11.12.2025

Tectonic shifts on right

Though denied, it seems quite possible that Nigel Farage will strike some sort of deal with the Tories, either before or after the next election. Some even talk of a merger, reports Eddie Ford

Shortly before Labour got its “loveless landslide” in the July 2024 general election it had become obvious that our prior expectation, that Reform support would eventually bleed into the Tory Party as election day approached, had been disproved. Quite the reverse was happening, with Tory support bleeding steadily into Reform UK!

At the time, as life itself was teaching us a lesson, we raised the possibility of the Tories and Reform merging and renaming - maybe something like the ‘Conservative and Reform Party’, or the ‘Conservative, Reform and Unionist Party’, though we did wonder whether such a name would last long, as its usefulness could surely have only a limited shelf-life. But, as we noted, the entire history of the Tories has been one of splits and mergers - beginning as a faction inside the Whigs and eventually leading to the Conservative Party, as we know it today, having incorporated all sorts of disparate and varying elements. Hence we never thought that the Tory Party - as some foolishly thought - would do the ‘sensible’ thing by moving to the centre, for the relatively simple reason that the ‘centre’ is moving ever more to the right: therefore the right is moving further rightwards, with the ‘left’ also going rightwards under a remorseless gravitation pull.

When we first mooted the idea, it might have sounded like pure speculation (if not an exercise in counterfactual thinking) - especially the thought of a post-election Nigel Farage being able to establish a “bridgehead” in parliament to the 2029 general election, where he will actually make a serious bid to become prime minister. But now that does not sound too fanciful, with every poll consistently showing Reform comfortably ahead of the other parties. Find Out Now gives it a 17-point lead over Labour and 11 points more than the Tories. As a consequence, the chatter about him becoming prime minister, or Reform winning the next election, becomes ever louder.

Inevitable

Then last week we had the report in the Financial Times about Farage telling donors that he expects a deal, or even merger, between Reform and the Tories ahead of the next general election, as he does not believe he can sweep to power alone because of the ‘first past the post’ electoral system, which historically has always favoured the established parties.

According to the story, one donor informed the FT that Farage told him that such a deal could only be done on his terms, due to the fact that the Reform leader felt “betrayed” after the pact he made with the Tories at the 2019 election. His Brexit Party, which subsequently gave birth to Reform, had agreed not to field parliamentary candidates in Tory-held constituencies, assuring Boris Johnson of a big win against Labour. Another associate who met with Farage in recent months, we read in the FT, recounted that Farage described a pact or merger as “inevitable”, but added that it might take some time - also saying that Reform “held more power”, so will get to dictate the agenda.

Naturally, Farage has denied the story, saying that “sometimes people hear what they want to”, but predicted that, after next May’s devolved elections in Scotland and Wales and local polls in England, the Conservatives will no longer be an alternative governing party. Farage claims that he “would never do a deal with a party” that he does not trust, just a “reverse takeover” - something that he has been talking about since before the 2024 election. Since then Reform has accepted more than 21 current and former Tory MPs. Danny Kruger became the first sitting Tory to defect to Reform in September, not to mention former Boris Johnson heart-throb, Nadine Dorries; and one of the latest defections came a few weeks ago in the shape of former deputy Conservative chair, Jonathan Gullis. Of course, no MPs from any other party have made the journey to Reform, clearly highlighting the ideological overlap between the Conservatives and Reform.

But it is worthwhile noting what Farage also said about the Tories: that “a deal with them as they are would cost us votes” (my emphasis). Now, those three little words have been forensically examined by the commentariat, implying as they do various hidden meanings - so there is always the danger that you can read too much into them. But, on the other hand, Farage is presumably looking forward to a post-Kemi Badenoch Tory Party, which you can only say is reasonable - very few expect her to last long, even though she has sought to distance the party from its final years in power. In particular, she has admitted her party “got it wrong” on immigration after the so-called ‘Boriswave’ that saw almost a million legal migrants arrive in the UK within a year. Trying to move into Reform territory, she has also pledged to “shrink” the size of the state, abolish stamp duty and tear up Britain’s legally binding 2050 net zero target, which was signed into law by Theresa May.

Yet, for all her efforts to make the right political sounds, Badenoch appears to have ruled out the idea of joining forces with Farage, notably saying earlier this year that she is “the custodian of an institution that has existed for nigh on 200 years”, thus cannot “just treat it like it’s a toy and have pacts and mergers”.

