Leadership Contenders Can’t Duck the Nigel Farage Question
Given the shrunken Tory activist base and the few Tory MPs still remaining are furious with Reform it is entirely unsurprising that the Tory leadership candidates seeking their votes are signaling “no deal” and saying words to the effect that they will have no truck with the catalyst for their general election thrashing. However if the Tory leadership contenders really don’t have a Farage strategy they are going to remain in opposition for a long time. Whilst Reform take votes from all quarters, research by YouGov immediately after the last election shows they took most of their voters from the Tories. That is the reality of the political predicament the next Tory leader will find themselves in.
Half the candidates standing are implicitly saying that they will occupy the same policy ground as Reform on immigration and somehow this will displace their rivals. Guido’s not so sure voters will trust them to execute on the policies better than they did last time. The other half of the candidates say the party must not occupy the same ground and that “elections are won from the centre”. The latter is a centrist’s nostrum that Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson might dispute.
There is no evidence that Nigel Farage is going away, he’s been in politics a quarter century and he’s now inside the Westminster parliament. There is arguably as much chance of Reform displacing the Conservatives as vice versa. Some argue that the British political system has a two-party centre of gravity and two-party politics will reassert itself, that may be true, however there is no guarantee the Tories will be one of those parties and the precedent of the SDP keeping Labour out of government for over a decade is not one many right-of-centre voters will relish.
The contenders for the Tory leadership have to articulate a real strategy for what to do about Nigel. Or else Nigel will do for them…
