Starmer v Farage - is the Tory party dying?
The old two party system looks very vulnerable and Reform may be on the verge of replacing the Conservatives
For as long as I can remember it has been a fixed point in my worldview that one of Britain’s greatest advantages since the Second World War has been its two party Westminster system. Yes, of course, in the literal sense there are more than two parties in operation. The Liberal Democrats, the heirs to the old Liberal party, are always with us, although their numbers in parliament fluctuate. They have 72 MPs today, yet got only eight as recently as at the 2015 general election and eleven in 2019. In Scotland there are lots of parties, not least the Scottish National Party that has run Scotland - spectacularly badly - for 18 years now. And in Northern Ireland too there are yet more parties.
By the two party system I mean that when it comes down to it at a Westminster general election it is widely understood that the outcome and the ultimate choice of party and Prime Minister is between the leader of the Labour party or the leader of the Conservative party. They have both tended to be broad church parties, but with each embodying a certain contrasting view of human nature, of the role of the state and of economic incentives.
Unfashionable as it may be to say it, this two party duopoly has served us rather well, given the alternatives. At times of crisis they acted as shock absorbers, big enough to soak up populist discontent and adapt and reinvent themselves repeatedly.
Reform devotees will howl at the notion that the old parties have done anything like an okay job. If you are a Reform ultra and think the rot set in when the death penalty was abolished or see everything through the prism of national betrayal, I’m not going to convince you that the system actually got us through in surprisingly decent shape. In Monty Python “What did the Romans ever do for us?” terms the two party system did quite a bit for us. It could have been worse, is what I mean, given the circumstances thrown up by the 20th century.
Look at the backdrop. Remember that during a disastrous First World War, Britain lost its role as the number one global financial capital and became a debtor rather than a creditor nation. In the Second World War, a conflict which Britain sought to avoid, the country all but bankrupted itself to defeat tyranny and in the process was made humiliatingly dependent on the US, which imposed harsh terms.
At Suez, where Britain was broadly right and the US administration was wrong, an American president piled on more humiliation. There was a complex and painful dismantling of our empire and a series of financial scrapes at home. That we came through it and still produced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and much else along the way, is cause for pride. Unfortunately, the trade unions went wild to the extent it is surprising the place was still standing by 1979. After this difficult run of experiences, Britain was reinvented several times more in the 1980s and 1990s, with some mixed results and many positives.
So that was the Tory v Labour two party system.
That was the the two party system. Why talk about it in the past tense? Well, if the opinion polls are correct, and the atmospherics, anecdote, vibes and political weather forecasts all suggest they are, then the next general election will not be a contest between the Labour leader and the Tory leader, but instead it will be a fight to the electoral death between Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage.
That is certainly Labour’s working assumption. Everything Keir Starmer is doing, guided by his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, is underpinned by the assumption they are mainly fighting Farage. That is why Starmer has gone much tougher on his rhetoric on immigration and integration, although let’s see on the results. Reform could eat Labour alive and the Labour leadership, unlike many of its MPs, seems to see the danger.
The Prime Minister is also making robust speeches on defence and national resilience, not least at the London Defence Conference where I’ve been preoccupied for the last few weeks.
In part, Number 10 is pursuing this approach because they want it to be so, because if they are right then they get their old rivals the Tories diminished as a third party and they are then up against Reform with the right of centre vote split. Margaret Thatcher won her second and third majorities in 1983 and 1987 party because of a similar dynamic, with the centre left then split between Labour and the Liberal-SDP Alliance.
There is more to it than that, though. In Number 10 they are rightly and genuinely worried about the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform. The voters are so furious that there is a scenario in which the next Brexit-style shock event is a Reform majority in 2028 or 2029, or at least Reform becoming the largest party with traditional Labour and Tory voters defecting to Farage on the basis that it couldn’t get much worse. Though believe me, it could get a lot worse, especially if Reform arrives in government with a fiscally incontinent plan to slash taxes and not control spending. That’s the way to a Sterling crisis in the first week of a Farage premiership.
