March 22, 2024 - 1:00pm
The latest YouGov poll isn’t just a new low for the Conservatives, but a new high for Reform UK.
The party’s 15% vote share puts it just four points behind the Tories. But that’s not all. The YouGov data tables show that Reform is now in first place among Leave voters — edging out the Conservatives by 33% to 32%.
It’s also beating the blues in a number of other categories, including male voters, working-class voters and Northern voters (though in all three cases Labour is way out in front).
Not every pollster has Reform doing quite as well. Redfield and Wilton has the Right-wing party on 14%, People Polling 13%, Deltapoll 12%, Savanta 11% and Ipsos UK 8%. That said, it’s not just the current level of support which matters, but the direction of travel — and most polls show the party gaining ground.
The ground, though, is about to get stony. After Easter, we’ll be straight into the campaign for the local and mayoral elections on 2 May — and Reform, like Ukip before, is much more about national controversies than pavement politics. The party is facing a relevance problem over the coming weeks.
Crucially, there are three things it can do to hold our attention. Firstly, overtake the Tories in a national poll. Given that YouGov had Reform on 10% at the start of the year, and 15% now, the long awaited crossover could happen within a couple of months. This might just be the shock that brings down Rishi Sunak.
Secondly, attract more defectors. Only this week Dan Barker, who had been the Conservative mayoral candidate for Greater Manchester, announced he was joining Reform. Of course, MPs are the most valuable prize — and Lee Anderson could do with some company on the Opposition benches.
Thirdly, sort out the leadership. Reform UK already has a leader in Richard Tice, but he’s always been a placeholder for the real deal: Nigel Farage. If the latter returns, then that guarantees the party all the publicity it wants. Indeed, just such a comeback has been promised time after time. Yet, despite the hype, the stage is still empty. The longer the no-show goes on, the more the opportunity becomes a problem.
Does Farage not realise the potential here? Reform is unlikely to win more than one or two seats, if that, but it could bring about a much bigger change: the fall of the Conservative Party. Entering the YouGov poll figures into the Electoral Calculus seat predictor produces a Tory meltdown for the ages. There’d be only 36 Conservative MPs, a Labour majority of nearly 400, and the Lib Dems would be the official opposition. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you split the Leave vote in half — which Farage could easily achieve.
But perhaps that’s just it. It could be that he doesn’t want to destroy the Conservative Party. Indeed, he doesn’t seem averse to the idea of himself leading it. Whether he’s entirely serious about that is open to question — but it certainly won’t happen if there’s nothing left for him to lead.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI reckon Rishi will resign within the next couple of weeks. Perhaps he will hold on to May 2, to get the party past the local elections but there is no way he will make it to the GE. I predict Kemi Badenoch will be the next PM (if only for 6 months).
No, she will hold out until after the elections. No point in getting burnt now.
And anyway, I don’t see how a new leader would help. Let’s just hope the elections are not going to be too disastrous, but we do need a good clear out.
Absolutely. Kemi (or anybodyelse) would have to be out of their minds to want the job now. Let Rishi go down with the ship and then take over for the rebuild job. If Starmer screws up the way the Tories have done in one term, obviously a possibility, you could be PM by 2028-ish, maybe 2029.
Frankly, wanting to be PM right now for anybody not named Mr. R. Sunak is disqualifying on grounds of stupidity.
Penny Mordaunt would be the best replacement. Opportunity to ditch another lame duck ‘one nation’ liberal before taking their time after the election to select the right person to rebuild the party around.
Farage is right about (at least) one thing – this country desperately needs a realignment of the right
Reform’s popularity is an illusion, much like their ‘policies’. It’s easy to make a completely unrealistic vision when there is no danger of actually being in power. Same thing goes for Farage – whilst he may have some popularity with the public, it’s Tory MP’s he has to convince.
That is true. The only power that UKIP/BP/Reform has is to put pressure on the Tories to adopt their policies. The threat is: do what we say or we will help Labour win by splitting your vote.
The problem at the moment is that they haven’t articulated a policy they want the Tories to adopt. I think this is because they have bought their own rhetoric about killing the Tories and taking over. That will not happen in a million years. But it is also a problem in selecting what the primary policy demand should be.
What they should do is zero in on a single policy and not talk about anything else. And they should also work out what they will do if the Tories do adopt it (this was the problem that the BP ran into – they withdrew their candidates but didn’t get any other benefits). They could for instance say they want some secondary policies in the manifesto too. And maybe peerages for Tice and Farage.
