Henry Hill Hill pours cold water on Arron Banks’ claims that Reform UK might secure lots of Conservative defectors.
But Tory Democracy has triumphed for much of our history since Disraeli, and can before long be expected to triumph again.
On current trends, the next election poses the greatest threat to the Conservative Party’s continued existence in its history. Can we imagine politics with under 50 Tory MPs?
We spoke to 2019 Conservatives who put their chances of voting Tory again at less than five out of ten – the people the party will need to win back if it is to recover ground before the election.
On the face of it, the plight of the Government today is much, much worse than was David Cameron’s in 2014. Yet few people can think that Reform UK poses anything like the threat to the Tories that UKIP did ten years ago.
The leadership may lack the vision and courage to exploit the Tories’ weaknesses, but they make it very hard for a hungrier, savvier party to do so.
The former has once again been returned to Parliament at the head of a minor party. Yet it was the latter who, despite never entering the Commons, wrought the real, transformative change.
Mike Freer’s announcement is a significant milestone. As he prepares to leave the room, Labour is knocking on the door. We have little sense of how it would rearrange the furniture.
The fundamentals of our democracy are strong: voters continue to take pride in their community, to respect their neighbours, and to want Britain to be an outgoing, self-confident country that plays its part on the world stage.
Again, it is undecided voters who are more hawkish on immigration. The issue’s high salience with swing voters is why it will be an important battleground in the next election.
“If Nigel Farage doesn’t come back to lead… it never manifests in by-elections, it doesn’t have a ground machine, so I expect a few points of that would probably end up back in the Tory column.”
Farage is 59 – a rubbery, ebullient 59, but 59 nonetheless. Does he really fancy a decade’s prospective work to recast the right, with no certainty of elected office at the end of it?
The longer Number Ten fails to declare, the more cheerfully Labour will pile in – preparing to frame the Prime Minister as a bottler if he waits until after the Budget to rule out a May poll.
The attempt to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Belgium is a clear-cut case of abuse of power that has exposed a disturbing attitude towards freedom of expression and assembly.