We’re all familiar with the post-match political interview in which the poor spokesperson is sent out to explain how his party’s devastating defeat really shows that it is on course for electoral triumph.
Predicting the impact of elections based on just a handful of results is a fool’s errand, but the Radix Big Tent weekly briefing goes to bed at 8am on Friday morning, so here goes: these results show the Conservatives could well win the next General Election.
It doesn’t matter terribly what the final results look like: it’s the direction of travel which is important and that’s already clear.
Between elections, support for governing parties declines and a protest vehicle emerges. Historically – in England at least – since the 1962 Orpington by-election, this has been the Liberal party and its successors. This held until the 2010 Con-Lib Dem Coalition (with the notable exception of the 1989 European Elections when Jonathan Porrit’s Greens took advantage of the Lib Dems post-merger travails to score nearly 15%, for all the good it did them).
Coalition, however, knocked the Lib Dems from their perch as the party of protest and while – in a number of very specific circumstances – the party has rediscovered the role since, the door have been very firmly opened for other beneficiaries too. From UKIP, in Clacton and Rochester in 2014, via the Brexit party in the 2019 European elections to the Greens in Bristol, and now Reform, there will always be space for ‘none-of-the-above’, as long as nothing very much is at stake.
The lesson of those Lib Dem by-election victories from 1962 to 2010, is, however, that the protest rarely ‘sticks’. Come a general election, parties of protest need to define themselves in ways that have much broader appeal to become parties of power.
So, how could Reform make today’s progress meaningful in the longer term?
On the downside for the party, it has few policies and those it does have are vague and often off-putting to the very people who have voted for them: from the hardline on immigration and Europe in the socially liberal South to privatisation of the NHS in the working class Midlands and North. Even with today’s unique circumstances, it seems likely that not much more than a quarter of the British public can stomach Farage – and the more that they focus on his agenda the less they like.
But on the upside for Reform, it is fighting not only a typically weak incumbent, but a chaotic and failing Opposition. It is the Conservatives rather than Labour that are potentially fatally weakened: a poisonous legacy from their time in government, a leader who is failing to cut through, a shrunken and divided Parliamentary party, and now a grassroots operation devoid of councillors and troops.
The opportunity for Farage is this: to build on this success, Reform needs to reform and become the Conservative Party: adopt its programme and tone, and absorb its resources and members to become the serious alternative to Keir Starmer.
I think Farage gets this. Expect him to drop talk of an insurance model for the health service every bit as quickly as he has forgotten he was Donald’s best mate. Expect him to plant himself firmly on Tory territory, so that by the time of the next election Kemi is in the distant rearview mirror and Jenrick (or whoever) has proved the old Conservatives irrelevant, whether by losing the fight for the right with Reform or having reached an accommodation with them, the sole impact of which is to manage the Tories’ decline. Even moderate conservatives will have joined Reform and helped Farage drag the party towards the centre – detoxifying it for those that won’t currently consider it – just as the Lib Dems provided cover for Cameron to do likewise for the Conservatives in Coalition.
The next election will be the traditional British battle of right versus left, with the Lib Dems and Greens as protest parties, challenging Labour round the fringes and feasting on those part of the Conservative carcass Reform can’t touch.
There is every chance the Conservatives will win the next UK general election … but only if their posters are aquamarine and the word on them is Reform.
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