From the Reform UK website;
• Reform the unelected, crony-filled
House of Lords: Recent abuse has
been offensive — a former Prime
Minister ennobling his brother, mates
and personal donors by making them
peers is indefensible. A properly
It wouldn’t make sense to demand peerages-by-patronage for Tice and Farage if their own policy is a democratic upper chamber.
I think it would be a huge asset to have 50 UKIP/BP/Vote Leave/Reform stalwarts in the HoL. It would dilute the Remainer, Open Borders, Globalist tendency of the upper house and it would give Conservative ministers a raft of peers to call on to head up quangos and public bodies.
Do you think there are going to be any Conservative ministers this time next year? Appointing heads of quangos will be a distant memory for the sorry lot of them.
Not as things stand, no. But 7 months is a long time. I suspect Rishi will be out on his ear in the next couple of weeks.
They have articulated plenty that they want the Tories to do, including the following: leaving the ECHR, one in – one out migration and repeal of the NetZero legislation. Go to the link in this thread for many others.
All good stuff but which one do the public want the most? The idea needs to be both highly popular among 2019 Tory voters and something that can’t be reneged on after the election. That is the one that they should force the Tories to adopt.
I would say the leaving the ECHR only works if they block the Rwanda scheme and it comes to a head. Then I can see an argument for leaving that the voters would get behind. At the moment it wouldn’t garner majority support.
One-in-one-out immigration system is good. I would vote for it but would I really trust the Tories to follow through? Why is it different from putting net 100k in their manifestos and then not delivering? I think it needs to be something concrete (like leaving the ECHR) that they cannot weasel out of. Perhaps it needs to take the form of legislation that limits in law the number of visas of any type that can be issued by the Home Office.
Changing the Net Zero legislation is interesting. Have they fleshed out the changes they want? I could imagine modifying it to say that emissions reduction should be dependent on no increase in the price of fuel so that the targets for getting rid of gas power stations, ICEs and gas boilers are tied to the price of non-subsidised renewables, electric cars and alternatives to boilers (if such a thing exists). I’m not sure it would capture the voters imagination though. I suspect it is a second order priority.
Other ideas would be modifying the Equalities Act to stop any form of “positive discrimination”, banning “social transitioning” in schools as well as ruling categorically on women’s sports, prisons etc.
All good suggestions. I suspect the only possible game-changer is a promise to leave the ECHR – within 12 months – of their first block of a deportation.
Before thinking they have no policies it might be worth reading their contract (manifesto) which is, actually, quite detailed – certainly compared with the mainstream parties. It’s here: https://www.reformparty.uk/our-contract-contents
The wretched Tice has just deselected a sound, based, candidate (Beau Dade) based on the whining of the egregious “Hope Not Hate” activists. Tice has to go.
I read their stuff, it’s not that I disagree with it, their ideas have much appeal – there’s a big gap however between fantasy and reality in delivering them.
The longest journey begins with a single step. What else do we have?
I’ve just been looking at the results of the four local government by-elections held yesterday. Reform didn’t stand in any of them. I don’t think I recall them contesting any other recent local polls either. If they were a real party with a grassroots membership and organisation this surely wouldn’t be happening
They are putting up candidates in every constituency in the next General Election. There’s quite a well-developed grassroots inherited from UKIP etc. but, given the push for candidates, doubtless the media will catch out some who’ve said/done verboten things.
Some remark in the transsexual line is my guess. That’s all people seem to be talking about these days, that and cancer in the royal family. Oh, and Harry and Meg.
Farage doesn’t want it because he’d make less money! Simples.
Were he an MP he’d have to declare his sources of income and devote some hard yards actually doing a proper job rather than being a Celeb. And if Labour still win, that what he wants to spend the next 5yrs doing? I think not.
Grifting much more his likely first choice.
As for Reform – moment their policies, and the clowns they’d have conveying them, come under consistent scrutiny they’ll rapidly go backwards. Usual case with protest votes but bring it on please. Illumination a good disinfectant
That kind of “only in it for the money” cynicism is cheap and boring.
Easily done, though.
I think the author may have hit the nail on the head in the last paragraph. Donald Trump and his movement have benefited enormously from having the existing organizational structure of the old Republican party. The struggle between him and the old guard appears to be largely over. Nikki Haley was decisively defeated in the primaries, embarrassingly so in a couple instances. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from his leadership role. Trump recently put his own daughter in law in control of the RNC. He’s effectively completed a hostile takeover of the Republican party. If he wins in November and the Republicans win Congress as well, it will basically etch the populist future of the party in stone with him as the central figure for as long as he wants to be and sets him up to name whichever of his many relatives he wants as his successor. Of course, it all depends on the election.
