Nigel Farage is, I am pleased to say, back on form, tanned fit and lean.
He had a wobble ten years or so ago, what one of his MEPs, Patrick Flynn, called his “snarling and thin-skinned” phase when anyone in UKIP who got too much publicity was booted out. I suspect it was a combination of booze and painkillers after his horrifying plane crash.
Anyway, the Reform leader is obviously enjoying life again, dominating interviewers, charming voters, and never losing sight of his long-term strategy. Unfortunately for us, his long-term strategy involves crushing the Tories.
Maybe Elon Musk really is planning to throw $100 million at Reform, maybe not. Either way, it would be surprising if Britain remained untouched by the nativist, protectionist, and Trumpy currents that have roiled other developed countries.
Labour’s popularity is already plummeting, but the Tories have not seen a commensurate improvement. If ever there was a pendulum, it is broken.
Might voters turn to a party that defines itself as being against the system? I have always found the whole “I’m not a politician” shtick a bit odd. I mean, none of us is a politician until we are elected, and then we all are. But, despite having fought elections since 1994, Farage is still seen as a weapon to wield against the political caste.
Think of what the political landscape will look like by the next election. We’ll have had years of Labour borrowing and taxing to boost the pensions of its supporters in the public sector, but no improvement in services.
The economy will be groaning and swaying. Unemployment will be rising, something that, other than blips during the financial crisis and the lockdown, we have not known for more than 30 years.
And, in the meantime, more wokery, more illegal immigration, more crime. It all adds up to a populist perfect storm.
Farage wants to displace the Tories as the main Rightist challenger to Labour, mopping up the old party along the way. I remember from our time in Brussels together that he was fascinated by the Canadian election of 1993, which saw the governing Conservatives reduced to just two MPs, largely because they were facing a challenge from an insurgent party called – significantly – Reform. In the end, Reform ended up absorbing the Canadian Tories. Its leader, Stephen Harper, became the leader of the merged party and went on to be a transformational PM.
But there are two problems. First, it took the two Canadian parties more than a decade to get their act together. Do we really want Labour in office until 2040 on a shrinking share of the vote, simply because first-past-the-post punishes a split on either side of the spectrum?
Second, the 1993 Canadian election left Reform with 52 MPs to the Tories’ two (versus 177 Liberals and 54 Bloc Québécois, making the separatists the Official Opposition). In Britain, the proportions are the other way around. A party with 121 MPs does not volunteer to be taken over by one with five.
The worst-case scenario, then, is two or three more general elections won by the Left on a relatively tiny proportion of the popular vote. Can we stop it?
Part of the solution is for the Tories to address the issues that led to the rise of Reform in the first place, above all immigration and culture wars. Kemi Badenoch, who has spent her life fighting wokery, anti-white racism and trans madness, is well-placed here.
But that is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition. The question of how to deal with Farage – who has been uncomplimentary about Badenoch ever since she was allegedly rude to him – remains.
In the run-up to the 2015 election, I argued for a limited electoral pact between the Conservatives and UKIP.
In the event, the Tories won an outright majority. The same could happen at the next election if people are sufficiently desperate to get Starmer out, and so feel that they can’t indulge themselves by backing a smaller party. But it’s a hell of a risk to run.
The Tories and Reform are surprisingly close on policy (as distinct from tone). In France, there are major differences between Michel Barnier’s party and Marine Le Pen’s. In Germany, the CDU and the AfD are leagues apart. But here, very few Conservatives disagree in principle with most of what Reform wants to do, though they might question the deliverability of some of its airier ambitions. The only major differences are on constitutional questions, such as an elected Upper House and a new voting system and, frankly, those should be dealt with by referendum.
At the same time, the parties are geographically complementary. Their manifestoes may be similar, but their electorates are not. Reform’s best parliamentary prospects are often Labour seats where the Tories have little chance.
And don’t worry about losing votes to the LibDems. The LibDem share of the vote barely moved at the last election; indeed, in absolute numbers, it fell slightly. The reason Ed Davey went from 15 MPs to 72 is not that Tory voters switched directly to his candidates, but that they switched to Reform. We can, in other words, win seats back from the LibDems and Labour by patching up our quarrels with Reform.
None of this needs to be decided yet, obviously. But shouldn’t we at least keep alive the possibility of a deal, even a highly limited one?
And when I say “we”, I mean both parties. One of Farage’s favourite phrases is “country before party”. It is hard to see how a new lease of life for Starmer would be in anyone’s interest – even, looking at how he has handled the past five months, Starmer’s.