I’m not too stubborn to admit when I’m wrong. A few months ago, I predicted that Farage would stay on the periphery of the political fray. A week ago that felt like a good call, but now he’s back in charge of Reform and running for Clacton. It’s perhaps the last thing Rishi Sunak and the Tories would have wanted. The questions now are what impacts the arch-gadfly will have on this campaign, the result, and the Tory reformulation afterwards.
Farage will only be standing in Clacton because he thinks he has a decent chance of winning. Failing to win here, at falling at the eighth attempt to get into Parliament would be embarrassing. It would likely end his political career. This is the best shot Reform will have at parliament, with the Tory Party brand in the gutter and its polling falling. After Labour have a majority, the mood will move away from the disputes on the right (more on this next week).
The polling concurs that Clacton is perhaps his best window of opportunity. The YouGov MRP predicted it going to Labour, with 47% - yet with the Tories on 27% and Reform on 20%, there is a chance he can pull in voters from both sides and change that dynamic. Constituency-level polling is even more positive – especially when asked about if he is the candidate. Each of these should be greeted with the usual methodological scepticism, but there is a real chance that he could snatch the seat.
If this happens, it will be a real shot of adrenaline for Reform. It will keep them in the game for another five years. It will move the conversation on from “Can they ever win?” to “Can they build from here?”. Most of all, it will renew Farage’s platform, extending his stay in British politics even if more attention shifts to the left. He’ll be able to rile the Tories from right up alongside them, flirting with potential defectors and grabbing more attention.
Alongside this goes the question of how much he can float the other Reform boats. For the last year or so, the reality of Reform support has been an open question. Their polling numbers have ticked up towards the teens, but this has failed to materialise in local elections or Westminster by-elections. The party has never had the grassroots breakthrough that UKIP enjoyed, for example. Right now they have just ten councillors, compared to the one hundred and sixty some UKIP enjoyed going into 2015.
Farage stated his aim, beyond winning his own seat, was to top 4 million votes and beat UKIP’s 2015 performance. Depending on wider turnout, this would mean getting above 13% of the poll, something which Reform hasn’t threatened and certainly hasn’t backed up in electoral performance so far. The question is whether the presence of Farage is enough to achieve it.
Part of Reform’s problem is that it is rooted in anti-politics, more than it is left or right. Focus groups and deeper polling have shown its core is disaffected and anti-establishment, more than ideological. This presents a problem for the insurgent political party – while those people might poll, they don’t often vote. One of the great triumphs of the Leave campaign was getting them to do so, but that relied on highly effective air and ground games. Something which Reform has so far lacked.
Without the presence of Farage, their ability to do so in the general election looked suspect. There was little evidence of the local organisation needed to find voters and get them out, while the Tice leadership didn’t have the same knack for rabble-rousing as Nigel does. His presence will have come too late to energise the organisation and pull in lots of recruits, but it could drag up their vote share. Though Farage is unpopular with 2/3rds of people, he’s beloved by his base and may drag more of them out to vote. At the same time, his mere presence will draw more press attention to Reform than they’d otherwise enjoy. “How does Farage do” has become a narrative of the campaign. The man knows how to exploit this, too. He relishes it and gives the press something they love to cover. Boosting the Reform air war will make up for some of their campaigning deficiencies.
For the Tories, this is a real problem. The basis of their campaign so far was squeezing the Reform vote to shore up the core. The push on issues like national service and pensions was part of this, leaning into the same populism Farage espouses. It wasn’t working, with post-announcement polling suggesting a poor start to the campaign for the Tories. But now that route gets even harder.
Squeezing Reform was always a challenge – again the voters are disengaged and different from usual Tories – but now Reform stands more of a chance not just of holding, but of peeling off some of the remaining Conservative voters who want to pressure the party from the right. This becomes especially true for the fifty to a hundred seats where a Reform surge could allow Labour through. For the Conservatives, it matters less whether Reform breaks 4 million than if they take an extra percentage or two in dozens of key seats.
