This weekend it can be revealed that a significant number of senior Conservatives are concluding that if Sir Keir Starmer, the current favourite to win the next election, is to be stopped, Farage is the horse they will have to put their money on. MPs, donors and former party aides have been meeting in secret to draw up a campaign to “Unite the Right”, with even moderate Tories now prepared to see Farage as prime minister to stop Labour.
This weekend it can be revealed that a significant number of senior Conservatives are concluding that if Sir Keir Starmer, the current favourite to win the next election, is to be stopped, Farage is the horse they will have to put their money on. MPs, donors and former party aides have been meeting in secret to draw up a campaign to “Unite the Right”, with even moderate Tories now prepared to see Farage as prime minister to stop Labour.
Also enjoying the £900-a-head hospitality at Cheltenham was Nick Candy, the former Tory donor who is now treasurer of Reform. Vatche Manoukian, a millionaire partner at the tech investment firm IMS Digital Ventures, was spied on the terrace behind Farage. Sources say other potential donors were present, including some who have given to the Conservatives in the past. Farage’s Cleeve View Box 6 would have cost between £27,000 and £45,000 depending on the number of guests he was entertaining.
The most interesting meeting Farage has had in the past few months, however, took place before Christmas in conditions of far greater secrecy. It was then that the Reform leader met Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave, who was credited both with helping Boris Johnson win a landslide in the 2019 election and then with bringing him down three years later. Once bitter enemies, Cummings and Farage rowed for years over who was really responsible for Brexit and who is more toxic with the public.
The interesting thing is that the conversation focused not only on how to win power but on what to do with it, evidence Farage is already taking seriously the idea he could become prime minister. A Reform source confirmed that “Nigel and Dom did have a meeting — they discussed how to take on the blob”, Cummings’ description of the Whitehall bureaucracy he blames for holding Britain back.
An old colleague of Cummings’ said the conversation roamed rather more widely than that: “They had a friendly chat about the general scene, about [Donald] Trump and Doge [Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive in the United States], about how No 10 and the Cabinet Office really work, about the catastrophe of the Tory party and about what Reform has to do to replace the Tories.”
Cummings has told allies Farage is clearly interested in how power really works and in how he would prevent the system thwarting him as Liz Truss claims it did her during her seven weeks as prime minister.
Both sides are adamant Cummings is not going to work for Farage, but the presence of someone who has a history of making and breaking leaders — and who has publicly declared that Kemi Badenoch has already failed as Tory leader — could prove highly significant. “Neither side discussed Dom working for Reform,” the friend of Cummings said. “He doesn’t want a Westminster job. He spends his time mostly helping people outside Westminster and a few inside Westminster he thinks are trying to build interesting things, regardless of their party or whether they’re political or official or in the forces.”
Cummings is very much a lone wolf, but senior Tories are drawing the same conclusion: that without co-operation with Farage they cannot win. Several of those involved in the conversations say a campaign is due to be launched in the next few weeks, ahead of the May local elections, urging Reform and the Conservatives to work more closely together.
With “significant” donor backing, former Tory and Reform aides plan to make the argument that the right has to unite, as it did in 2019 when Farage stood down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats, to prevent a repeat of the 2024 landslide when Labour and the Liberal Democrats had an unwritten deal that allowed them to maximise gains for the left.
The Unite the Right campaign will be “explicitly agnostic” about whether this means co-operation on shared policy areas such as immigration, a non-aggression pact so each party focuses on the seats it can win, a formal electoral pact or a full-blown merger or takeover of one party by the other, in order to maximise support.
One model being openly discussed is the relationship between the German centre-right parties. “Tories and Reform should become the CDU-CSU,” a former Conservative adviser said. “Tories in the south, Reform in the north.” Teased that this was a very European solution for the Eurosceptic parties, the source said the goal was the same as in the Second World War PoW film: “Escape to victory.”
At the moment, Farage and his closest aides are opposed to any sort of deal with the Conservatives, believing they are on the verge of an electoral breakthrough in the local elections on May 1 that will give them the momentum to become the main opposition party. “There is no deal,” a Reform spokesman said. “The only reason the Tories are talking about it is because their poll ratings are about to fall off a cliff.”
Where Farage and the Unite the Right people agree is that Badenoch is not the right leader to bring them together. One of those involved said political operators were already drawing up a media “grid” of attacks to make the Tory leader’s life difficult after May, when the Conservatives are expected to haemorrhage hundreds of seats to Reform. Badenoch is defending 1,450 seats, last won in 2021 at the high point of the Johnson government, while Labour could only lose a maximum of 350.
“We’ll get her out sharpish,” one plotter said. “More and more MPs realise she’s doomed. A grid is coming together to bury her in disaster from the locals, keep the pressure on, then f*** [up] conference,” the party’s annual get-together in October. If that does not force Badenoch out, many think the final straw could be the Welsh elections in the spring of 2026, which polls currently suggest Reform will win. That would be the moment when someone more open to an arrangement with Reform could take over.
