“Any man who must say ‘I am the King’ is no true king”, as Tywin Lannister once said. One was put in mind of this useful maxim yesterday when Isabel Oakshott tweeted that:
“Richard Tice is Leader of @reformparty_uk and there won’t be any deals with the Tory party. End of.”
It quickly turned out to be an open question whether or not that’s even true, as people were quick to point out that the sole owner of ‘Reform UK Party Ltd’ (it is not a normal party, and has no members) is Nigel Farage, who’s occupation is listed with Companies House as ‘Leader Of A Political Party’.
But the row was really sparked by his appearance on the Sun’s new political programme where he suggested that he and Rishi Sunak should “have a conversation” about a deal, in light of the agreements he has struck with previous Conservative leaders (most obviously, Boris Johnson in 2019).
Now this seems very likely to have been more a play for attention than anything. Even if it is true that the former UKIP leader had a venue booked and had been planning to run, a man who sincerely wanted some sort of bargain would probably not have talked in the same show about how he’d like to have pulled off a Trump-style hostile takeover of the Tories.
Like his challenging Rishi Sunak to a head-to-head debate on immigration (which the Prime Minister rightly dismissed), Farage’s problem is that he consigned himself to the margins of this election by refusing to stand. There may well be plenty of money to be made as a pundit in the United States, but there is a price to be paid for it in terms of his relevance to the British debate.
Even so, his intervention still highlights how much better are his instincts than those of Richard Tice, who this morning slapped down any suggestion of a pact with the Conservatives.
What Farage always grasped was that, as the leader of a minor party in a system which makes breakthroughs difficult, he was always at his most effective when the Tories were trying to do something about him – the stand-out example being David Cameron’s decision to call the EU referendum, which helped secure an overall majority in 2015 at an election where UKIP came second in 100 seats.
As such, the then-UKIP leader always tried to maximise his cheer chorus inside the larger party, endlessly talking up defections and dangling the prospect of individual deals in front of Eurosceptic MPs.
Tice has no time for any of that: he thinks Labour and the Conservatives are both ‘socialist’, and that the latter needs to be ‘destroyed’. This sentiment is undoubtedly sincere. But it comes at a cost. With the Tories 20 points down in the polls and even MPs with historically healthy majorities rightly worried, Reform might have had considerable scope for extracting concessions and, in so doing, digging into the Conservative Party in a manner which might endure beyond the election.
Instead, there will be no love lost between the two come 5 July – and as the Tories settle back into Opposition, there is a real danger for Reform that it gets eclipsed, with the larger party occupying the right-wing protest niche Tice and co have tried to carve out for themselves.
The only way their current strategy seems likely to pay off is if the Conservatives have such a catastrophically bad night that it puts a Canada-style realignment of the Right on the table. But in the now much-discussed 1993 Canadian election the official Tories were reduced to two seats, and the Reform Party (no relation) 52. Even now, that seems very unlikely to happen next month.