Nigel Farage’s insurgency has left the two main parties of British politics with a lot of thinking to do.
The success of Reform UK in the general election, when the party won four million votes and five seats, is possibly just the beginning.
Donald Trump, an ally of Farage, is about to become the most powerful person in the world. And while Elon Musk may have cooled on Farage recently, his tweets aimed at destabilising Sir Keir Starmer will continue to appeal to a Reform constituency.
Over Christmas, Nigel Farage boasted about his party overhauling the Conservatives on membership numbers, while an MRP mega-poll at the end of last year predicted Reform could climb from five MPs to 67.
Other polls have shown the party almost neck and neck with Labour and the Tories.
Reform came second in 98 seats at the general election – 89 of which were won by Labour. But while Labour strategists have to take the Reform threat seriously, it is the Tories who will be feeling particularly anxious
Not all disgruntled Tory voters turn to Reform, but if Reform are coming second then the Tories are coming behind them. And that is obviously a problem for Kemi Badenoch.
Inside the party, views differ on how to tackle Reform. Some Tories think they should “just ignore” Farage’s party to avoid giving them the “oxygen of publicity”. Others are mulling an unspoken non-aggression pact at the next election in a bid to carve up Labour’s current seats.
According to Lord Barwell, a Tory peer who was Theresa May’s chief of staff in Number 10, the crucial thing the Conservatives have to grasp about Reform is that the party is “here to stay”.
The rise of the party, he says, has created a “completely different electoral dynamic, not just for the Conservative Party, but for British politics as a whole”.
“We could well expect that we have three parties at the next election not miles apart in vote share terms.”
For Barwell, this means that the Tories should abandon the notion that they can consign Reform to the dustbin of history by trying to squeeze them from the Right.
“The Conservative Party has to put out of its mind all of this ‘reuniting the Right talk’ – that is not going to happen,” he says. “You’re not going to be able to reunite the Right because Reform is not going to go away, and for voters who feel very strongly about the things that Farage cares about, he’s always going to be able to go further than the Conservative Party is going to go.”
The more positive news for the Tories, he says, is that given the multi-party nature of British politics, the Conservatives may be able to win a majority with about 35 per cent of the popular vote – similar to what Labour got in the 2024 general election.
“I don’t think the party should think in terms of responding to Reform. I don’t think that’s the right exam question,” Barwell says.
“The exam question you’re trying to answer is how do you construct a coalition of 35 per cent of the vote in a world where there is a main challenger to the Right of you and a challenger to the Left of you?”
Barwell says this means the Tories need to be thinking about “what are the issues that it wants to be front and centre at the election”, rather than trying to fight Farage on his preferred territory of immigration.
He goes on: “Where are the issues where a party of the centre-right is best placed vis-a-vis the incumbent government and Reform?
“To me the obvious starting point would be economy/cost of living. You’re going to find it very hard ever to trump – I’m using the word non-ironically – Farage on migration/culture wars issues, which is not to say that you don’t need to have a convincing answer on them.”
This means the Tories should avoid the temptation to “respond to everything that either Reform itself, or [Elon] Musk, or people on X are trying to make the issue”, and instead think about “what do you want voters to focus on, where do you think the party has comparative advantage?”
Musk, the X owner and richest man in the world has been flirting with Reform, meeting Farage at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and not dismissing talk of a sizeable donation – although he has since fallen out with Farage.
Among other Tory politicians, there is much agreement with the idea that the Tories should not try to outflank Farage on the Right.
A former Tory Cabinet minister says that the Conservatives “mustn’t get mesmerised by what other people are doing”.
“Every time the Tory Party get attention it’s got to be absolutely for the reasons that we want it to get attention,” they say.
The ex-minister – who is critical of Kemi Badenoch’s decision to follow Elon Musk in calling for a national inquiry into grooming gangs – says that aping Farage risks making the Tories look “a bit weird or desperate… which isn’t the sort of impression we want to leave the public with”.
“We’re fighting for scraps in an increasingly competitive media world. That means that the more desperate you get, the more non-discerning we might become. We’ve still got to be very discerning about how and what we say.”
Some MPs think the party would actually benefit from thinking less about Reform. “We need to remember that they have just five MPs, which in this place [the House of Commons] does not mean much at all,” one Tory MP says. “Farage will always be looking to grab headlines so we need to avoid giving them the oxygen of publicity and just ignore them.”
The decision by Badenoch to accuse Farage of faking Reform’s membership numbers caused particular consternation. “I think it was a mistake, and I think [Badenoch’s inner circle] will think it was a mistake looking back,” the MP says.
“The party that has had the most success in terms of increasing membership was Labour under [Jeremy] Corbyn, and look how well they did in elections. Membership figures do not necessarily translate into electoral success.”
The MP suggests that the Tory leader would be better off focusing efforts on regaining seats lost to the Liberal Democrats, who won 72 seats at the last election. “If you look at 2015, Ukip won only marginally fewer seats than Reform did in 2024 and we secured a majority.”
