March 18, 2025 - 7:00am
In a speech later today, Kemi Badenoch will launch the Conservatives’ policy renewal process. It’s a critical moment for the party, so the last thing she needs is a distraction.
Unfortunately, Westminster Tories are convulsed by rumours of a plot to “Unite the Right”. According to Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times, the idea is to dump Badenoch as leader, replace her with Robert Jenrick or someone similar to him, and hammer out a deal with Reform UK. The most intriguing feature of the story is an appearance by Dominic Cummings, who reportedly met with Nigel Farage recently for a “friendly chat about the general scene”.
Of course, this comes less than a month after a Cummings blog post in which the former Number 10 adviser set out the following plan: “shove out Kemi ASAP, take over the Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a Third Force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force…” That sounds a lot like a Unite the Right formula, though with an added element of reinvention.
Shipman describes Cummings as “very much a lone wolf”, but that’s not quite true. The onetime director of the Vote Leave campaign has maintained close links with his former comrades, as well as with his key allies from his time in Downing Street. These would be the core of his “Third Force”.
Cummings and his supporters have been thinking about replacing the Conservative Party since 2022, when he spoke of Liz Truss’s premiership as a chance to “plough the Tories into the earth with salt so they never recover & are REPLACED!” By 2023, he had unveiled a blueprint for a “Startup Party” that would work to replace the Conservatives from 10pm on election night.
But these plans were derailed by the events of 2024, as the Tories suffered a landslide defeat but weren’t destroyed.
What’s more, Reform UK reemerged from the fringes to take up the space that the Startup Party might have moved into. Both these things — Tory survival and Reform’s breakthrough — were simultaneously possible because of Labour winning the election with an astonishingly low share of the vote.
This explains Cummings’s change of tack: instead of trying to replace the Tories or compete with Reform, the new plan is to merge them all together with his Third Force. But would such a chimera be viable?
First of all, Badenoch isn’t done yet — and even if she is deposed, the Conservative Party would have to hold together through yet another round of bloodletting. Secondly, Cummings and Farage are both notoriously combustible characters, and whether they could maintain a harmonious working relationship is far from certain.
And finally, what element specific to the Third Force is supposed to make it all work? The Vote Leave alumni might provide the foundations but, as Cummings himself makes clear, it would also need to attract “great people” from outside the Westminster bubble: business leaders, investors, scientists, technologists and the heroes of public service. It’s a wonderful vision, but why would talented and sane individuals from these walks of life look at the feuding Tories and Reform and think: yes, I’d like some of that?
Cummings is correct that Britain needs a new Right, but working with the Right as it is makes for an impossible starting position.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThere is absolutely no chance of Reform voters accepting any deal with the Tories. They have lied so often and for so long on immigration numbers that nobody trusts them to tell them what day it is.
Farage isn’t so stupid as to alienate his fan base.
Let’s hope.
It’s clear Farage and Reform need to democratise and have leadership elections as properly set up parties do. Only then can they be taken seriously as a party for others to merge with.
The problem with the Tory party merging with Reform is that the Tories are not of the right, they are controlled by those on the left, the One Nation Tories, and any merger will look like another part of the UniParty.
Time for those on the Right of the Tory party, 20 MP’s maybe, to leave the Tories and start their own party.
A new party with 20 MP’s would be quite a force in the present tumultuous politics we have in the UK today, and they would be in a strong position to lead the ‘right’ in Westminster.
But they are proven liars. Nobody will trust them.
LOL! Name the party that isn’t full of ‘proven’ liars!
All politicians are liars … the recent election campaign in 2024 has already been exposed, they were all lying through their teeth.
Reform may well need a democratic reform
but it might be an error to mimic the ‘democracy’ of the two main parties. They have had their chance and are currently struggling to achieve competence.
Cummings is absolutely toxic. He doesn’t care about any political cause. He is only interested in promoting himself, and aims always to get out in time to loudly blame failure on someone else.
And Farage ?
Basically the same. I think giving Lowe the boot has condemned Reform to remain a minor party
Why do these parties on the right insist on trying to mimic or link themselves to those in the States?
There’s a space for a British right leaning party, but trying to get elected by copying what’s happening across the pond simply isn’t the way to go about it.
