Time to finish off the Tories: it’s not personal, it’s business
“There is woe in Oxford halls: there is wail in Durham’s stalls…” The defenestration of the Tories in the local elections has left This Great Party of Ours in shock. The grandees whose arrogant mantra for so long was “They have nowhere else to go” are dismayed by the multifarious destinations to which their erstwhile dupes have departed. Even those icons of entitlement, the One Nation social democrats occupying plum Conservative seats, courtesy of the egregious Dave Cameron, are sensing the first intimations of political mortality.
Rishi Sunak might be said to have “West Midlands” engraved on his heart, as Mary Tudor had “Calais”. It was one of the more refined cruelties of this electoral massacre that it was implemented incrementally. By Saturday morning, Sunak was clinging to his party’s wafer-thin survival in Harlow, as a child to a security blanket. Incredibly, CCHQ, supposedly adept at expectation management, had allowed the faithful to delude themselves that Susan Hall was about to defeat Sadiq Khan; the supposed basis of this rumour was a drop in turnout that would disadvantage Labour.
There was indeed a drop in turnout, amounting to a prodigious 1.5 per cent; the outcome was the return of Sadiq Khan as London mayor, with an increased majority of 276,428, more than 11 points ahead of the supposed Conservative victor. CCHQ’s reputation is now that of a clownish coterie, more concerned with keeping the party leftist than with designing victorious strategies.
Then came the supreme disaster: Andy Street’s ejection from the West Midlands mayoralty. That was the point at which the last shreds of electoral credibility were stripped from the Tories, though it is questionable, even now, if many of them acknowledge the cause of their humiliation. In plain statistics, Labour’s majority in the West Midlands was 1,508 votes: Reform UK gained 34,471 votes. The Tories did not lose the West Midlands to Labour: Reform took it from them and delivered it to Keir Starmer.
Ah, the desperate Conservative propagandists will cry, that is exactly as we warned: a vote for Reform lets Labour in. There is something almost endearing about their simple peasant faith. They really imagine the conservative electorate of this country is so stupid as not to have worked that out – long ago and far ahead of them. How can the disenchanted conservative constituency explain to these poor dears that they know very well that Labour will become the government, that it will implement an open-borders policy, nationalise everything that moves, ratchet taxes even higher, try to smuggle Britain back into the EU, pander to the pro-Palestinian hysteria and enforce every insane cultural Marxist obsession in the hard-left play-book?
Do those in Westminster, Number 10 and CCHQ really not understand that the millions who will vote Reform at the general election are perfectly well aware their actions will bring Labour to power and that that will generate a nightmare five years of destruction? Reform voters are inured to that reality and will not be deflected, for two reasons.
The first is the very human, if politically unreliable, desire to punish those who have lied to gain one’s confidence (and vote) then trashed every value of Britain, from opening the immigration floodgates to allowing the grooming (that is the only realistic term) of children at school into transgender confusion, with parents marginalised. There were two commanding issues that motivated the majority of voters to support Brexit: sovereignty and immigration.
The Tories sold out sovereignty, from Theresa May’s weasel Brexit plan to Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework. Every encounter with EU negotiators produces further erosion of national sovereignty, to the extent that we have a border running down the Irish Sea. As for Sunak’s supposed key priority of “stopping the boats”, that has translated into a 24 per cent increase on last year. The Rwanda pantomime has become, for the La La Land Tories, a myth of impending electoral salvation, like the Angels of Mons or King Arthur arising from his tomb.
There was reputedly an isolated tribe of South Sea islanders that, when discovered in the 19th century, had not identified the connection between sexual intercourse and propagation. Today’s Tory tribe suffers from a similar inability to connect cause and effect. Rishi Sunak imported a record 745,000 legal immigrants last year and is on course for 850,000 this year; but Conservative MPs are at a loss to comprehend what kind of base ingratitude now puts him at risk of becoming the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat (majority 27,210) at a general election.
Do taxpayers filling in their returns, in a climate of fiscal extortion unknown since the Second World War, bless Rishi Sunak? Do families who have lost their homes as a result of economic mismanagement by the government feel warm gratitude to Jeremy Hunt? Do parents whose children are hopelessly behind educationally due to the second and third lockdowns hug Conservative canvassers on their doorsteps? Will those who have watched a Tory government allowing civil servants to suppress all the potential benefits of Brexit rally to the party?
Will all those British citizens who have seen their history trashed, their culture calumniated, their museums infantilised, their freedom of expression crushed, their streets taken over by far-left mobs and their political police forces kneeling to rioters, but inflexibly tyrannical towards the general population – will they queue early at polling stations to vote for more of the same?
There is, of course, some fear stirring in Tory ranks. The comical conversion of Gillian Keegan provides an entertaining example. Having promoted her political career by becoming director of Women2Win, an organisation aimed at securing more women MPs, she uttered the distinctly un-feminist claim in 2020 that “Trans women are women.” Recently, she resiled from that position, using the Cass review as a pretext, saying she had “learnt a huge amount more about this complex and challenging subject”.
