The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The plotters, the coup and Nigel Farage’s path to the Tory throne
Think ruling high-tax Conservatives can’t be wiped out by the Reform Party? Tory plotters know it’s happened before. By Tim Bale
Tory nerves have been fraying for months. But with the publication of a survey predicting the loss of nearly 200 seats, funded (apparently to the tune of £40,000) by the so-far-somysterious “Conservative Britain Alliance”, there’s a serious risk of full-blown panic setting in.
The constituency-by-constituency survey means Conservative MPs are now split into those sighing with relief that, despite it all, they still look like holding onto their seats and those who know they have little hope of doing so – one of whom, Simon Clarke, took to the pages of this newspaper to join the similarly-doomed Andrea Jenkyns in calling on his colleagues to rid themselves of Rishi Sunak before it was too late.
For some of us, the only surprising thing about Clarke’s cri du coeur and Lord David Frost’s equally apocalyptic take on the survey’s results was the absence of any mention of the so-called “wipeout” suffered by Canada’s Progressive Conservatives back in 1993.
How Conservative parties die
That was the year in which Canada’s governing party, also led by a recently appointed party leader and prime minister, Kim Campbell, lost 167 seats, retaining only two it had previously held in Canada’s 295-seat House of Commons. The explanations for what can genuinely be called an “extinction-level event”, were, as they always are, complex and contingent – but by no means completely unfamiliar to us here.
As with Scotland, there were tensions over constitutional reforms designed to pacify separatists in the French-speaking province of Quebec, not only leading to a loss of constituencies there but also inflaming resentment elsewhere – resentment that led to the formation of a challenger party on the Right which, after winning precisely no seats in 1988, picked up 52 five years later. Its name? Reform.
And then there was the economy. Canada was only just emerging from a recession and the government, with public finances under severe stress as a result, had introduced a deeply unpopular Goods and
Services Tax. Having been in office for nine years, there was no one else to blame, and with the end of its latest five-year term looming, the Progressive Conservatives had effectively run out of road.
That said, when the contest kicked off in the first week of September, it could not have been predicted quite how badly things would turn out. Seven weeks later, when the ballots were counted, the Progressive Conservatives took just 16 per cent to the Liberal Party’s 41. Almost as damagingly, Reform took 19 per cent, while the Bloc Québécois took 13.5 per cent, rising from 10 to 54 seats, with both parties hoovering up plenty of former Conservative voters.
Campbell, having lost her own seat in the rout, surrendered the leadership to former Cabinet minister Jean Charest, whom she’d beaten in the contest to replace Brian Mulroney earlier in the year and who was one of the two Progressive Conservatives left in the Commons.
But it was never really glad confident morning again, and in 2003 the party merged with the successor to Reform, the Canadian Alliance, to create the Conservative Party of Canada, whose leader Stephen Harper, by “uniting the Right”, managed to serve as Canada’s prime minister from 2006 to 2015. Polls, which currently put the party near 40 per cent, suggest it won’t be long before it returns to office.
Canada 1993, Britain 2024?
The 1993 catastrophe – easily the worst single defeat ever suffered by an incumbent government in a Western democracy – has achieved nearmythical status among policy wonks around the world, especially among Right-wing politicians keen to avoid the same fate.
True, it might not have earned a mention this week by Messrs Clarke and Frost, but it certainly hasn’t been forgotten by senior figures in Reform UK. Speaking just a few days before Christmas about the party’s determination to remove the Tories from power, one of the insurgent party’s number predicted that, if and when Nigel Farage was “properly engaged” with Reform, its ratings would shoot up overnight. “You do that to the
Tories,” they declared, “and you are looking at a Canadian wipeout.”
The parallels, of course, may not be exact, but they can be portrayed as eerie – especially by those determined to see them as such.
After all, Sunak, like Campbell, gave his party something of a boost in the polls straight after taking over from a deeply unpopular predecessor, only to see it evaporate in short order as voters rapidly remembered that all the problems associated with the old regime – not least when it came to the economy – hadn’t magically disappeared.
Then there’s the fact that Reform helped the opposition into power by splitting the Right-wing vote. In 1993, Canada’s Liberals increased their vote share by only nine points. But in doing so they more than doubled their number of seats and won a comfortable overall majority (their best performance since the 1940s). That is what haunts so many of today’s Tories on this side of the Atlantic, whichever wing of the party they see themselves belonging to.