With Farage in the mix, the Conservatives are now playing on hard mode. They are fighting over votes with Reform whilst still having to contend with defensive action against Labour and Lib Dems. This is a hard position to manoeuvre in. The more they make an entente towards Farage and his voters, the more they might lose elsewhere – and so far, nothing they do towards the right seems to satiate them. There’s a real chance they run around alienating the soft right with their rhetoric while Reform voters punish them for their record. It also heightens the risk of a collapse in discipline as individual MPs try their attempts at triangulation or deals with Reform to go easy on them. All the while ignoring that winning over LDs and Labour switchers in key head-to-heads will count double.
Perhaps the biggest effect, however, will be when the smoke of the results clears. Just as Reform v Tories will now be the framing of much of the campaign, it will be the framing of the result too. That his presence might have dragged the party from 140 to 90 seats will be more of a talking point than what got it to 140 in the first place. The Reform squeeze will not have driven the most dramatic change, but it will tip the scales on some of the most existential-feeling individual seats. Equally, those who scrape back to Parliament will feel they just survived the same wave and will likely worry more about winning back from Reform than elsewhere.
Especially if Farage is in parliament the question of what to do with him will dog the next leadership debate. This will fracture the Tories even more – between the appeasers and those who want to drive him out for both political and personal reasons. He will tilt at undermining the Tories – after all, he’s been pissing on them from outside the tent for 30 years - while the Party will publicly and nastily argue overpaying the Farage-geld. Embracing his populism will be the short-term answer. This might help pick up the most vulnerable seats in 2029, but it will kick off the questions of longer rejuvenation. It largely extends the same conundrum of 2024, trying to square a fight on all sides.
There’s then an even bigger chance the party gets bogged down in a half-imagined history of 2016-2024 instead of building something for the future. Even if they ate up the entire Reform vote without any other costs right now, the Tories would be more than ten points behind and destined for opposition. For the Tories to ever have a shot at governing again, they have to become something new, going beyond the NIMBY-pensioner consensus and appealing once again towards younger voters.
In a way, what Dominic Cummings is saying is right. The time is more open than ever before for a start-up party. The choice for the Tories will be whether they want to become this themselves or leave the door open for others. Doing so will be a hard slog, requiring root and branch rejuvenation. Farage’s re-emergence makes it a road the party is far less likely to take. He will now play a bigger role in the campaign, and the politics of the defeat.
For twenty years or so the Tory Party has been trying and failing to find an answer to Farage. His re-entry into politics now means its likely worst moment will be partly in his shadow. In both the media and on the ground, his presence will shape the contest. On the night, it will shape the result in both Clacton and elsewhere. Afterwards, it will likely have an undue influence on the postmortem. 4 million votes is a tough ask for Reform, but it doesn’t matter if they clear it. The task for them is twofold – taking Clacton and losing Tories as many seats as possible. Do that and they will be best placed to influence the post-election wreckage of the right.
Why do you think an eighth failure to win a seat would end his political career, while the other seven losses have co-occurred with his ascendancy in influence and power?
I'm not so sure. Starmer's lead is two dimensional. He's not been picking up numbers in the by elections, just getting in due to the Tories staying at home. Tice has never inspired me, my other half often asks 'who's Richard Tice? Which Party? Oh, them' All Parties know there are votes they'll never get.
The MSM and the polls are driving the narrative and our sheep like electorate aren't that rebellious. Hitchens said polls influence voters. It's goals that make us follow the Premier Division teams if only for lip service to stay in the conversation..
That immigration, high taxes, enforced net zero and wokeness are in the news doesn't mean they are popular. That Labour intend to double down must give the floating voter pause for thought.
There's another elephant in the room, Galloway. Safe for now in Rochdale with Gaza persisting, he's gunning for Starmer, particularly Rayner. For the same reason Reform was forecast to leach votes from Sunak, similar applies to Labour. He may not get seats but...
My big regret is that Tice allowed himself to be pushed into fighting 630 seats. He'll never take the donkey rosette seats, blue or red, this time. He should have been more modest. Applies to Farage too and I'm hoping we'll see something on those lines in the coming days. Finally, not to spend time on it here, there's a quiet but significant groundswell among the young who view the 'uniparty' as ludicrous.