Once true-blue Tories are leading the charge to join ranks of Reform
During his two decades as a paid-up Tory member, David White could never have imagined he would go on to lend his support to another party – let alone stand for Parliament with one.
But after jumping ship to Reform UK at the end of 2022, Mr White, 59, is preparing to stand against the Tories and a Labour minister candidate in the new constituency of Barnsley East at this year’s general election.
Mr White, a councillor in the South Yorkshire market town for the past three years, is among a wave of former “true blue” Tories whose disillusionment has led them to join Richard Tice’s insurgent Right-ofcentre party.
While current projections suggest Reform is unlikely to win any seats in the House of Commons, it is attracting a significant number of former
Conservatives and polling as high as 13 per cent nationally.
A former chairman of his local Conservative association and also the wider South Yorkshire association, Mr White said he became “deeply concerned” about the Tories’ direction of travel towards the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership, with the ousting of Liz Truss the final straw.
“Boris was an excellent campaigner, got the election won and absolutely squandered it,” he said. “People now realise that he’s not the quality leader that people expected.
“The infighting has been abhorrent, comical, and Liz Truss was the final straw. The backbiting and infighting to get Rishi
Sunak elected was absolutely shocking. Every time I went into the town hall I was ridiculed by the Labour members, and rightly so.”
Mr White argued that the leadership of Reform, which is to the Right of the Conservatives on issues including immigration and net zero, has “other people’s interests at heart” while his former political home has eschewed “traditional values”. “Reform is where the Conservatives were in the mid-80s,” he said. “The Tories have not addressed fundamental issues that concern people … There’s the cost of living crisis, the illegal immigration they witness on a daily basis with hotels. There’s ill-feeling there because people are struggling to feed their families, and the housing market is an absolute disaster.” His disquiet is echoed by Cllr Robert Bromley, who was elected on a Tory ticket in Runnymede in Surrey in 2021. Cllr Bromley was elected as a Conservative deputy mayor last year but has now quit the party and joined Reform. He is in talks with party chiefs about where he may wish to stand for parliament, although no final decision has been made.
“I’m not very happy with the infighting,” he said. “I think Rishi’s a nice guy but he’s in the wrong job. Migration is probably the main thing – Richard Tice comes across as saying the right things, and that’s why I resigned my membership from the Conservatives and joined Reform.”
Despite successive governments promising to cut arrivals, net migration levels hit a record high in 2023 and Reform sources credit the issue for an influx of one-time Tory supporters joining their ranks.
Mr Tice has talked up a “net zero migration” policy, which would work on a “one in, one out” basis.
For Mark Hoath, 55, Reform’s candidate in the Birmingham town of Sutton Coldfield at the next election, at least part of his candidacy is personal.
Since the creation of the Sutton
Coldfield constituency in 1945, its voters have only ever returned Tory MPS and it has been represented since 2001 by Andrew Mitchell, the international development minister.
Mr Hoath was the chairman of Mr Mitchell’s Tory association until 2015, when he quit over Brexit. He has come to view his one-time colleague as “acting more like a Lib Dem”.
He said: “If you look at our town centre now, it’s not a shadow of what it used to be and that’s all been under his watch. And when you see the fiasco with virtually everything that he tries to do, there’s not a chance I would ever consider voting for Rishi Sunak.”
As recently as last year, Conservative Campaign Headquarters had little to fear from a party that was struggling to poll above 5 per cent. Yet at the dawn of an election year, the scale of discontent among parts of the Tory grassroots has not only driven councillors and activists away from their former political home, but into the hands of a party that openly aims to destroy it.
‘When you see the fiasco with everything he tries to do, there’s not a chance I would vote for Sunak’