When Nigel Farage won the Brexit referendum nine years ago, I wrote that he had in effect become leader of the Conservative party. And so it proved as Boris Johnson rammed through a hard Brexit, helped by Farage’s strategic decision to withdraw most of his Brexit Party candidates in the 2019 election in order to give Johnson a clear run against Labour.
For a while it looked possible that Farage might actually join the Tories and have a shot at taking over the leadership from the inside. Given his popularity among Tory members, he might have pulled this off had he entered the Commons as a Tory MP in either 2019 or 2024. But he opted instead to build up his media career, courtesy of GB News and the resurgence of Donald Trump. When the date for the 2024 election was called, he announced he wouldn’t be campaigning, either as a Tory or on behalf of Reform UK, the successor to his Brexit Party—which was at the time led by Richard Tice with respectable but not breakthrough poll ratings of between 10 and 15 per cent.
Then, a week into the campaign, he fatefully changed his mind and became Reform’s leader and candidate for the Clacton constituency. Equally fatefully, he won the seat, becoming an MP for the first time. Reform’s national tally of 14 per cent wasn’t much better than his Ukip party had achieved in 2015, but crucially Farage was now in parliament, literally looming over the Tories from the rear of the opposition benches.
It is not yet a year since the election, but Farage already seems to be a fair way towards replacing the Tories. He has comprehensively outpolled them in this May’s local elections and in two recent byelections, one of which he won. His party now leads the polls, with the Tories in third place. Significantly, he recently returned to front his GB News show, and GB News has become a kind of Fox News champion for Reform. The BBC also gives Farage’s party star billing: its lead news item this week was the resignation and then return of former chair Zia Yusuf after a row over banning the burka. So the question is now stark: could Reform actually replace the Tories?
If Kemi Badenoch continues as Tory leader, her party’s decline could become terminal, with Reform becoming the main party of the right. Badenoch seems incapable of projecting either a personality or a message against Farage or indeed Keir Starmer. Under her leadership the Tories are likely to be eviscerated in Scotland and Wales in next May’s devolved elections and in local elections across much of provincial England. This could precipitate a Tory implosion, with Badenoch forced out and yet another weak leader installed in her place. Tory MPs might then start to defect to Reform en masse. Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system has little to offer a party with less than 25 per cent of the vote and no strong regional base.
But this is still year one of a five-year parliament. The Tories could yet find their own effective populist. Robert Jenrick is auditioning for the part, and there is a new generation of Tory MPs behind him.
Much of the affluent, middle-class Tory vote in London and the Home Counties—which is where the party’s continuing support is concentrated—may also balk at Farage, even if he destroys the Tory party. That faction might be more attracted to the Lib Dems or even Labour.
When the Liberal party declined in the 1920s, its erstwhile supporters veered both left and right. A solid chunk also remained with the diminished Liberals. But then Lloyd George was the Liberal leader, a giant with no peer in today’s Tory party.
