Reform understands politics in a way that today’s Tories never will.
The centre is not where elections are now won. This is something Farage gets and Sunak does not
Cut off your nose to spite your face by rebelliously voting Reform – or do be logical and stick with the Tories, dear. That is the message that the Conservative Party is now desperate to convey to its revolting base as it reels from the most disastrous election campaign in its history.
Unfortunately for the Tories, such a claim prickles the suspicion of voters; are they being gaslit? But it is not the electorate that is in a state of nervous collapse, it’s the Tories. Their entreaty to vote for the “natural party of opposition” quivers with demented arrogance. It is far from self-evident that they would make a superior opposition to Reform.
True, some deride Reform for being a fundamentally unserious party, merely feeding the disillusioned Tory base the deliriously lightweight bunkum it yearns to hear. And to be fair, some of its headline policies on immigration and taxation border on the fantastical.
Yet, somehow, it doesn’t follow that the Tories are a better bet. Some of the reasons for this are simple. It is clear by now that Labour does not have a compelling plan to fix Britain. With its political return doomed to paralysis, it will spend its first term tactically blaming the opposition for wrecking things in the first place. If a start-up party replaces the Tories, Labour’s trump card is instantly sapped of its potency.
Even more damning for the Tories is the astonishing reality that the “natural party of government” no longer understands politics. The analogue metropolitans that run the Tory machine still haven’t got the memo that, contrary to London folklore, politics is no longer won in the centre ground.
True, Western politics used to resemble a single Left-Right continuum shaped in a “normal” bell curve, with most voters clustered in the middle. In the period bookended by John Major and Gordon Brown, voters – alive to socialism’s obsolescence amid The End of History and yet chilled by the Schumpeterian cruelties of Thatcher’s reign – genuinely yearned for a Third Way utopia between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. The era of cheap money made it momentarily feasible.
Third Way cultists believe that “centrism” is an eternal iron law of politics. But it was a black swan event, an excrescence of Cold War fatigue, a singular convergence of public opinion that is unlikely to be repeated.
In the past decade, the centre ground has unsurprisingly collapsed. Amid stagnation and mass migration, voters’ views have become more multi-dimensional and radically spread.
Across the West, the old Left-Right tribalism is morphing into a rivalry between technocratic populists, such as Biden’s Democrats and Macron’s Renaissance, and “anti-systems” populists, such as Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen.
The Wets that dominate the Tory machine are doing their best to obscure these shifts. It is no coincidence that many of the Cameroonian big beasts in the Cabinet, from Jeremy Hunt to Alex Chalk, are in terminal Blue Wall seats.
In their hubris over the collapse of the Lib Dems over tuition fees and mystical faith in the centre ground, the Wets made the fatal error of assuming southern seats to be “safe”. In fact, as liberal professionals fan out from overpriced London, they are destined to fall. To safeguard their position, they have sought to tug the party in a liberal direction, propagating the falsehood that the mission of the Tories is to occupy the “centre ground” between Red Wall and Blue Wall voters.
Even more ominously, the next generation of “rising stars” who are now being parachuted into safe seats have all been rigorously schooled in Third Way dogma. They believe their mission at the next election is to neutralise the “loony Right” and then settle on a mushy middle that allows them to heroically reclaim the ancestral lands of their Cameroonian elders.
One should not underestimate just how psychologically irresistible the Third Way myth is to young Tory careerists; inbetweeners who are removed from the constituencies with which they have no historic ties and yet similarly ill at ease in the hostile environment of liberal London, their lived experience is that of the mediating, double-faced outsider. The temptation to project their profound personal estrangement into a cultic political doctrine is overwhelming.
Reform politicos, in contrast, are clear-eyed about the fact that in order to win majorities, mainstream parties must put the tub-thumpingly popular policies that unify their disparate voter coalition at the forefront of their campaigns (such as reducing immigration) – even at the risk of unleashing paroxysms of revulsion from liberal commentators and triggering the blob’s sophisticated defence systems. As political beasts with thick skins and a spiritual affinity with “the people”, they may be well suited for next-generation politics.
Tory Third Way fundamentalism is also compounded by a diabolical realpolitik dilemma. The mode of politics that both major parties live by – that of triangulation (neutralising the opposition by appropriating their popular policies) – has reached a dead end. It has left Labour and the Tories locked in a toxic prisoner’s dilemma: both sides know they must somehow in tandem move away from popular but unsustainable common positions (such as endless bungs to the NHS) but neither side is able to shift, for fear of being betrayed by the other.
Farage has been mocked for espousing unpopular views. But an insurgent, mildly reckless party may be needed to break the stalemate. Reform may even be groping towards an innovative way of doing politics, which might be dubbed “paradoxical populism”. The challenges of the day require charismatic leaders who can bank voter goodwill from populist achievements, such as bringing down immigration, in order to drive through less attractive but necessary projects, such as administering tough medicine to the economy or fixing healthcare. The Tories, in contrast, with all their bland technocrats and cakeism, no longer seem of this world.
In truth then, emotional arguments and dirty tactics are all the Tories have left. There is probably some mileage in continuing to shriek at pensioners that they will live to regret it if they enable a Labour landslide (even though, the broader the Labour majority, the more likely there will be internal party dissent over its wealth raids). But when one puts aside all bitterness and knee-jerk fear, it is difficult to muster a single logical reason to vote Conservative.
That is quite something.
