“Please stay. I mean, please don’t resign, we want you to stay on as leader.” That was the plea not from one of Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s backbench MPs, but from Nigel Farage, who is already doing a victory lap after a very good early set of by-election and local election results for Reform UK. He also said: “You’re witnessing the end of a party that’s been around since 1832. They are disappearing.”
The Reform leader isn’t just good at speaking to the very deep fears of voters. He is also excellent at knowing exactly which buttons to press to send the Conservative Party mad. That’s why he made it about the question of Badenoch’s leadership – not just because she has performed poorly in her first six months at the top, but also because the Tory party hasn’t yet recovered from its predilection for psychodrama and obsessing about the right time to send another boss hurtling out of the window.
And by sending the party back into its internal drama, Farage is guaranteeing the Conservatives become even less attractive to the voters who ran from them in last year’s general election. The internal strife and appearance of total incompetence are the two things the Tories need to dispense with the most. Instead, they’re teetering on the edge of a relapse on both counts.
Now there will be even more talk of a pact between Reform and the Conservatives, more videos of Robert Jenrick walking faster through London than he moved in the marathon, and more obsessing.
After any big election defeat at the end of a long period in government, it is impossible for a party to rebound within six months. Conservative HQ has tried to emphasise that in the lines to take for MPs today, with frontbenchers saying Badenoch has “only been leader for six months”, and that “it’s going to take us a long time to build back that trust”.
The Tories haven’t even started repairing: they’re still on the tow truck on the way to the garage. So in a sense, a bad set of local election results is not a surprise. The question is what sort of repairs they end up doing, and the answer is not straightforward.
The problem for Badenoch is that she does not have the one luxury that Keir Starmer enjoyed when he was leader of the opposition. That luxury was the ability to benefit from the Conservatives’ misfortune without having to do much himself. So long as Labour wasn’t obviously unhinged, then Starmer could watch voters turning away in disgust from the Tories, and come reluctantly to his party.
But Reform means that there is another party that those reluctant voters, now annoyed with Labour too, can turn to. And it benefits from not having the responsibility of preparing policies that might actually have to be enacted in government, but offering the kind of solutions that normal voters idly talk about among themselves.
square KITTY DONALDSON
Six votes prove it: Reform UK is now a serious political force
Read MoreBadenoch hasn’t produced any policy at all while she considers what the Tories stand for, and she will come under much more pressure now – not just to start making announcements, but to make colourful policies that counter the Reform threat.
So far, the main attack line from the Tories to Reform has been that it splits the vote and leads to Labour councillors and MPs being elected. But with another Reform MP in the Commons, and more Reform councillors being declared today, this line will make less sense to voters, who will see Farage’s party not just as a protest in the ballot box but as a force that they want to hear more from in politics too.
But policymaking purely with Reform voters in mind then makes it harder for the Conservatives to win back their other lost group of voters, who have bled to the Liberal Democrats. Those ex-Conservatives are also appalled by the psychodrama and constant obsessing about leaders, but they also do not like the idea of an inward-looking Britain.
Badenoch remarked in an interview earlier this week that she had been pleased that her party hadn’t descended into the kind of internal warfare after the general election that many had predicted. The truth is that the splits are still there, but the Conservatives have been frozen in a kind of grief after their defeat last summer, and she hasn’t given the party enough of a direction for those who want it to do something different to push against. Now comes the really tricky bit.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of ‘The Spectator’ magazine
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