Locked in a death spiral where only one can triumph at the other’s expense, Reform UK and the Conservatives both publicly say it’s too early to talk of compromises or electoral pacts.
Reform dismissed a report in the Financial Times this week that leader Nigel Farage had been tapping up former Tory donors with the expectation of a deal or merger between the two parties ahead of the next general election. No wonder the party described it as “fake news”; it implies Reform cannot win outright, even if the report stressed any deal would be done on Farage’s terms.
With the Tories yet to stage a significant revival since the election wipeout of 2024, both Reform and Tory supporters have expressed concern that the two parties could end up fighting over the same seats, splitting the right-wing vote and benefiting Labour or others. With no sign of any changes to the first past the post system, candidates with the most votes win a constituency even if they fail to secure a majority. While Reform was the third most popular party at the last general election with 4.1 million votes, its thin nationwide spread amounted to just five seats in Parliament.
On current form, hovering around 30 per cent in the polls, Farage and co could win a House of Commons majority if there was an election tomorrow. But there is a long way to go until 2029, and last week a survey for The i Paper saw the Conservatives gain three points to hit their highest rating since March, which pollsters said could be the “first shoots of recovery”. The question Tory party strategists keep asking is whether Reform has hit its poll ceiling, and the only way is down.
Optimistic Tories hope the only way is up. There’s no doubt their leader, Kemi Badenoch, has gained in confidence since her party conference speech in October. She is consistently improving at Prime Minister’s Questions, a key metric for keeping her backbenchers happy, even if it doesn’t filter through to voters. “She’s owning the space and feeding off the energy,” one Tory MP said admiringly after this Wednesday’s session.
But some of her party say Badenoch hasn’t made a big enough impression as Leader of the Opposition, spending too much of her time reflecting on errors in Government and that crushing election defeat. That has left room for shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick to overshadow her.
“She left the pitch empty for a year. Maybe that was a mistake as that space was taken by Nigel for them and Rob for us, but she’s taking it back now and Rob is being pushed back,” a second Tory MP said. “Any support for Rob’s tilt at a leadership challenge is dissipating,” a third Tory MP added.
“When we came back from summer recess in September, it seemed quite likely a leadership challenge would happen in November. Now it doesn’t feel likely at all. The problem is the polls. Ideally, we’d want to get to 25 per cent by May; otherwise, we lose a load of [council] seats and any small momentum we have now is lost,” a fourth Tory MP told The i Paper.
Farage, meanwhile, has forecast a Tory drubbing. “I think next May marks the moment when the Conservative Party, after a good run of 200 years, ceases to be a national party,” he told a news conference on Thursday. “They are going to be obliterated in Scotland. They are going to barely exist in Wales. And if you look at where the local councils are taking place, the counties that will now go ahead are all Conservative-held, I believe we’re going to do phenomenally well in those counties.”
But the Tories’ emerging optimism has not stopped private conversations taking place while they languish in the electoral wilderness.
“I had a conversation with Nigel a while ago in which he said the price of a merger would be ‘you losing the Liberal Democrat wing of your MPs’,” a Tory MP told The i Paper. “I’m not sure he’s been doing it recently; nowadays, they seem drunk on their poll numbers. But I have heard from Tory donors how Nigel has spoken to them and said he is going to need some Tories in Government because he hasn’t got enough people.”
Some Tories estimate around 20 of the party’s current 119 MPs might fall into the category of left-leaning – ideologically more likely to go into coalition with the Lib Dems than Reform. Reform declined to comment.
But there are cultural differences that are making even the most right-wing of Conservatives think twice about a pact. On Thursday, Tories were left slack-jawed as Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, poured petrol on a rumbling row about whether Farage had made racist taunts as a schoolboy, rather than shutting it down. Tice called it “made-up twaddle from people who don’t want Nigel to be prime minister of the country”.
The Reform deputy leader was pressed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about specific allegations from Bafta-winning director Peter Ettedgui, who is Jewish, and alleges a teenage Farage would tell him “Hitler was right” and “gas them”. Pressed directly on whether he believed Ettedgui was lying, Tice replied, “Yes.”
“It’s shone a spotlight again on the type of people they are,” a Tory MP told The i Paper. “This goes back to whether they should have given Lucy Connolly a platform.”
Connolly, who served 10 months of a 31-month sentence for inciting racial hatred in the wake of the Southport murders, became a right-wing cause celebre after a tweet led to a jail sentence longer than that handed down to a terror offender in February 2024. However, Reform’s critics say making her a star turn at their September conference showed the party was still a protest movement.
“Reform has to keep up this idea that it is the next party of government. If they default to the protest party and show they can’t win outright, then they are really vulnerable to the ‘don’t split the vote’ argument. That gets a spotlight and people start rummaging through their candidates to see who would form a Reform government and basically every weird thing any of their people has ever said is in legitimate play,” a Tory shadow minister said.
“Their sales pitch is: ‘Dear poor and dispossessed, if you’ve been chucked out of your party over free speech issues or racist outbursts, come to us.’ And that’s fine when you’re a protest party; you can come out with all kinds of posing and claim it’s free speech. If you think you’re about to be elected, suddenly you’ve got to exert a bit of discipline on your party. But then what happens is those people who signed up say, ‘I thought you were different, I thought I could say what I think.’ Then you need to decide, do you discipline people for saying what they think, or do you stick with your brand?” the source added.
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Farage, judging attack is the best form of defence, launched into an extraordinary attack on the “double standards” of the BBC, saying he was “done” with the national broadcaster until it apologised for broadcasting programmes in the 1970s and 1980s which included racist characters.
At his news conference, he read out a letter of support from one of his Jewish school contemporaries saying the “schoolboy banter” was “offensive, rather like most of the BBC output, but never with malice”.
For the gloomy Tories who have mulled a merger with Reform, the rant was a wake-up call as to who they’re dealing with.
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