The assumption of many is that Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, would be likely to emerge as leader, though others have not ruled out a return by Johnson. Those who support Johnson say he and Farage could be an unstoppable campaigning team. His critics, however, believe the explosion in net immigration, which under the last Conservative government topped 900,000 in the year to June 2023, largely as a result of a relaxation of the rules under Johnson, make it impossible for him to be leader now.If Reform gathers momentum, talk of pacts may become redundant. But private polling circulated among those interested in a deal suggests neither the Tories or Reform could stop Starmer on their own — yet if they united, Labour would be at their mercy. The private polling shows the Starmer government was the most unpopular ever in its first six months (at which point it is trumped by the Major government after Black Wednesday) and that a swing of only 4 per cent against Labour next time would eliminate Starmer’s majority.On the right, however, 1.6 million Reform voters are Tory defectors. One in five Tory voters in 2024 now say they would vote for Reform, 4.7 per cent of the total electorate. The polling suggests Tories would need to win 75 per cent of the Reform base, plus every Conservative voter who stayed home in 2024 or voted tactically against the Conservatives to win a majority of two in 2029, a triple whammy that seems vanishingly unlikely.One of those who has studied the polling said: “The bottom line is that in 2019 the right was united and we won a landslide. In 2024 the left had a deal in all but name and they won a landslide. If we unite, we will beat them. If we don’t they will win.”The polling also raises the interesting question of whether Morgan McSweeney, the Downing Street chief of staff and Starmer’s political strategist, has positioned his man in the right place. By taking a tough line on immigration, welfare cuts and net zero, McSweeney’s strategy is to neutralise issues where the Tories and Reform might get traction and keep working-class voters in the red wall onside. However, it risks leeching support from pro-environment, anti-Trump voters to the Lib Dems and the Greens, which could be critical if the right gets properly organised. A third of 2024 Labour voters would consider voting Lib Dem or Green, the private polling shows.One of those involved in the Unite the Right discussions observed: “Labour’s fate is in hands of whether we can sort the shitshow of the Tories and Reform.” This argument is persuading a lot of Conservative MPs, including former die-hard supporters of David Cameron, that they will have to “hold our noses and jump into bed with Farage”.
Badenoch, like Farage, refuses to countenance a pact. She will try to take the initiative this week by launching the Conservative Party’s policy review, which is supposed to draw up plans for the next manifesto. She will give a keynote speech to launch the project at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank on Tuesday. Some will see experts commissioned to write reports.
Internal critics say she is ignoring the elephant in the room. One of those behind the Unite the Right campaign said: “People who have been in to see Kemi’s team to ask what the plan is have been told time and again that Reform will implode over time because of Farage’s propinquity to Trump, which the public don’t like. Secondly, they say that everyone in Reform hates each other.”
The recent row between Farage and Rupert Lowe, the second-most prominent MP, who has now been kicked out of the party, suggests that these predictions were spot-on. Lowe was reported for bullying, a charge he denies, and accused Farage of leading a “witch hunt” against him because he dared to challenge the leader’s authority.
However, the senior Conservative said this only proved the new campaign’s point: “In the last four weeks you have seen the absolute worst display of Reform infighting that you’re probably going to see in the next three to four years. Trump has openly humiliated a global leader in the Oval Office and shown himself to be a Putin acolyte. The combined effect on Reform’s polling score is that they are up by one point in four of the last five polls.” In two of those polls Reform was ahead of Labour.
Both public and private polls suggest Farage’s personal ratings have taken a hit as a result of his alliance with Trump and criticism of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. In YouGov polling, 30 per cent of voters had a favourable view of Farage on February 18, the highest of any leader, but that has fallen to 26 per cent, behind Starmer, who is on 31 per cent. In focus groups run by More in Common in Merthyr Tydfil and Dudley last week, voters questioned Farage’s stance.
Luke Tryl, who ran the groups, said: “There’s no doubt Reform have been making the running since the election but figures like Elon Musk are deeply unpopular in the UK, while Brits have been appalled by the Trump-Vance meeting with Zelensky with the words most used to describe it being ‘disgusting’ or ‘bullies’.
“Now is the moment of reckoning for Farage and Reform. Do they build on their more moderate supporters they’ve gained since the election through a mainstream political platform or condemn themselves to remaining a party of protest by embracing fringe theories?” The Times on Sunday.
The question for the next 12 months is whether all of that persuades key figures on both sides that they need to change jockey or back a different horse to get to the winning post. Times.
The question for the next 12 months is whether all of that persuades key figures on both sides that they need to change jockey or back a different horse to get to the winning post. Times.
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