And they are right to worry. Reform UK might not yet have ascended to the giddy heights reached by the Brexit Party in the summer of 2019; but it seems to be doing better and better with each poll published and now looks set to stay in double figures, with most of its new supporters moving to it from the Conservatives rather than from Labour’s traditionalist flank.
Why hasn’t Farage joined Reform?
That was true of voters defecting to the Brexit Party five years ago, too; but back then disaster was averted by Tory MPs, reluctantly or otherwise, replacing Theresa May with Boris Johnson – who, in terms of his ability to connect with disaffected Leave voters, proved more than a match for Farage.
Sunak stands no chance of doing the same. As Farage noted this week: “Rishi Sunak may be intellectually bright, but he does not connect with ordinary people at all.” Nor, as even some of those who despair of Sunak acknowledge, is there anyone else, either inside or outside the Cabinet, who seems likely to do so either; or at
least no one among the ranks of those crazy enough to preside over a general election currently set to deliver something between defeat and annihilation.
Johnson was helped, of course, in 2019 by Farage’s last-minute decision not to stand candidates against sitting Conservative MPs. That was not so much because it saved many of them their seats (research suggests, in fact, that only a handful, if that, of Tory incumbents held on as a result) but because it sent a signal to “his voters” that they could vote for Johnson and trust him to “Get Brexit Done”.
All of which prompts an intriguing question: given that, as was the case at the beginning of 2019, we have a hopelessly divided, poorly-led Conservative government that looks to be heading straight for the rocks, why hasn’t Farage decided to return to the fray to lead Reform UK?
Ask around and you’ll hear various explanations. According to his stand-in, the party’s current leader Richard Tice, Farage is “giving a lot of thought to the extent of the role that he wants to play in helping Reform UK save Britain”. Don’t forget, he told journalists: “A good poker player doesn’t show their hand too early.
Nigel is the master of political timing.”
But there’s another explanation. Tice may think that, as he put it recently, “the Tory party deserve to be smashed and destroyed”. But Farage may prefer to wound rather than to kill – for the simple reason that one day soon he’s hoping not just to rejoin the Conservatives, but to lead them.
Nigel Farage, New Conservative leader?
It’s a prospect that he himself raised back in October, telling a journalist, “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by 2026. Very surprised” – only to say not long afterwards that he’d made the remark “in jest”. But it seems eminently possible that the enthusiasm with which he’d been greeted by the Tory faithful at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester in October may have given him pause for thought.
Sunak, clearly desperate to keep Farage fans from flocking to Reform UK at the general election, told GB News that “the Tory Party is a broad church. I welcome lots of people who want to subscribe to our ideals, to our values” – a statement that only served to suggest that the door remains, if not wide open, then at the very least ajar.
That allows nervy Conservatives to indulge the fantasy of Farage loyally joining the Tory fold before the general election and transforming their fortunes – just think of the political coup de théâtre we’d witness were Sunak to allow the prodigal son, in the run up to the campaign, to seek and win selection in a safe Tory seat!
According to that fantasy, getting Farage inside the Tory tent would represent the most effective way of fulfilling Tory strategist Isaac Levido’s “narrow path to victory”. Should the economy improve and tax cuts deliver a feel-good factor, the polls might tighten sufficiently to allow the Government to argue that a ballot cast for Reform UK would let in Labour rather than being “a free hit” for disaffected Tory voters who assume their party is going to lose anyway.
In reality, a pre-election Farage-Tory alliance – or at least a non-aggression pact – would benefit the former Ukip leader far more than it would the embattled Prime Minister, especially in the aftermath of an election that looks likely to leave the Tories in what Lord Frost vividly described as “smoking rubble”. At that point, Farage really would be well placed to rejoin the party, make it into the Commons and eventually run for the leadership.
In many ways, it would make perfect sense. Farage taking over would, after all, represent the culmination of a process that has arguably been unfolding for a decade – namely the sometimes halting but seemingly inexorable transformation of the Conservatives from a mainstream centre-Right outfit, concerned mainly with the protection and promotion of the free market and traditional institutions, into a populist party of the Right – dedicated to disrupting, even destroying, institutions the better to pursue its twin obsessions with immigration and “woke”.