Farage may be angling to do something similar with the Tory party. Considering said party is facing a projected defeat of historic proportions, he’s likely to have a historic opportunity to reform the party in his image. All he has to do is show up after the dust settles and point out what’s obvious to most everyone here. Brexit and 2019 showed that there’s a critical mass of voters who want to take the country in a decisively independent direction and the Tory leadership led the party to a historic defeat by not even bothering to visibly try. I have said before and I’ll repeat that I would not be shocked at all to see a Prime Minister Farage in the next decade.
I say, Jolly well said.
Considering he has failed in, what is it, 7 attempts to get elected to parliament I think you may be overstating old Nige’s popularity with the non-swivel eyed loon sections of the electorate, most of whom have by now recognized what a historic cockup Brexit is proving to be.
He may end up as leader of what is left of the Tories after their upcoming obliteration but that will just be a comedy sideshow as Labour get on with fixing the mess the Tories have left.
And Trump loses in another landslide in November, taking congressional republicans with him in a blaze of embarrassing stupidity…
Really, who cares?
The British Tory party are done for the foreseeable future. What we will now see is an utterly predictable lurch to the right with the usual swivel eyed loons taking over what’s left of the party and Labour getting on with fixing the mess.
Call yourselves the Conservatives, Reform, Ukip, BNP, whatever – we know what you are about. Fear, racism, bigotry and utter self loathing wrapped up in some ghastly pantomime of Rule Britannia.
Embarrassing but also highly amusing! We’ll see you in 10 or 15 years once its all blown over and you’ve found some posh clown who is able to bring you back to some sort of respectability.
TLDR, old chap. Stick to the flaccid one-liners.
You need some help with the big words?
Indeed, they’ve presided over catastrophe after catastrophe, and now the only pretence left is the idea that they’re somehow not ‘proper’ conservatives – as if the real brand are the fruitcakes who came in riding Johnson’s filthy coattails.
The idea that them or anyone else is going to come sweeping into power with a platform based on trans issues and being anti-DEI is laughable. Irritating as these things may be, they’re less important than potholes or being able to get through on the HMRC phoneline for most people – rightly.
A comment that personifies “deluded” Than you
Hilarious rant. And even “self loathing” to boot!. I might that the (true, patriotic) Right have not had on the whole good candidates. But the public, of all races, overwhelmingly support them on mass immigration, which is rapidly and visibly transforming this country. Let me remind you, over a million gross, 600 to 700,000 net per annum. Extraordinary figures. We cannot build anything like enough housing, let alone the huge issue of cultural integration (which we have entirely failed to do especially with a large Muslim population with the with the past immigration levels of a tenth of the rate. Look at Bradford for example). And at the extremes there is no comparison between the levels of Islamist violence and that of the almost mythical “Far Right” as all government figures show. But of course in your eyes Boris Johnson is some kind of fascist, so I think we can see how balanced and evidence based your political views are.
Labour has absolutely no chance of “cleaning up the mess”. It veers even more towards an open borders ideology and that a government can solve every problem by spending. What it will be incapable of doing of course is introducing “socialism” which I presume you support. So we at least have to be thankful for that!
The disturbing thing about Reform is that whenever Communist front groups like Hope Not Hate denounce a Reform candidate, the leadership purge the candidate (see what happened to Beau Dade this week). Meanwhile they think it was a good idea to run a candidate who was an ex-Labour MP who got caught sexting a teenage girl in Rochdale. A combination of dire judgment and complete cowardice.
There are c.105 centre right Tories across 5-6 factions within the party. Reform UK is a company not a party. There are a number of other centre-to-hard right parties in the UK from Reclaim, UKIP, The Heritage Party and the SDP (right of centre culturally, left economically).
There needs to be a realignment of the centre-right around the Tory Party-like structure to benefit from organising nationwide and tapping into FPTP. This needs to involve a purge of centre-left Tories (they can go to the Lib Dems!) and a name change, like New Labour (say, New Conservatives or British Alliance of Conservatives)
.
Conservative politicians should do everything they can to inject Nigel into their stiffening corpse on the small chance it can be revived.
There is no Conservative Party, and nature abhors a vacuum. While on that subject, you don’t believe Reform or a Farage-led Conservative Party (as if that viciously back-stabbing ambitious crew, busily assassinating one another, would willingly let him in) may attract even more sizeable volumes of Labour voters who previously defected to Conservative? Maybe. Just not the polisci Labour types.
Boris?