Nigel Farage has a good claim to being the most successful politician in British history never to sit in parliament. His success with Ukip pushed David Cameron into his EU referendum pledge—and more populist policies around immigration and welfare. In 2019, his new Brexit Party helped force Theresa May out as prime minister. For a short period that summer the Brexit Party actually led the polls and knocked the Tories into third place in the Peterborough byelection.
The populist incarnation of Boris Johnson who became prime minister was designed to get these Farage voters to come back to the Conservatives—which they did in December 2019, ensuring a substantial majority. Having swallowed the Ukip/BXP vote, though, the Tories have since struggled to digest it. The new intake of Tory MPs from the north of England and the Midlands—won in large part due to mostly older, mostly non-graduate and mostly male voters—have campaigned for a mix of economic populism and social conservatism within the party. But Tory MPs of earlier cohorts, from more southern and wealthier seats, would prefer to stick to a fiscally conservative economics tinged with paternalist liberalism. This clash of values, which Johnson proved unable to resolve, is at the heart of the Conservative leadership contest—and one reason why the party now looks so directionless.
This lack of direction, combined with Johnson’s personal behaviour and the cost-of-living crisis, has left the Tories trailing Labour in the polls and cost them a series of recent byelections. Yet for all their problems, their vote percentage has remained remarkably stable since the start of the year. Around a third of voters seem prepared to stick with them regardless, even given the recent chaos. While this wouldn’t be enough to stave off defeat in an election, it is enough to keep hopes of a comeback under a new leader alive, especially given governing parties tend to make up ground during general election campaigns (though not always—just ask Theresa May).
But if you look beneath the surface, the remaining Conservative voters are increasingly unhappy. Up until the end of March, a majority of people who voted Conservative in 2019 thought the government was handling the economy well. Now just 37 per cent do, while 56 per cent say it’s doing badly. The numbers are negative for almost every issue from health to immigration.
Yet few are ready to vote Labour or Lib Dem—only around 20 per cent say they will. Another 25 per cent are telling pollsters they don’t know how they’ll vote. And this 25 per cent, as well as many of the rest who are sticking with the Tories for now, are deeply disillusioned. But they aren’t prepared to switch. For many in this group it is not just because they find Keir Starmer and Ed Davey uninspiring, they also fundamentally disagree with them. They don’t want a more liberal government; they want more aggressive policy on immigration, a more belligerent attitude towards the EU and tougher criminal sentencing.
Having swallowed the Ukip vote, the Tories have since struggled to digest it
In other words they want Nigel Farage, who is well aware of their growing unhappiness. His tweets are now a stream of abuse aimed at the Conservatives and their feeble weakness in the face of the metropolitan elite. He’s demanding that we “complete Brexit”; leave the European Court of Human Rights; remove the final remaining rights from asylum seekers. In case there was any doubt about his thinking, he finished a recent article for the Mail on Sunday with this threat: “What people voted for in 2016 was a proper Brexit… [and] voters have the final say.” These positions have been copied by the Tory leadership candidates furthest to the right.
Without Farage the Brexit Party, rebadged as Reform UK, has failed to connect with the public. Its campaigns on coronavirus restrictions and climate change didn’t land. At the Wakefield byelection it came sixth with 513 votes, in a seat where Ukip had secured 8,000 votes in 2015. Were Farage to return to Reform as its leader and catapult the party towards 10 per cent in the polls, then the new prime minister could find themselves in the low 20s and looking at electoral catastrophe. The Tories dropped as low as 17 per cent just after May resigned.
First-past-the-post provides some protection against total electoral collapse; the fear of a Labour government will always tempt some unhappy right-wing voters to back the Tories. But this protection isn’t complete, and parties can and do completely fall apart. In 1993, the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was reduced from 156 seats to just two, when its deeply unpopular government was suddenly confronted by a range of new parties from across the political spectrum, including a right-wing populist party coincidentally called Reform.
This isn’t a problem that getting rid of Johnson can solve. It’s hard to see how any leader can resolve the fundamental split in the Conservative vote. Having relied on authoritarians to win, the party finds itself bound to its new right-wing voters yet unable to appease them. A leader who attempted to do so would further alienate an increasingly liberal majority. Meanwhile Farage, unencumbered by the constraints of reality, can continue to offer the promised land that Brexit was supposed to represent. Perhaps his biggest contribution to British politics is yet to come.