The British public and, in particular, the voters in her Chichester constituency are expected to believe that the Secretary of State for Education, holding two university degrees, found the basic realities of biology too hard to comprehend, until enlightened by the Cass report. It is an article of faith among the entitled ones at Westminster that no conservative voter has an IQ above 40. That was why it was thought a clever wheeze to resurrect the Ghost of Christmas Past and make David Cameron the foreign secretary.
For millions of betrayed conservatives and Red Wall voters, this year’s general election will be an occasion to lay in large supplies of popcorn and to relish many Portillo moments. However, that first reason for Reform voters destroying the Tories is the lesser and more self-indulgent of their twin motives. The more serious reason for aiming at the annihilation of the Conservative party, even at the cost of a Labour government, is that until the Tories are so diminished as to become marginalised from public life it will be impossible to build a genuine conservative party to reclaim Britain.
The obvious nucleus for such an organisation is Reform UK. In the recent elections, for the first time, Reform had the experience of seeing its votes counted, not in the low hundreds, but in the tens of thousands. That builds confidence. In some Sunderland seats, Reform beat the Conservative candidates; in one ward there it scored 32 per cent. A Reform candidate unseated the Conservative leader of Havant borough council. These are just a few straws in the wind, far short of giving Reform electoral credibility under the first-past-the-post system.
However, in the Parliamentary by-election at Blackpool South, where the Conservative vote plunged by 32 points, Reform came just 117 votes behind the Tories. That sends a serious warning to the Conservative Party. The swing of 26 per cent, if replicated across the country at a general election, would leave the Conservatives with 11 seats. While that is unlikely to happen, it illustrates the danger of an extinction event for the Conservative party. On the pattern of recent by-elections, large Tory majorities are at risk. Any majority of under 10,000 must be regarded as high risk: that accounts for 119 Tory seats.
Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, has found a new security blanket to hug. A dubious exercise in reading across local election results to a general election has claimed the local government outcome portends a hung parliament. While Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos, has derided this suggestion as “for the birds”, consider just for a moment the possible outcome if it turned out to be true.
Labour, as the largest party, would still form a government. Its natural partners in coalition would be the Liberal Democrats; the SNP, if enough of them were still polluting Westminster, would demand a second independence referendum, a price that even a drifting Starmer government could hardly afford to pay. But the Lib Dem price would be a switch to proportional representation.
Considering that Britain shares this outdated system with only one other European country – democratic icon Belarus – that would not be an outlandish demand. If implemented, it would benefit the Liberal Democrats; but, above all, it would open the flood gates to Reform UK entering Parliament in force. That would be the end of the Conservative party, with part of its rump uniting, like the National Liberals in their day, with Reform.
Perhaps Rishi Sunak should beware of what he hopes for. On the other hand, a trouncing of the Tories offers two potential prospects. If it were to be a serious, but not annihilating defeat, that would leave the One Nation caucus, whose members largely enjoy fairly safe seats, courtesy of David Cameron, dominating the surviving rump. Since that is the caucus that has already damaged the Conservatives’ electoral prospects by ring-fencing membership of the ECHR and similar leftist totems, that would leave the party incapable of competing against the challenge from Reform, which would become the leading right-of-centre party.
In the event of a near-extinction event, although much of the One Nation incubus would be removed, the surviving rump would be in a similar situation to the Peelites after the Corn Laws schism, when it is likely much of it would unite with Reform.
Yet all of these speculations and possibilities are subject to the decision of one man: Nigel Farage. Seldom has one individual commanded so much influence over the political scene. Farage has achieved more than any one of the denizens of the Palace of Westminster: the fact that he has never been elected to that chamber says less about his abilities than about the increasing irrelevance of the House of Commons.
Recent signals from the Farage camp suggest he is now focused on Donald Trump and American politics. That, however, must be a precarious prospect, since Trump routinely discards allies and there is no significant locus for a Briton in United States politics. America undoubtedly holds financial opportunities for Farage, but it is likely other considerations are influencing him.
After years of a political life that resembled a salmon swimming upstream and the tedium of serving in the European parliament, having made Brexit possible, it would be understandable if Farage felt he had done his bit and deserved to reap some rewards. With Brexit having secured his place in history, he may feel he should get out of the casino as a winner. The thankless task of navigating yet another new party through the shoals of a first-past-the-post system guaranteeing a monopoly to the legacy parties may be unappealing.
On the other hand, he did not endure the hardships of “I’m a Celebrity” solely for the money or to impress Americans: he deliberately cultivated a constituency among younger Britons. He has always found it difficult not to march towards the sound of the guns. There is a danger, too, that if he were to restrict his participation at the general election to token campaigning for Reform, to the detriment of his party’s electoral performance, the adulation he enjoys could be replaced by a “Lost Leader” perception, with his followers feeling betrayed.
What is beyond doubt is that the extent of the Conservative meltdown at the general election depends on Farage’s engagement in the contest. In pure terms of patriotism, he has a duty to help free Britain from the tyranny of a uni-party, social democratic, managerialist consensus that has left our economy stagnant and our culture debased. It is a necessary, even clinical, task to remove the Tory roadkill from the path to the future. That is the more objective, practical reason for voting Reform. As expressed in The Godfather: “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”
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