Keir Starmer is still enjoying his honeymoon with the British press while the Conservative Party prepares for an ugly baby contest.
Rumour has it that Suella Braverman may be planning to defect to the populist Reform UK.
This would be the first time a former home secretary has defected from a ruling party in decades. Why now?
If you want to become a Tory leader, this should be the time to strike.
After all, Suella Braverman’s campaign has been underway for at least 18 months. Everything she has done has been to build support among the far right.
This even included stoking a far-right mob to run amok in Central London on Armistice Day 2023.
No home secretary has ever done anything like this – and she did so in response to the Palestine solidarity demonstrations.
Past Tory leaders such as Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher would have expelled her for far less. But the weakling Sunak could barely raise his voice against Braverman.
Nevertheless, Suella Braverman went too far for the Tory establishment.
Now two other candidates are vying for the same position as Braverman: Kemi Badenoch, who has double Braverman’s support among Tory members, and Robert Jenrick, who looks like the safe option for Conservative MPs.
The big question is who carries the most support among Conservative MPs.
This will be crucial in filtering through candidates before members get their say. It’s easy to imagine Badenoch and Jenrick making the cut, but not Braverman.
Historically, it’s not even sure the membership would get a say. It used to be a matter for the grey men in smoke-filled rooms to decide.
Tory clubland is long gone. So are the old One Nation berks. Well, not all of them.
Anything that looks like a stitch-up would be disastrous for the party reeling from its worst-ever defeat.
It’s unlikely the 1922 committee will organise a coronation. Instead, we could get a battle for the soul of the Tories.
Project Faragisation
Assuming the rumours are accurate, Suella Braverman may think she can exert more influence long-term outside the Conservative Party.
This is not unreasonable, given the success Nigel Farage has had doing just that.
It looks like Braverman won’t make it through to the membership round. MPs will probably back someone like Jenrick because he can play the populist game without the aggressiveness of either Badenoch or Braverman.
It’s possible to imagine the first Black woman leader of a national party winning Tory votes on the back of harsh rhetoric about crime, trans rights and immigration.
Many Tory members might think it’s helpful to have a black or brown face, giving a respectable voice to the country’s racist Id.
Yet the party membership is not representative of the wider Conservative electoral bloc.
Many right-wing voters decided to support Reform UK out of anti-multicultural and anti-immigrant fervour more than anything else. This includes topics about cultural war, such as trans rights.
Farage is so popular among these voters because he’s been mistaken for an imaginary everyman.
You can imagine running into him in a pub, and that’s no accident. He is the pintman populist. None of the Tory candidates have this appeal.
There is a potential electoral coalition for national populism in the UK.
This was clear after the 2015 general election, but barely anyone noticed: the combined Tory-UKIP vote was around 49% of the electorate.
The Tories were able to absorb much of this vote by pursuing Brexit.
Despite her terrible performance, Theresa May rallied 42% of the national vote in 2017. Boris Johnson only increased this share by 1% in 2019.
This is why the Leave campaign won in 2016.
Yes, many of the Tory voters in 2019 have died off – about 10%, in fact. But Reform still got over 12% of the national vote, just as UKIP did in 2015.
The far right faces one big contradiction: the need to radicalise to succeed.
But going too far right could cost Reform the milquetoast voters who turn out for the Tories.
It’s possible to imagine young right-wingers calling for ‘remigration’ – mandatory repatriation – but this is the old cause of the British far right.
However, it won’t go down well with most of the public, who are more diverse than ever.
Nigel Farage understands that Reform’s success is due to alienated Tories. However, migrating them to nationalist politics will take a bit more work.
No Peace In Sight
Unsurprisingly, 47% of Conservative voters want the Tories to merge with Reform, and just 48% oppose this idea.
Such a merger may be a fantasy unless the situation gets more desperate in the next few years.
Whoever takes over, the next Tory leadership is likely to pivot rightwards deep into the Great British culture wars.
Most Conservatives still want to rebuild their party, and competing with Reform is the key to power.
So we expect the Tories to outflank Reform and Labour to try to triangulate both parties.
The result will be that Labour looks unconvincing and craven, while Reform seems right on immigration and cultural issues.
This logic of triangulation could pull all three parties closer together.
Many voters will conclude staying home is better than supporting Labour over the Tories or Reform.
It’s not certain that Reform would even go for a merger.
Farage is unlikely to play ball with any Tory leader for now. More importantly, Reform is not a mass political party in any sense.
It’s a start-up media company with no formal membership.
People can file to become supporters, and the party has consulted supporters by email on policy, but it’s very much a top-down structure controlled by one man.
The Tories will likely seek to claw back the votes lost to Reform and re-energise the right-wing voters who stayed out of the general election.
It’s a steep hill to climb in just five years, but this was true of Labour after 2019.
The long game is unclear: Reform could still play kingmaker in a future election, even if the Tories can reclaim their voters.
Would Farage oppose a pact with a resurgent Conservative Party? He made a grubby deal with Boris in 2019, after all.
It’s also true that the Tories have often had to rely on more marginal right-wing parties to wield power. These are usually the Ulster Unionist parties, the UUP, or the DUP.
But it could be Reform in the future.
“You can always do a deal with an Ulsterman,” Ken Clarke reflected in 2010. “But it’s not the way to run a modern, sophisticated society.”
Maybe the British right has just found the substitute: Ulsterman in the form of Middle England radicals.
The great illusion of UK politics is that ‘Middle England’ is a synonym for moderation.
These are the people who want small government and low taxes but also massive state intervention to stop immigration and save us from the Great Replacement.
They fear low birth rates among whites and high immigration will be the demise of ‘our people’.
Brexit was just the beginning of a long battle for the kind of country Britain should be.
The coalition of voters who backed Leave and gave us the last Tory government is still out there.
Let’s hope it never returns.
Photograph courtesy of Gavin Lynn. Published under a Creative Commons license.