Another Tory MP, who is on the Right of the party, agrees with this analysis. “I don’t look at it through the lens of how do we take the fight to Reform, I look at it through the lens of how do the Conservatives recover and re-earn trust, re-earn the right to be heard,” they say.
This means that the Tories need “as much a pitch that will win back votes from the Liberal Democrats” and Labour, as from Reform.
The MP goes on: “Labour in some ways are going to become a low hanging fruit because they’re messing it up so badly. For us to win a majority, we need to be winning 55-60 of those 72 Lib Dem seats. Winning the five of Reform is actually relatively small beer compared to the challenge we’ve got against the Lib Dems.”
However, some Tories think they need to take a more direct and pragmatic approach to Reform.
One senior MP believes that as things stand, Reform are poised to hoover up Red Wall seats which Labour won back from the Tories in 2024.
“The people who voted for us there were disaffected Brexit-inclined Labour voters. We are going to find it very difficult to reclaim their support in those seats, because they’ve tried both [the Tories and Labour] and now they will give the others [Reform] a go.”
The MP believes this will put a ceiling on Reform’s “maximum growth in seats, regardless of the share of the vote”, with Farage’s party unlikely to make gains elsewhere in the country. This in turn could deny Labour a majority but keep Starmer’s party in power via a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and nationalist parties, the MP believes.
“One scenario is that if [Reform] carry on like this they’ll end up with 50, 60, 70 seats, we’ll end up with 150, but Labour wins,” the Tory MP says.
To have the best chance of removing Labour from power, the MP believes Reform may have “to come in to some sort of coalition of the right-of-centre”.
With Farage and Badenoch both ruling out an explicit deal, the MP thinks this could take the form of “some sort of informal pact that no one ever acknowledges”, similar to the alleged understanding between Labour and the Lib Dems at the last election, where both parties were viewed as having soft-pedalled in Tory seats where they were not best placed to win.
“There has to be some sort of understanding like there was between Labour and the Liberal Democrats but they never publicised it,” the Tory MP says.
“If that happens, then you could be in a position where you maximise the combination of [Tory and Reform MPs].”
With the next election still probably four years away, there is no doubt that Farage will continue making mischief for the Tories for the time being. A number of ex-Conservative MPs, including Dame Andrea Jenkyns, Marco Longhi and Aidan Burley, have already defected to Reform.
None of these politicians had seats in Parliament, and Tory MPs remain sanguine about the situation, with actual defections within the parliamentary party not expected.
“I would never say never, but I can’t see it”, one Tory MP says. “Reform bigged up for about a fortnight that they had a big defection coming. And it was Marco Longhi. Now I like Marco… but ‘who he’?”
A second Conservative MP says that Suella Braverman is seen as the only possible Tory MP who could jump ship.
“I suppose the only one who looks possible is Suella,” they say. “She’s got a big problem there because she doesn’t really get on with anyone, does she?”
Such speculation has been stirred in media and political circles by Braverman’s husband, Rael, joining Reform and enthusiastically posting on X about them. For her own part, Braverman has said: “I don’t speak for my husband… we have a healthy respect for each other’s independence. He doesn’t tell me how to do my job and I don’t tell him how to pick a political party.” She has said she is not going to defect to Reform.
The Tory MP who named Braverman as a possible defectee is relaxed about more ex-MPs who used to sit as Conservatives joining Reform. “It doesn’t worry me because if 20 of the say 50 Reform MPs are ex-Conservatives, we can deal with them and also they will be inclined to find pragmatic solutions,” they say.
In Badenoch’s shadow Cabinet, the official line is that the Tories are well-placed to rebuild, irrespective of the challenge posed by Farage.
Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow Housing Secretary, tells The i Paper: “The most important thing is that we have a leader that people trust.
“That’s why I supported Kemi, because she is a person who speaks her mind and she’s very courageous and she says some things other people are not willing to say, and I think that’s what people are looking for – many of those attributes you would also associate with Nigel Farage.
“People are looking for that, they don’t want all this mealy-mouthed nonsense which sometimes politicians have been guilty of in the past, they want to be told straight. That’s what Kemi will do. That’s the most important thing – we regain trust through the right leader and on the back of that you develop policies that Kemi absolutely believes in, and I think those kinds of policies are the ones the public want to see.”
Despite the apparent optimism, there is a recognition across the political spectrum that the nature of British politics has changed – perhaps for good.
Barwell says that the next election will be marked by as many as six different major political battlegrounds, with different parties facing off against each other in different seats. In some seats it will be Labour/Tory, in others Tory/Reform, Labour/Reform, Tory/Lib Dem, Labour/Green, and in Scotland, Labour/SNP.
“It’s going to be quite a kaleidoscopic campaign because you’re going to want to deploy different arguments in some of those different places,” Barwell says.
A Labour MP meanwhile thinks there is a serious possibility that Reform could displace the Tories as one of the main two political parties altogether.
“It’s a toss of a coin whether we will mostly be facing Reform or mainly face the Conservatives,” they say.
