What would the period between turkey and New Year’s Day detox be without a row to enliven the torpor? The Reform-Conservative spat livened up the political dead zone with an ongoing rumble between the two leaders, ostensibly about party membership figures. More fundamentally, it was about a contest to determine the course of politics on the right in Britain.
It is doubtful whether Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, disputing the veracity of its declared sign-ups did much good. By engaging Farage as what the armed forces would define as the “peer enemy,” Badenoch gave a movement adept at filling vacuums something to talk about over the holidays, and probably reinforced the membership drive. Beneath the bravado, neither party would relish too much lasting attention on their methodologies for counting members, so more likely, that spat will peter out, leaving a residue of personal ill-feeling between Farage and Badenoch.
What matters more is momentum and there is no doubt that Reform has more of it. In 2025, we can expect it to move its tanks decisively on to the Tories’ lawn. It has long been the case that a complacency about immigration has punished parties on the left. That phenomenon is now hitting “classic” Conservative parties just as hard.
It has chewed up “never-Trump” Republicans and confronted right-of-centre parties from Christian Democrats in Germany to the Gaullist Republicans in France with insurgencies on the more vociferous anti-immigration right. The effect is to trap them between adopting a semi-skimmed version of policies fronted by the harder right (watering down of asylum rights and faster tracks to deportations with fewer exemptions) and more clashes with the judiciary, over the reach and limitations of international agreements.
Badenoch is stuck here between a Tory record, which ended in a heavy rise in immigration figures and a failed Rwanda plan to shunt more asylum seekers for processing to a third country, and Reform’s ability, via Farage’s quirky mix of punitive tone with cocky presentation, to push its case without worrying too much about the coherence of ideology. Ideology which veers from protectionist saving of steelworks on the public purse one day, to City-slicker low-tax arguments for UK recovery the next.
Powerful mavericks do not much care about these oddities, as long as their own spirit of disruption is reflected in some form. Elon Musk met Farage and the Reform treasurer, Nick Candy at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month with the subject of a potential “reasonable-sized” donation under discussion (Musk could most likely donate a hefty amount as a foreign national who has a UK-registered arm to his company).
Labour, for all the concerns about this form of influence-peddling, is unlikely to move mountains to block Musk’s largesse if it comes about. It has its own worries about being seen as the “Establishment” blocking Reform in working-class Northern and coastal seats. Doubling down on the Tories’ troubles in fighting Reform also gives Labour the advantage of a divided opposition. That is preferable to a united one for Keir Starmer, who is due to face a trying year and local elections testing his popularity.
That will sharpen the awkward question of how far unpopular parties can afford to keep being so snuffy about populists. Badenoch is fundamentally right that Reform’s policy agenda is often inchoate or opportunistic. Nonetheless, Farage is seen as part of the zeitgeist in a way the Conservatives are not: he is courted by Labour’s new incoming ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson as a conduit to the Trump presidency and attractive to Musk, knitting together an anti-establishment united front across the Atlantic and Europe, and now connected closely with the second Trump-era agenda.
This populist phenomenon has hit centre-left parties from the reeling Democrats in the US to the slump of support for centrist parties in France, Germany and the Netherlands, while Italy’s Giorgia Meloni now looks like a more durable leader than her detractors carelessly imagined.
Britain occupies a different stage in the cycle after a long period of Tory rule and the “black swan” event of Brexit. We are nonetheless open, via Reform UK, to an insurgency which is likely to be strengthened by an uncertain recipe for economic improvement under Labour and the obvious fragility of the Conservatives.
Musk’s noisy intervention in the German election campaign – he has just penned an article supporting the far-Right AfD as the country’s “last spark of hope” for economic and social salvation and lumping the centre-right Christian Democrats in with other enemies – is part of a trend which will not leave British Conservatives unscathed.
A number of people with large megaphones and increased funding are occupying space and attracting support which would once have been default Tory territory. Reform’s chair, Zia Yusuf is a former Goldman’s banker and venture capitalist. Candy, now the party’s main money man and link to the City, is a property developer. And other well-heeled figures with big ideas outside the mainstream of party politics, like Paul Marshall, who will convene a major Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in the new year of free-thinkers on the right, are shaking up traditional alignments.
Even where they do not support or endorse Reform, they are beneficial to Farage’s “just you wait and see” promise-threat of imminent upheaval.
Some of this has a habit of not working out electorally – the noise is often louder than the signal in the raucous new politics. What it saps from Britain’s battered Conservatives however is energy and focus, two of the most important assets of an opposition party. Meanwhile, much of its ground is being devoured by a competitor, wielding the seductive claim that absolutely everyone else has messed up.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and host of the Power Play interview show
