Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
It’s happening in poll after poll now: Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK all with a vote share of twenty-something percent. If this is the new pattern of British politics, then something’s got to give — specifically, the refusal of the two Right-of-centre parties to contemplate a pact.
We saw what happened the last time that Conservative and Reform UK candidates ran against each other in a general election: Labour cleaned up, winning almost two-thirds of the seats with little more than one-third of the votes.
Now consider what might happen at the next election — for instance, a scenario in which Labour, the Tories and Reform each win a quarter of the vote — and the Lib Dems and Greens stay steady on 13 per cent and 7 percent respectively. According to the Electoral Calculus website that would give Labour 241 seats, the Conservatives 183 and Reform 101. Such an outcome would allow Labour to cobble together a governing arrangement with the Lib Dems (72 seats) plus some combination of the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Jeremy Corbyn independents.
Fancy a slice of that? No, me neither.
It would be ludicrous if a Tory-Reform vote share of 50 percent still produced a Labour-led government. But as things stand, that’s exactly where we’re heading — which is why the case for an electoral pact is overwhelming.
I don’t say that with any relish. Nigel Farage is the consummate protest politician — not a man equipped to transform the governance of the nation. Furthermore, his party has yet to prove that it can field a roster of candidates who won’t blow-up on the launchpad. I fully realise that our own party is in a poor position to criticise others on the flakiness front, but with Reform there’s a non-negligible chance of a total meltdown.
Furthermore, the two party leaders are very far from establishing an entente cordiale.
As Kemi Badenoch put it in her speech to Onward last week: “Nigel Farage says that he wants to destroy the Conservative Party — why on Earth would we want to merge with that?” Not exactly the basis for a beautiful friendship, is it?
Nor is Farage’s long history of either dominating every political movement he’s been part of — or, if the required level of submission is not forthcoming, disappearing in a puff of smoke. His critics moan about his lucrative media gigs — but they miss the point. Whether or not he’s being paid to be in front of a camera, it’s always the Nigel Farage Show. I really don’t see Badenoch, no shrinking violet herself, accepting a supporting role.
And yet the numbers don’t lie.
Unless the polls change out of all recognition, the two parties must either hang together or hang separately. What sort of arrangement might they come to? Badenoch specifically spoke against the idea of a merger, but as history shows us there are other, less radical, options.
There was the SDP/Liberal Alliance, of course — but that’s not the most encouraging of examples.
Rather, what I have in mind is the 1918 general election. Nicknamed the “coupon election” — it featured a pact between the Tories and a Liberal faction led by David Lloyd George, who together formed the government of the time. Candidates loyal to the coalition received a “coupon” (actually, a letter) signed by Lloyd-George and the Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law — with the coalition parties standing aside for one another in constituencies across the country.
It was hugely successful. 379 Conservatives were elected (the overwhelming majority on the coupon) and 127 coalition Liberals. The anti-coalition Liberals, led by HH Asquith, were reduced to a rump of 36 MPs — despite winning almost as many votes as the rival Liberal faction. The coupon also helped elect nine members of the National Democratic and Labour Party, a breakaway Labour faction.
Of course, for a pact to work in 2029, the Conservatives and Reform UK would have to not run candidates against one another in winnable seats. But is it conceivable that the two parties could agree to divide the electoral map between them? Only if both sides (a) negotiated in good faith, (b) recognised their own limitations and (c) put the national interest before self-interest.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
There are 650 Westminster constituencies, but I’m going to concentrate on England and Wales, because the mainland parties don’t run in Northern Ireland and Scotland would need a separate negotiation. I’ll leave out the Speaker’s seat too, taking us down to 574 constituencies. Of those, 116 are already held by the Conservatives and five by Reform, leaving 453 to allocate. We can reduce that number further by disregarding the seats where the combined Tory and Reform vote share is less than a third. By my calculation, that gets us to 310 winnable seats. 57 of those are held by the Lib Dems and two by the Greens. All 59 are stony ground for Reform, who’d lose very little by withdrawing in favour of the Conservative candidates.
The real negotiation is over the remaining 251 seats. In 61 of these constituencies, the Reform candidate did better than the Conservative in 2024 and in the other 190 the reverse was true. The geographical distribution of the 61 is fascinating. All but a handful are located in the North of England, the Midlands or Wales. In other words, these are “Red Wall” seats, many of which were won by the Conservatives from Labour in 2019, but lost again 2024 — consituencies like Whitehaven and Workington, Easington, Spen Valley, Llanelli and Wolverhampton South East.
Ceding this territory to Reform would be a bitter pill for the Tories — but then that’s the price of betrayal. The Red Wall electorate trusted us to take back control of our borders and level-up the land; instead we unleashed the Boriswave of record immigration while starving our towns and cities beyond London of vital investment. It will be a long time before we’re trusted again in these seats, so we might as well withdraw to give Reform the best possible chance.
Of course, Farage wouldn’t be satisfied with a mere 61 seats. Reform’s poll ratings are up substantially on the general election results — enough to put their vote share above ours in many more constituencies than was the case last July. To put it another way, a number of Lab/Con marginals could now be seen as Lab/RUK marginals instead.
Let’s start with the tranche of constituencies where the Tory vote share last year was no more than five percentage points higher than Reform’s. There are 33 of these — and, again, most of them are typical Red Wall seats — for instance Bishop Auckland, Halifax and Dudley. Added to the 61 seats mentioned above, plus the five already held by Farage and his parliamentary colleagues, this would bring the total to 99 winnable seats in England and Wales.
Might Farage settle for this sort of number? Well, he could point to the polls showing Reform winning about a hundred seats without a pact with the Tories. On the other hand, there are three good reasons why he’d be well-advised to take the deal:
Firstly, Reform wouldn’t have to spread its resources so thinly. This includes the effort required to recruit candidates who aren’t mad, bad or dangerous to know.
Secondly, while Reform’s current poll ratings indicate that a major breakthrough might be on the cards, it would only take a small dip in their vote share to drastically reduce the number of gains they’d make at the next election. Given the volatility of electorate, a pact could give Reform the chance to lock-in a major advance. The geographical distribution of the most winnable seats for Reform would also give the party a heartland. That’s what they need to survive multiple election cycles instead of fizzling out like most other insurgent parties in British history.
Thirdly, and most importantly, a 2029 coupon election would boost the number of Conservative MPs. That’s something that Reform candidates ought to welcome — assuming they have ambitions to enter government and not just parliament. After all, who else are they going to form a coalition government with? Labour? The Lib Dems? The Workers Party of Britain?
But perhaps I’m guilty of wishful thinking. It could be that Farage’s priority really is the destruction of the Conservative Party. He might even succeed in that objective. But how many extra terms of Labour government would that mean? And what would be left of our country by the end of the process?