There are many on the Right of the party who firmly believe that this is the direction in which it must travel if it is to thrive in the future, convinced as they are that their big win in 2019 reflected a long-term (and for some, long-awaited) realignment of British politics triggered by Brexit. They realise, however, that journey can only be taken under the leadership of a politician possessed of sufficient guile and charisma to enable them to sell a small-state, low-spend, low-tax message to less affluent voters who, for all their cultural conservatism, are not necessarily attracted, especially if they are heavily reliant on public services, to Thatcherite economics.
For a while, of course, those Right-wingers had high hopes of Boris Johnson in that regard – so much so that some 100 MPs felt able to countenance his returning to lead the party in the wake of the implosion of (the self-evidently guileless and charisma-free) Liz Truss. But now that they’ve finally grasped, post Partygate, that even many of their target voters never want Johnson near No10 ever again, their erstwhile champion is no longer an option.
Nor, after her tragicomic departure from Cabinet, they have concluded, is Suella Braverman. And nor, if charisma is one of the crucial qualities you’re looking for in a leader, is Robert Jenrick. Kemi Badenoch might just fit the bill, but, even leaving aside what some colleagues see as her arrogance and abrasiveness, will she really connect as well with ordinary voters as she apparently does with the Tory grassroots?
Farage on the other hand has proven star quality – and guile and charisma by the bucket-load. He may not be a Conservative yet, but the latest Ipsos polling suggests that getting on for half of all those who voted for the party in 2019 have a favourable impression of him – around the same, note, who look favourably upon Sunak and Johnson, two paid-up Tories.
As long as he doesn’t decide to join Tice in genuinely trying to smash and destroy the Conservative Party, why shouldn’t there be a way back for him, perhaps after Badenoch is given a chance to try (and probably fail) to restore its fortunes after what many assume will be, to quote Clarke, “a shattering defeat”?
Having resolutely refused to say who funded the YouGov poll that he used to put the cat among the pigeons, Lord Frost, confronted mid-week by the Conservatives’ leader in the lords, Lord Nicholas True, is reported to have told him that he “did not think the donors were linked to Reform”. But that was a form of words that hardly rules out the possibility that the “shadowy” group based out of an office in Covent Garden, working (supposedly in cahoots with 10 or so disillusioned Tory Right-wingers) to oust Sunak may have links (financial and otherwise) to the Faragist insurgency.
A possible plot?
One prime mover in this supposed coup has been outed as Will Dry, a 26-year-old former No10 special adviser, where he was head of polling, who allegedly framed the questions for the devastating Conservative Britain Alliance poll earlier this week. Dry said he had become “steadily more dispirited” working in the heart of government, and “had concluded, sorrowfully, that the Conservatives are heading for the most almighty of defeats”. If Farage returned to frontline politics, suggests Dry, “the Conservative Party essentially won’t exist by Christmas”.
But the Westminster rumour mill is now connecting other names to the supposed plot. These include Jake Ryan, a former journalist who was appointed a special adviser to Braverman in October 2022, when Joel Winton also joined her team. Winton and Ryan are not the only Braverman alumni supposedly connected to the new coup. Plotters are also thought to include Chris Jenkins, a former adviser to Lord Frost, who joined Truss’s team in No10 after also working for a couple of years as special adviser to… Braverman.
They envisage a torrid couple of months ahead for the Prime Minister that could help their cause prosper, in which the Tories lose two by-elections next month and are then assailed by local election results in May that are devastating generally, but particularly in Red Wall seats. Farage seems to sniff opportunity here. As he tweeted this week: “The Red Wall is completely and utterly gone.”
Yet a successful challenge to Sunak from the Right of his party, by Braverman, or former immigration minister Jenrick, or anyone else before the election, remains highly unlikely.
Which brings us, full circle, back to the Canadian wipeout scenario. The sheer suddenness and scale of the defeat is what most of us who remember it, rightly, recall. But just as important is what followed in its wake – namely, the merger of the losers with their nemesis to form a new, more populist, more Right-wing, and electorally successful
Conservative Party.
Couldn’t happen here? Don’t be so sure. “The [current] Tory party seem to be utterly terrified of me,” Farage noted earlier this week. No wonder.
Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of ‘The Conservative Party After Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation’
A Farage-Tory alliance would benefit the former Ukip leader far more than the PM