Kemi Badenoch has one last shot Are coalitions the future?

The strange war dance on the Right is over. For years the Conservative Party and the various political parties built around Nigel Farage have waved their spears at each other without really seeking to draw blood. Indeed, their relations have often been marked by semi-covert co-operation. But now Kemi Badenoch has decided to stand and fight, ensuring that the bomb of Robert Jenrick’s defection from the Tories to Reform last week was turned into a controlled explosion and showed her to be a decisive and ruthless leader. Her dry remark that Jenrick was “Nigel’s problem now” suggested that she might be harder to bully than the boys in the playground of Dulwich College.

International affairs might also play to the Conservative advantage. Farage has benefitted from being Donald Trump’s favourite Englishman, but Trump will not last forever and anyone who cares about British interests will be in despair about an American president who threatens to invade a Nato country and punish those who get in his way.

In the next few months, the future of the Tory party will likely be decided. Farage has said that Tory defectors will no longer be welcome in his party after the local government elections of May of this year — not, incidentally, a remark that suggests that he has great respect for the motives of those Tories who jump ship. If significant numbers of senior Tories defect, Reform may become the new force on the Right and the terrified remnants on the Tory benches might force Badenoch out so that they can do a deal with Reform that would save some of their seats.

It is fairly certain that the local government elections will see a big vote for Reform (because voters use these occasions to protest against established parties); it is also fairly certain that this victory will be a pyrrhic one, because nothing is more calculated to reveal the weakness of the party than having lots of its ill-tempered and inexperienced activists installed in local councils.

Things will start to get easier for Badenoch, though, if she makes it through the spring. Her position will be stronger because her most dangerous rival in her own party has gone and also because she has begun to show the ferrous qualities of her character. Like Margaret Thatcher, she is beginning to look like someone who is at her best when the going gets tough.

There are other things in her favour. Farage and his Tory admirers may talk about “uniting the Right”, but the truth is that the struggle between Reform and the Conservatives is a civil war within a fairly extreme part of the Right — one that is obsessed with nationalism and, increasingly, with race. One wonders what Edward Boyle, the Conservative MP for Birmingham Handsworth until 1970, would have said about Jenrick’s remark that one does not see a white face in the area.

Reform now seems to be abandoning free-market principles, at the very moment when Rachel Reeves has made even the most socialistically inclined voters think that perhaps entrepreneurs might understand the economy better than politicians and civil servants. This opens up the possibility that the Conservatives might spend a little less time hanging union flags on lampposts and return to their natural territory as a party that exists to defend capitalism. Badenoch might even think of bringing economic liberals such as Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak back to the centre of power in her party.

If Reform supplants the Conservative Party or takes it over, then, in a strange way, the British political party system will stay the same. There will be a single party of the Right confronting a single party of the Left. In fact, having Farage as the effective leader of the official opposition is probably the only thing that could save Keir Starmer’s political career. A significant minority of British voters would vote for Farage but a majority would vote for anyone but Farage. In 2002, the French Left rallied behind Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election under the slogan “vote for the crook not the fascist”. One can imagine a variety of similarly unappealing slogans under which the anti-Farage electorate might grudgingly vote for Starmer’s Labour Party.

The tectonic plates of British politics will really move if the Tories survive as a significant force. If this happens, Reform will not go away. Rather there will be two parties on the Right. There will also be fragmentation on the Left — partly because it will be harder to rally the Left-wing vote behind a single party if there is no single party on the Right to oppose. To an extent, this is already happening: there are already more than 120 Members of Parliament who do not belong to either Labour or the Conservatives (in 1951 there were just six) and the great majority of these identify as Left-wing. Badenoch’s survival would, in itself, damage Starmer — because her decisiveness highlights his weaknesses: the more she looks like a pitbull on speed, the more he looks like a robot with a flat battery.

In Britain, we have taken the two-party system for granted. Third parties have either been absorbed into an established party (as Joseph Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists were absorbed into the Tories before the First World War) or have replaced an established party (as Labour replaced the Liberals after the First World War). But there is no reason why the two-party system is bound to survive. Most European countries are governed by multiple parties (sometimes fairly ephemeral ones) that move in and out of alliance with each other in a perpetual Brownian motion.

Tories who are nostalgic for the huge Thatcher majority of 1983 do not find multi-party politics appealing. But, in fact, Conservatives have often done well from allying with other parties — they were the dominant element in a succession of coalition governments that ruled from 1931 to 1945.

Coalitions do have their advantages. Politicians can do things that they know to be necessary, but which would be unpalatable to their own party, by explaining that they need to please their coalition partners. This might be particularly useful to the Tories now — because the party has given rank-and-file members the final decision in leadership elections. It is said that David Cameron promised the Brexit referendum because he assumed that his coalition with the Liberal Democrats would endure after the 2015 election and that his political partners would save him from having to honour his promise.

A multi-party system and the resultant coalitions might, in fact, allow a re-alignment of British politics. Once the two major parties reflected a real social division that pitted the cloth cap against the bowler hat. But the old maps of politics are less reliable now. The working class is much reduced and a large part of the middle class now works in the public sector.

This might simply mean a coalition of Lefts confronting an alliance of Reform and the Conservatives, but it might allow for more complicated alliances. Blairites in the Labour Party and those in the Liberal Democrats who remember Gladstone (or even just David Laws) might be willing to support a free-market government. There must be Tories who privately dream of reversing Brexit. Some important Conservatives — including Boris Johnson — took climate change more seriously than Starmer does.

There is one politician who has, effectively, been operating in a European political system for many years: Farage. His only real experience of elected office was gained in the European parliament. He has long understood that having a majority in parliament may not be the key to getting what you want — he has, after all, placed himself at the centre of the political system when he still has only half a dozen MPs in parliament. He has no institutional attachment to a particular party, beginning life as a Conservative (though he much admired Enoch Powell who had left the Conservative Party) before joining UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform. His parties have always been built around him and his freedom of manoeuvre is greatly enhanced by the fact that he has not had to worry about votes by the rank and file. His political language derives from business: he talks of Reform as a “startup” and once suggested that he might engineer a “reverse takeover” of the Conservative Party. All this suggests a view of politics that revolves around deals and opportunism — there is no one who feels more at home in the smoke-filled room than Farage. His political style would be familiar to, say, a Radical in the French Third Republic or an Italian Christian Democrat in the Seventies.

Perhaps it is time that the defenders of political convention at Westminster began to study the skills that Farage picked up in Brussels and Strasbourg. As for the objection that multi-party systems produce weak governments, has Britain ever had a weaker government than it has now at a time when the ruling party has a huge majority?

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