulroney as prime minister, lost her own.
Under First Past the Post, a lot of things have to go wrong for a major party to be so totally annihilated. The eclipse of our own Liberal Party probably required the long-standing and bitter split between the followers of Asquith and Lloyd George, for example.
But one crucial ingredient is the presence of a viable alternative for its voters. For the Liberals, that was Labour. For the PCs, it was Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Having won no seats in 1988, and picked up only one in the interim, they scooped 52 MPs in 1993 – despite only taking 2,559,245 votes to the PCs’ 2,186,422. The electoral system giveth, and the electoral system taketh away.
At present, most of the debate about the Conservatives’ possible performance at the next election seems to be framed around whether it will be a 1992, when the Tories managed to defy expectations to claw a narrow win (albeit on what remains the highest popular vote ever recorded), or the 1997-style rout suggested by current polling.
Even in the face of some truly satanic polling, there is currently little discussion about the possibility of a Canada ’93 extinction event. That this is the case probably owes much to the widespread perception that Reform UK isn’t set for the sort of breakthrough their Canadian counterparts achieved.
Why should this be? We know from recent experience that the Conservatives are not immune to a challenge from the right.
The UK Independence Party may only have ever returned two MPs to Parliament, but it cast a sufficient shadow over David Cameron’s government that he ended up conceding the Brexit referendum; in 2019, Nigel Farage’s decision not to stand Brexit Party candidates may, according to political scientist Pippa Norris, have doubled Boris Johnson’s eventual majority.
Yet despite the Government’s woes, Reform UK is not casting that sort of shadow this time; Jeremy Hunt was not looking over his shoulder at Richard Tice when he eased immigration restrictions at the most recent Budget.
Why might this be? A few reasons suggest themselves.
The first is the absence of Farage. Whilst he has hardly quit the bubble, he has stepped back from his front-line leadership role, being content instead to host his nightly show on GB News.
Despite never making into Parliament, Farage is a very skilled political operator, and enjoys a huge public profile. Neither of these things is true of Richard Tice, a businessman with scant practical experience of elected politics (his august predecessor had, at least, been a long-serving MEP; Tice sat in Brussels only from 2019).
Whereas Farage always recognised the importance of partnering stick with carrot, and took care to always hold his door open to disgruntled Tories, Tice prefers to declare that the Conservative Party needs to be “smashed and destroyed”.
Such language is hardly calculated to appeal to wavering Tories, either in Parliament or the electorate.
That Andrew Bridgen, this parliament’s first defector, plumped instead for Laurence Fox’s absurd Reclaim Party is not indicative of anything much; indeed, Tice himself said in January that he wouldn’t welcome the Member for North West Leicestershire, citing his views on vaccines.
But it is significant that there is no broader chatter of defections, private meetings, channels of communication, and the like. Even though he only ever bagged two MPs, Farage always kept the pot of speculation simmering; at present, it is all but stone cold.
Another issue is the lack of a ground machine (not an uncommon problem on the disaffected right).
UKIP struggled with turning its national profile into an effective activist base, but operated for long enough that it was, by 2015, making some headway. Having come second in 120 seats in 2015, it seems likely that had the referendum not taken place, they were on track to securing status analogous to the Liberal Democrats at some point.
Reform UK have the same problem – and have not managed to inherit the spadework done by their predecessor party. The most recent local elections are evidence of this: despite what ought to be propitious circumstances for a right-wing challenge, the party secured just six councillors. Contrast this with the Greens, who gained 200 seats and took control of a new council.
Finally, there’s policy. It simply isn’t obvious that Reform UK is pitching itself to the actual gap that is opening up in British politics. This is in what ought to be widely known as the Jeremy Driver quadrant, summed up by him as “love our NHS; hang the paedos”.
As Danny Finkelstein noted recently, there is space for a party which leans right on culture but left on economics. This tallies with my argument that actually bringing immigration down over the long-term would mean confronting a number of the Conservative Party’s pro-business shibboleths.
Yet Tice, and indeed a great number of the disaffected right-wingers trying to fill that gap, are not cast in that mould. They are, as William Atkinson noted at the Conservative Democratic Organisation’s inaugural conference, for the most part nostalgic Thatcherites. Reform UK talk loudly about immigration, of course, but beyond that their programme is mostly right-liberal economic policy and obviously self-serving, Lib Dem-flavoured constitutional reform.
Combine all that, and it perhaps isn’t surprising that even though the party is polling between five and eight per cent nationally, there is scant expectation that they are on the cusp of a major breakthrough.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat. Sir John Curtice told the FT that “Leave voting Tory voters are among the most volatile of the Conservative base, with many not having a long standing record of backing the party”. They may mainly be “recipients of protest votes from frustrated Tory leaning voters”, according to Anthony Wells of YouGov – but under First Past the Post that could still make the difference in a number of seats.
And then there’s the one thing which could yet deliver that 1993-style shock: the return of Farage. In November he ruled out a pact with the Tories, and last month he dropped hints at a comeback, suggesting he would have “a much more revolutionary agenda than just Brexit”.
With that sort of star power, and his much better feel for where to meet the voters, Reform UK could yet do here what their Canadian counterparts did.
It’s worth both sides remembering how that story ended, however: the right only returned to power in Ottawa, after thirteen years in the wilderness, once the two factions had united once again into the Conservative Party of Canada.