As a general rule a majority of Brits think Trump is a simpleton, Musk a ketamine addicted weirdo and Vance a bearded God bothering t**t. None of them would be elected to Westminster.
Americas problems aren’t Britain’s problems, and American attitudes aren’t British attitudes. If these parties want to make the jump from minor/protest to major parties they need to start talking the same language as the electorate and offer solutions to the nations rather entrenched problems rather than copy and pasting nonsense they’ve seen on Twitter.
Yep, the electorate want low taxes and small govt but they just don’t know it yet.
When the present Govt has to start dismantling the welfare state I think the electorate will come to realise that big Govt is a complete failure.
I’m not sure the Brits do want low taxes and small government, they just want things to work.
Most polls seem to suggest most Brits are happy paying more tax if it would lead to the public services working as intended, unfortunately that rarely seems to happen.
Small government is largely an American concept, Brits just want a competent one
Public services are about to start being cut from today I believe, disability benefits will be but the first.
Big Govt has been exposed, it doesn’t work, and it will have to be dismantled, as our debt continues to increase year on year.
Austerity doesn’t work either though. Slashing everything to the bone means nothing gets built, people lose jobs and can’t afford to buy anything, businesses close, the tax take dwindles and infrastructure falls apart.
It’s not big government or small government, just an incompetent one
You could have the best of both worlds ie a small, competent government
But this goes back to my original point. In all the pubs I drunk in, all the sites I worked on, I never heard “small government” talked about.
It’s an American talking point, not a British one
Not a British one…yet.
The NHS is a massive expensive organisation and it doesn’t work properly. It has been reorganised numerous times and still doesn’t work. The reason it seemed to work for the first twenty years of it’s existence is probably that there was a “residual competence” from the previous position.
The example is clear. Big just doesn’t work well eg the fashionable 1960s industrial “conglomerates”…utter failures which had to be broken up.
The same applies to government. Small is beautiful as Schumacher said…and didn’t he work for the NCB? That’s the National Coal Board for those somewhat younger.
I think you’re right about this, though I take it as a sign that 20th century socialists did serious damage to the British psyche.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps we faced a choice between universal suffrage and revolution, and universal suffrage leads inexorably to Big Government.
But remember A.J.P. Taylor: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.”
Which is not to say that the old British ideal was the same as the stereotypical American one, of rugged individualism. There were some Englishmen like that, and they went off adventuring, but most were more like Tolkien’s Hobbits, rooted to a place and embedded in a community.
On this Thatcher was actually within the British tradition – “It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour” – there is such a thing as society, but it’s not the same as the state.
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
There are countries in the Antipodes where ‘small government’ is talked about in a more ‘Brit-approved’ way.
It doesn’t follow that small govt entails austerity, it means the State does less and the private sector takes on the work.
This article stands above the Peter Franklin average. Plenty of interesting points to consider.
Cummings was right the first time: the Conservatives need to be REPLACED. From this standpoint, it’s a good thing Badenoch won the leadership race; the Conservatives would have stood a much better chance of survival under Jenrick.
If Cummings succeeds on his current approach, and achieves a merger, the new party will be contaminated by the rot that runs to the core of the Conservative party, but that’s not the worst of it.
A fundamental problem is Cummings himself, who can’t be trusted. I was happy to support him when Brexit was the biggest issue before us, but he showed his true colours in 2020.
Cummings is a curious but surprisingly common specimen: a highly intelligent useful idiot. He’s in thrall to the self-proclaimed Rationalists – the Silicon Valley thinkers who played a major role in the global overreaction to COVID.
Cummings wanted to Take Back Control only to replace one group of technocrats with another. He doesn’t value traditional British freedoms, or care especially about the hoi polloi. He’s insufficiently sceptical of The Science, and easily manipulated by the psychopaths who really run the show.
Ideologically, Cummings is closer to Klaus Schwab than C.S. Lewis. Follow him at your peril.
This looks like a proposal to create the pro-MAGA party.
MEGA!
Unite the right?
The tories are further to the left than Labour, and Farage has proven himself to be a sellout, so reform are lurching to the left also.
I thought Dom C. was interested on telling us the latest lowdown on the Zapruder fillum?