Henry Hill Hill pours cold water on Arron Banks’ claims that Reform UK might secure lots of Conservative defectors.
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.
Party strategists will be concerned that Reform UK managed to post double-digit vote shares in both Kingswood and Wellingborough. But the mortal danger is Labour, and Conservatives cannot afford to forget it.
Four, deep-rooted currents in are carving out space for movements which seek to prioritise the interests, the culture, the values, and the ways of life of the majority group against what they see as self-interested, corrupt, narcissistic, and incompetent elites.
Tory MPs have refused to go and canvas for their candidate, the girlfriend of the disgraced Peter Bone.
The defeat of these parties is above all a task for the moderate Right.
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?
He said at conference that: “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by ‘26. Very surprised.” Even if he was joking (and he insisted he wasn’t, at first), that’s the sort of jest that’s never entirely a jest.
Over the last 50 years of British political history, there have been precisely two occasions when the established order was challenged and defeated: the Thatcher revolution, and Brexit. In both instances, the agent of change was the Conservatives.
His greatest success was to make the Conservatives more conservative, but he does not have the gifts needed to sustain a rival party.
Without him, the disaffected right lacks the profile, the programme, or the machine to capitalise on the Conservatives’ weaknesses.
The evidence from the local elections is not that the voters are abandoning the Tories to back Reform or Ukip , but parties of the centre and the left. Their situation is bad, but it can be made worse.
The may do so by concentrating on “the unsexy stuff that people care about”, which include dog mess, potholes and parking.