Our panel are known to be fans of Nigel Farage. Last year, 72 per cent said he should be admitted to the Conservative Party if he sought membership. A majority are likely to have seen his frequent appears on GB News. And after last Thursday saw Reform UK help the Conservatives to lose a record number of seats, the question of how we approach the party overhangs everything.
Personally, with three hundred-odd years of history behind us, Nigel Farage’s patchy record, and a previous example of our winning over his voters, I believe that the Conservative Party feeling it has to throw in its 121 MPs with Reform’s 5 would be a mistake, whatever form that would take. From our latest post-election panel, it seems a bare majority of our survey respondents agree.
12 per cent of panellists backs a Conservative-Reform merger; 19.1 per cent back a formal arrangement in the Commons, such as a shared whip; and 35.7 per cent seek an electoral pact at the next election, perhaps with the Brexit Party’s 2019 effort in the back of their minds. But 50.4 per cent would rather have none of the above. You can’t reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.
Similarly, a majority of our panel do not thinking a particular focus on winning back Reform’s voters is the right approach for the party going forward. 24.7 per cent would put Reform voters ahead of Labour or Lib Dem voters. 12.2 per cent would do the opposite. 4.9 per cent would target non-voters. By contrast, 57 per cent would target all parties and abstainers equally.
Again, this would seem the wisest cause. It is galling that seven million fewer voters turned out for us last Thursday than in 2019. But of those who did make it to the ballot box, Lord’s Ashcroft’s poll suggests 23 per cent went to Reform UK, 12 per cent to Labour, and 7 per cent to the Lib Dems. Appealing only to any one of those groups is not a route to a majority alone.
The next few years are going to be grim, as Labour fail to deliver the growth they hope for, public services continue to grumble, and the international scene becomes progressively darker. Unless the Conservatives can rapidly regain voter trust and unite around a realistic of national prosperity agenda, the potential for our politics to become more European as Reform leapfrog us is real.
Hoping for a Farage implosion is not enough. But nor is selling the world’s oldest political party down the river to his latest vehicle. Our panel is right to be confident that we can survive on our own.