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Reform UK - deadly threat or paper tiger?

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

As I sit here writing this, a Telegraph notification on my phone pops up: former Home Secretary Suella Braverman is considering defecting to Reform UK. This comes amidst reports that she has alienated her own party’s MPs to such an extent that she might not even make it onto the initial ballot for the upcoming leadership race. 


If you told me in 2019 that Nigel Farage would re-enter politics, the Conservatives would win 121 seats and only double the vote share of the Liberal Democrats, and that a former Home Secretary wouldn’t even be the first disaffected Tory to leave our ranks for Farage’s party, I would have probably had you sectioned. Fast forward to the 2024 General Election, and the exit poll predicting 121 Conservative seats and 13 to Reform caused mass sighs of relief, because ‘it could have been worse’. 


I don’t think I need to spend any more time analysing why we lost by such an astounding margin; I only devote this article to one (in my opinion, the biggest) threat to the continued survival of the Conservative Party.


It is important to dispel a few myths from the start. Reform UK is not the Brexit Party, and nor is it UKIP.  These are all very different entities even if they are designed to appeal to a similar group of people. In Farage’s own words, UKIP was a classical liberal party which became libertarian over time. This was one of the key arguments that UKIP figures, including Farage, used to quash notions of an alliance with the authoritarian BNP. In contrast, Reform UK has adopted a very different stance and absorbed some key political trends from Europe and the United States, while distancing itself from some of the more extreme parties on the continent, like Fidesz and the AfD. It is distinctively a postliberal populist party which believes that the ‘uniparty’ of Labour and the Conservatives are part of the same elite who both seek to maintain the status quo – while giving us the illusion of choice.


Reform identifies the elite, civil service, and rising immigration as the three key things holding back the country. The Conservatives exploited a political realignment in 2019 by capturing the votes of the non-university educated, working-class former Labour voters henceforth referred to as the ‘Brexit Geezer’ demographic. We mistakenly believed that these voters would remain with us without much effort from the Party. Yet, they jumped ship the minute Reform offered them what they wanted; Reform is a different beast to UKIP, and a devil of our own making. Rather than being a single issue pressure group formed out of a broad political coalition due to mainstream party inaction like UKIP, Reform exists to push us to the right or subsume us as the main right-wing party in the United Kingdom. 


Farage might have accepted a deal (perhaps under Liz Truss or immediately after) when senior campaigning figures were sounding the alarm bells about Reform splitting the Conservative vote and exacerbating already low poll ratings. That time has since passed, and Reform is now run by people who don’t really care about the Conservative Party – and have no reason to. 


Another thing that has been overlooked is the fact that Reform now have five MPs (six if Suella makes the jump). To achieve something that UKIP, a party better funded and much more robustly managed, failed to achieve in its twenty-year history in only four weeks with minimal infrastructure and funding, is nothing short of an extraordinary feat. The fact that one man who has never been an MP until now managed to increase his party’s poll ratings just by standing in an election speaks volumes when the average person can name maybe one or two Tory shadow ministers. 


From the insider knowledge I have, the Reform UK campaign consisted of a few guys in their  twenties sitting in rented WeWork offices and managing some spreadsheets, while on the ground, Nigel was filming TikToks and hanging around with a small campaign staff. One Telegraph journalist who spent the day with Farage on the campaign trail compared it to Fagin’s gang from Oliver Twist. It wasn’t very professional: they had little to no data, and simply knew Clacton would be their best shot because it  had returned Douglas Carswell as UKIP’s first MP. 


On the night of the General Election, Reform UK were suddenly predicted thirteen seats and won five, two of which were paper candidates who had done no campaigning. For reference, it was to be difficult for the Liberal Democrats to win more than twelve seats in 2017 despite record surges in donations, activity and membership when they campaigned to rejoin the EU. If this is what Reform can do in  four weeks with no money and a campaign team barely out of puberty, what are they going to be capable of in five years?


With the appointment of a Muslim businessman as the Party Chairman, and Reform bringing in more donations than the Conservatives during the campaign, that Reform will professionalise and begin targeting seats is a real threat. At their first press conference after the election, Farage promised to do just that. They will be setting up constituency/regional associations along the model currently used by most parties, and because they’re building from the ground up, they are not restrained by the institutional fatigue and tunnel-vision that is so clearly prevalent in CCHQ. Moreover, because many of their activists have already spent some time volunteering for us, they know what works and what has to be changed. We may end up with a situation where ten Reform activists can be more effective than twenty Tories, not least because they outnumber us among under  thirties. Reform are targeting the Midlands and the North now to come after Labour voters in areas where they came second along the Red Wall. Most of our activists and party officials, based further south, don’t see this and dismiss Reform as  unprofessional because their style and policies are so ‘in your face’ and don’t appeal to Southern sentiments. The blunt truth is that it doesn’t matter how it comes across to these people, because it’s not about them. Reform aren’t trying to win in Surrey – they’re coming after Hartlepool, Sheffield and Nottingham. 


Reform are perfectly positioned to deliver a death blow to the Conservatives, and yet, for several reasons, I think they’ll fail. The first has shown itself already, and it’s Farage as a person. Godfrey Bloom, a former UKIP MEP characterised Farage as someone with a Stalinist attitude to political management; if you’re in the way, to the gulag with you. This is seemingly what has happened to Ben Habib, who by every report was an articulate guy very popular with Reform members. When Farage feels you might outshine him, or get in the way, you’ll be dropped faster than he can say ‘Sigma sigma on the wall, who is the skibidiest of them all’. This isn’t a productive way to handle a political party, and Habib has already been doing the media rounds and denouncing how Reform UK is run (while still actually being a member). For all intents and purposes, Reform is still a one-man band where Farage is both their biggest asset and their biggest handicap. He’s immensely popular with a small and fanatical section of the population, but always runs the risk of scaring off moderates - as  he did with his comments on Ukraine.  Also, for all their talk of professionalising internally, the focus currently seems to be on Farage jetting off to America and on trying to court more Tory defections. They initially had a large amount of media curiosity and stamina, with the Telegraph even going so far as to offer tacit support. Yet within about a week of the election, the focus is back on Keir Starmer’s government, and Reform don’t seem to be up to much.


I can’t decide if Nigel has gotten smarter and has decided to lie low, letting party officials work in the background to build up an infrastructure, or if there’s absolutely nothing going on and Reform are too busy posturing with Trump. However, I can see that in the first few days after the General Election, Reform looked set to take the Conservatives out behind the woodshed and finish us off like Old Yeller - had they moved quickly enough. This existential threat has now subsided, unless something disastrous happens during the upcoming leadership election. Right now, the big risk is that Reform could choose to target the Red Wall and isolated areas of the South where they came second, such as Basildon. They have a serious and worrying opportunity to steal a good fifty seats from Labour in the North, in areas where the Conservative brand is too toxic because we didn’t deliver on promises. Because of Reform, we may never get to rebuild the political coalition that gave us our historic majority in 2019. 


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