Pollsters warn that Reform may slip as there are several “vibe shifts” - or changes of mood - possible before the next general election. I wonder, though.
Barring some kind of implosion of Reform (and there is no sign of it yet) the outline or the contours of the next election are already visible as Starmer v Farage.
Labour and Reform have a shared interest in presenting the general election contest in three or four years time as being between their two parties. Labour because it wants the centre-right split and Reform because it wants to stress the Tories are finished and Reform have become the contenders.
For the first time, I have started to think that this means we may be witnessing the eclipse of the Tory party and its proper disappearance as one side of that two party set-up.
This happened in France, where the French conservatives were smashed and replaced by the insurgent right. Now French conservatives have no-one to vote for. Obviously, in the US the Republican party was taken over by populists. It happens, and there is nothing preordained about the UK Conservative party’s survival or status as a challenger for Number 10, even if it has endured for centuries.
None of this is directly the fault of Kemi Badenoch, the incumbent Tory leader landed in an impossible situation after the Conservatives failed in office on immigration in particular. Changing leaders again would not make any difference and they do not have a better option even if they wanted to try. If anything switching to one of the alternatives would make it worse, and holding a leadership contest would only confirm the public’s view that the Tories are self-indulgent and addicted to regicide. There is instead an air of quiet despair hanging over the party.
The Tory party is capable of reinvention and recovery, naturally, when it has done it many times before. In 1997 it was fashionable to say they would never govern again, and they did win eventually. Even after the Brexit chaos, Boris Johnson won a thumping majority of 80 as recently as 2019.
This time it looks really tough. They have a rival to their right, they are being carved out and it is difficult to see what they can do about it that will make a meaningful difference, other than praying for Farage to screw up.
I’m not sure people will like the death of the old duopoly or the new Labour v Reform dispensation much once they get it. With its simplistic saloon bar solutions, Reform is set up to fail in office if it gets there. If Reform does win in some way, outright or at the head of a coalition, it will quickly find that governing is hard. Its policies as they stand are superficial at best and moronic at worst. In particular, their hilarious new tax policy of massive tax cuts and hoping for the best makes Liz Truss look like a patient and prudent economic genius.
If the Conservative party does slip away, declining into becoming the Lib Dems of the right on forty or fifty seats, the country will go into the difficult decades ahead without a moderate centre-right option for government. Not a sensible idea.
London Defence Conference 2025
A lot has happened since the last edition of this newsletter. Apologies, for more than a fortnight I was completely immersed in the London Defence Conference, assisted by the brilliant team that put on LDC 2025. On 8-9 May, discussing this year’s theme Alliances, we hosted a delegation of sixteen members of the US Congress, 600 delegates, an array of international expert speakers, sponsors, supporters, media partners Times Radio and Politico, a wide range of SMEs, the UK defence secretary and, on the morning of VE Day, the Prime Minister.
The LDC team also put on dinner for 160 guests that night at the Royal Hospital Chelsea to commemorate and celebrate the achievements of those who saved us from tyranny. The toast to “peace and freedom in Europe” was given by Rupert Soames, the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill. Then Lord Robertson, former NATO Secretary General and author of the upcoming UK Strategic Defence Review, spoke movingly after dinner about VE Day and today's threats. Across two days at the conference there were speeches galore and so much smart thinking to digest.
Planning for LDC 2026 has already begun.
Why Trump 2.0 happened
Flying back from Sweden on Friday - where I was out in the wilds giving a speech at a business conference - the plan had been to write a chunky and sophisticated item on Donald Trump. Among friends in the US one of the major topics right now is an anguished debate on why Trump 2.0 happened at all. I have a theory.
Anyway, before I could get down to writing it up, Trump popped up posting on social media about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen with a couple of those posts of his that make you think: my goodness, what’s the point in trying to analyse this?
“Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer HOT?” - said the President of the United States on Friday afternoon.
On his trip to the Middle East he had gone all in on the Gulf states, isolated Israel and made a consequential and interesting foreign poli