Seemingly dismissing Badenoch as a potential partner, the name of Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, is increasingly heard within Reform circles - he is definitely vile enough to get the attention of bigoted rightwing voters. You can glean from reading the rightwing press that Jenrick is among those who believe a deal is inevitable, and a leaked recording from April has him vowing to “unite the right” before the next election. Indeed, in an interesting reversal of what you might assume, a Jenrick ally has been widely quoted as saying that, on some issues, “Rob is to the right” of Farage, and remarks that the Reform leader is “proceeding cautiously, because he wants to be seen as more moderate”.

Jenrick

Jenrick is also behaving cautiously, though whether he wants to be seen as “more moderate” is highly debatable, declaring to journalists that it “wasn’t very long ago that I was running to be leader of the Conservative Party, so I’m not going anywhere” - which you can interpret any way you like. But, whatever the exact nature of the relationship between Tories like Jenrick and Reform, Conservative Party sources have suggested that any discussions about a pact would have to remain private, or take place after the election - one shadow cabinet minister arguing that Reform would not want to talk about it beforehand, “because so many people still don’t like Tories”.

Having said that, Conservative donors for the most part continue to stick with the Tories - the oldest and most successful party in modern history - with Kemi Badenoch seen as “improving” her performance in recent months. According to Electoral Commission data, the Tories secured £6.3 million in donations in the first half of the year, three times the £2.1 million raised by Reform, which has been reliant on a small pool of rich doners.

Since then, of course, we have had the £9 million donation from Christopher Harborne, the Bangkok-based tech capitalist who has global business interests, not least in cryptocurrencies. This single donation - the largest ever by a living individual - means that Reform has raised more in donations than the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined.

Anyway, showing the difficulty of striking a deal between the two parties (and perhaps indicating that timing is everything), although Reform is “miles ahead in the polls” - to use the words of Anthony Wells from YouGov - a significant number of Tory voters were not inclined to back Nigel Farage, even if there was a straightforward choice between Reform and Labour. This can only mean, in the view of Wells, that there are “some Tories that really don’t like Reform, so there will be some leakage from right to left” - not just from left to right, relatively speaking. YouGov estimates that about a quarter of the Conservative voting base would actually be willing to back Labour if it kept Farage out of No10, while three quarters would be content to vote Reform (a quarter of them “enthusiastically”).

However, on balance, it seems the case made by the FT’s Stephen Bush is essentially correct when he writes that “talk of a Reform-Conservative pact is no longer far-fetched” and, yes, “a deal would involve a lot of losers on the Tory side, but by the next election the party might just be desperate enough”, with or without Badenoch or Jenrick. This means, argues Bush, that the Tories, with their 119 seats to Reform’s five, “would have to accept that they were unlikely to have first dibs on any seat they do not currently hold”, and “there is no doubt that Farage would be the senior partner”.

Panic

By all accounts, this is exactly the sort of general election strategy envisaged by Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s chief of staff. That is, you should make Reform the main enemy, not the Tories, as that would panic a sizeable enough slice of the electorate to vote Labour against the right-populist threat. In that way, Labour can consolidate its base and attract undecided voters. Or, to put it another way, as does the New Statesman: Sir Keir “needs an enemy within” just like Margaret Thatcher, an initially unpopular prime minister who “drew strength from her foes” - like the Argentine junta, the NUM, the Soviet Union and the IRA.

Of course, this approach by McSweeney carries the unavoidable implication that Your Party could easily be squeezed in a straight fight between Labour and the far-right bloc - you can easily hear those voices already whispering that you need to choose between the lesser of two evils. Do you really want Nigel Farage to be ensconced inside No10? Under those conditions, so the argument might go, the ‘ultra-left’ would be strengthening the populist right (if not ‘fascism’!) by not voting for Labour. A point that Sir Keir too would undoubtedly make to secure the soft-left and liberal-left vote.

Last week, we continue to read, YouGov ran an unprompted open-ended question, to which less than 1% of respondents answered that they intended to vote for Your Party. From this, YouGov concludes that, with such “a low level of support”, it would be appropriate to continue to include them in the “other” category - those not among the main contending parties. But, as you might expect from a professional body, YouGov will continue to “monitor” this situation and “revisit” it, should the level of support for YP significantly rise.

In other words, if Your Party starts to appear in YouGov and other polls, then we will know that we are really getting somewhere!