Why the right-wing media want a Reform-Conservative pact…

…and why they are likely to be disappointed

The Great Patriotic War between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany lasted 1,416 days. Will the Great Populist War between Reform and the Conservatives last longer? Dating it from Nigel Farage’s decision to invade Clacton (June 3, 2024) it would do so on April 20, 2028. Will the war still be raging then?

Before attempting an answer, let us spare a thought for the innocent victims of this bitter conflict. The gallant editors of our right-wing newspapers are writhing in agony at the prospect of a fight to the death. They fear that taking sides would upset too many readers. We should sympathise with their plight and applaud the heartfelt pleas of the Sun and Daily Mail for an early armistice. They want a pact, so that the two parties divide up the 632 constituencies of mainland Britain and each ballot paper offers local voters a candidate from just one of them.

The papers are right to say that this is the most obvious way to bring an early end to hostilities. Their problem is that even if Farage and Kemi Badenoch dream of it happening, there is no way they could

convert a willingness to negotiate into a deal that both accept.

To see why, consider this table. Many people have observed that Reform came second to Labour in the last election in no fewer than 89 seats. Less attention has been paid to the size of Labour’s majority in those seats. Reform came within ten percentage points of Labour in just three of them: Llanelli, Amber Valley and Montgomery. In contrast, the Tories came this close in 85 seats.

The simplest form of Conservative-Reform pact would be for each party to defend the seats it won last time (121 and five respectively), and for the party that came second locally to be Labour’s challenger next time. Suppose that was the deal, and Labour lost every seat where its majority was below 10 points. The Tories would end up with 203 seats and Reform just 11. (Those figures assume that Danny Kruger, Robert Jenrick and now Andrew Roseindell, the three Tory MPs who have defected to Reform, keep their seats under their new colours).

Those figures are consistent with a significant Labour recovery. But what if Labour does worse, and the unified right-of-centre candidates capture every seat that Labour won by up to 20 per cent? Then a further 71 seats go to the Tories, and 27 to Reform. The new totals would be Conservatives 274, Reform 38. Together the two parties would fall just short of an overall majority, but the Tory contingent would be dominant.

Even If Labour collapsed completely, the Tories would be miles ahead. (If we also take account of seats currently held by the Liberal Democrats, the Tory-Reform gap potentially widens even further. Reform came second in none of them, the Tories in 64.)

Do you think a deal like that would appeal to Farage? Neither do I. As long as Reform maintains a lead in the polls – indeed, even if the Conservatives overtake it but only narrowly – the only pact that Farage would contemplate is one that gives his party a chance being a major player in the next parliament. This would require the Conservatives withdrawing from most of the seats where they came ahead of Reform last time – including dozens that must be high on the Tories’ current target list. Good luck persuading Badenoch to agree to that.

A pact, then, is a non-starter as long as both parties maintain their independence. The only way hostilities are likely to end before the next general election is if one of the two parties is so desperate that it sues for peace. This is plainly Farage’s plan for destabilising the Tories. Last week he said that any further Conservative MPs thinking of defecting to Reform must do so before this May’s local elections. His tactic is clear. Attract, say, a dozen more Tory MPs in the next few weeks, create panic in the Conservative Party, win the votes of even more right-of-centre electors, and dictate surrender terms to the Tories soon after.

I do not expect things to work out so neatly or so soon, and I doubt that Farage does either. But he is surely right about the dynamics of a possible Reform takeover. There will be no orderly negotiation between two willing and ambitious partners. If the war is to end before the next election, it will be because one or other achieves such dominance that the other concedes defeat.

(A brief aside. This would be disastrous for Labour. It needs the division of the right-of-centre vote not just to continue, but for support for Reform and the Conservatives to be as equal as possible. This gives Labour its best hope of retaining enough seats to win a second term. Just now, Labour’s interest is to help the Tories to climb a few points and for Reform to slip back. Why, then, did Keir Starmer accuse Badenoch of “weakness” in waiting so long to sack Jenrick from her shadow cabinet? He would have been smarter to praise her for acting decisively.)

In the absence of either Reform or the Conservatives collapsing completely, the chances are that they will fight each other, both fielding a full, or almost full, slate of candidates at the next general election. The Great Populist War will indeed last longer than the Great Patriotic War.

After the election? That is another matter. The results – how many votes and how many seats each party wins – will be decisive. If one emerges much stronger than the other, its leader will have the upper hand in any subsequent negotiations. They might even just wait for their weaker rival to fade away.

The dynamics will of course depend on whether the new parliament has a right- or left-of-centre majority. If Reform or the Tories win an outright majority, game over. If they need to join forces to achieve a majority, then we could be in for some interesting days or weeks as they try to negotiate the terms of sharing power – and discover whether they can work together at all.

If, instead, both remain in opposition, then the pressure for immediate negotiations will be off, but the eventual winner of their war may become clear. A rough parallel is with the 1987 general election, when Labour and the Liberal-Social Democrat alliance competed for the anti-Tory vote. It was, in effect, a semi-final contest to determine which should be the main left-of-centre party in subsequent elections. Margaret Thatcher won a third term, but Labour emerged sufficiently ahead of the alliance to ensure its place as the dominant alternative to the Conservatives.

All of which means that the likeliest scenario is for Conservative-Reform relations to remain ugly until the next election – and to change decisively only afterwards.

This not what the editors of right-wing papers want to hear. The longer the war lasts, the greater the pressure they will face to take sides, which is precisely what they want to avoid. Their agony is palpable – not just at the Sun and Daily Mail but also the Telegraph. It credited Jenrick for his “sometimes lonely stand against the forces of Islamism andante-Semitism in Britain”. It went on to urge Reform to flesh out its offer to voters: “policy will need to follow”.

But in the end the paper indicated that it would prefer to continue backing Badenoch – if she passes the test the Telegraph has set for her.

“[Jenrick’s defection] is a chance to show that her diagnosis – Britain is not “broken”, merely in the need of repair – can win the support of the electorate, and that Britain’s oldest and most successful political party can reinvent itself yet again to meet this challenge. Whether she will seize this moment remains to be seen.”

Ah, “remains to be seen” – that glorious journalistic device for hedging bets. If the war goes on, what will be the Telegraph’s final verdict – and that of the Sun and Daily Mail – once the winner emerges from each paper’s internal office arguments? My own journalistic answer is emphatic: time will tell.