Will Reform Kill the Tory Party?

According to betting markets Nigel Farage is currently favourite to be Prime Minister after Keir Starmer. Even for the overexcitable world of political gambling this is not so much due to a belief that Farage will actually be PM as a vote of no confidence in Kemi Badenoch. All logic suggests she has a much better chance – if still a longshot – at the top job. Reform has just five seats in Parliament and is second in fewer than 100 other constituencies. Extraordinary shifts are always possible in politics but becoming the largest party in Parliament is a distance prospect.

But Badenoch has had a poor start as leader, indulging in pointless fights and typically unnecessary rudeness towards interviewers. What’s most concerning to her colleagues is that these flaws have been pointed out to her but she either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand the problem. Another silly row with Farage over the Christmas break suggests she has no intention of changing approach. Meanwhile she remains largely unknown to most of the public. Labour are doing a more effective job of opposing themselves than the nominal opposition.

It's early days, and even the regicidal Tories will give her more time but in the meantime the Reform leadership are playing a clever game by appealing to the Lobby’s desperation for a narrative during a period of relative political calm. The excitements of the 2016-2024 era have left Westminster even more addicted to drama than usual and Farage is good at telling a story.

He has successfully hyped overtaking the Tories in membership (there’s no way to be sure on the numbers given a lack of transparency, but as far as I can tell this seems to be true). Though if party membership was a good indicator of political success Jeremy Corbyn would have become Prime Minister. They’ve also managed to get a string of front page headlines out of a so far non-existent donation from Elon Musk.

But there are also real signs that Reform’s position has strengthened since the election. They’ve won seven local by-elections and racked up decent percentages in plenty of others. They are just behind the main parties in the polling averages. A number of former Tory MPs have defected (as has Suella Braverman’s husband) including the dubious prize of Andrea Jenkyns, who will be standing for them in the Lincolnshire mayoralty election. This narrative is likely to continue for a while, with more donations, defections and successes in May’s local elections (possibly including Jenkyns).

None of this will make Farage Prime Minister but it will put Badenoch and her party under increasing pressure. The weakness of the Tory position, reduced to 121 MPs, and with barely any support from anyone under 50, makes them more vulnerable to losing their position as the main party of the right than ever before. There have been challenges in the past – from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, the National Front in the 1970s and UKIP during David Cameron’s premiership. But in the first two cases the alternative was too thuggish and anti-democratic to win over risk averse conservatives, and in the latter the Tories’ position was much stronger (albeit Cameron was still forced into the EU referendum).

In the rest of this post I’m going to run through the reasons to think it might happen this time, then look at the counter-argument, and finish with a few thoughts on how things might play out.