Whisper it, are more Tories going to join Reform?

‘We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we’ve not seen since Labour after the First World War.” Nigel Farage’s prophecy on Tuesday night at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards is unsettling mainstream politicians.

Are things really this bad for the old parties? Will we honestly see the hundreds of new Reform MPs that Farage predicts? Yes, it’s ambitious, but British politics are in flux. No one expected in 2019 that Boris Johnson’s majority of 80 would turn so fast into a Labour majority of 174. If voters believe both old parties have failed, then who can honestly say it couldn’t happen?

No one can know what politics will be like in five years’ time. Many things now unknowable will have come to pass. One can only assess the scene today. That scene shows both the Tories and Reform ticking up in a reaction to Labour’s unpopularity, roughly 55-45 in the Conservatives’ favour. If that split is repeated at the next general election, then the Right will lose again. That much is certain.

So far – and it is early days – the strategy of the new Conservative leadership on Reform is unclear. Robert Jenrick’s wasn’t: it was to turn the Conservative Party into a genuinely conservative party once again, the kind of party most if not all Reform voters wanted to vote for. That could, should, and perhaps will happen under Kemi Badenoch. Maybe we will learn more next year.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty is leading some Tories, for example Dan Hannan this week, to talk about an electoral deal with Reform. It’s a conversation among Tory activists too. But there is a problem: why would Reform politicians and activists want to do it?

Obviously I can’t speak for them, but surely if they and the Conservatives are running neck and neck next time, it will be because Reform voters don’t trust the Tories, don’t believe they will deal with issues like immigration and net zero, and won’t go back to them. So why would they want a deal, on Tory terms, with people they don’t trust and policies they don’t agree with?

If on the other hand the Tories have successfully reinvented themselves as a properly conservative party, and if that reinvention is credible, then maybe a deal is possible. But in those circumstances surely either the Reform vote will have collapsed or the parties will have merged.

It’s a paradox: an electoral deal is only possible in circumstances in which it is not necessary.

So talk of an electoral deal is displacement activity – displacement from the fact that the Conservative Party is in a street fight against Reform right now, and Reform is organising and mobilising fast. There’s only room for one party on the Right. For it to be the Tories, they are going to have to do things some of their MPs don’t want to do: repudiate most of their economic and social policy of the past decade; set out a firmly conservative set of policies instead; require MPs to get behind it, and face them down if they won’t. Something like this, something like Boris’s actions in 2019, is going to be needed for the party to answer the question, “Why should we believe you this time?”

I don’t know whether this is really conceivable. Much of the Tory party is still very complacent about the situation, encouraged as they are in the short run by relative success in council by-elections and by Labour’s laughably poor performance.

Perhaps that is why Welsh Tories have stupidly felt able to dump their leader, Andrew R T Davies, for being too Right-wing – even though they are actually running behind Reform in Wales, and the proportional representation system operating for the Welsh Senedd makes a shift Leftwards pointless.

A firm new course surely has to be set. Otherwise the party will just be operating on the basis of a fragile agreement to disagree on huge issues like withdrawal from the ECHR, immigration control, scrapping net zero, and the various forms of nanny state politics. As long as that’s so, the easier Reform’s job is.

Some Tories, I think, can see this. I sense a subterranean conversation is beginning on the Right of the party about whether the Conservatives will ever do what is necessary. The defections of Andrea Jenkyns and Tim Montgomerie may not be the last. The obstacle now isn’t so much policy – for there is little difference between Reform and half the Tory Parliamentary Party – but rather a sense that Reform is still fragile, not fully organised, vulnerable to leading figures leaving or to simple infighting and chaos.

But that particular concern will recede every time Nigel Farage commits himself firmly to long-term and determined political warfare against the old regime, as he did on Tuesday.

Much is at stake now for the Conservative Party. Urgency is needed. Watching Farage’s speech and the uneasy silence that greeted it, I couldn’t help recalling the prophet Daniel and the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast. “You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom will be delivered to the Medes and the Persians.”