A sense of Ukip déjà vu

I haven’t been making many friends over the last day or two. It’s been noted that I am not a fan of Nigel Farage and I am not swooning with Farage fever. As with Brexit, I’m supposed to toe the line and refrain from any negativity. That’s not going to happen.

I do recognise the validity of the argument that the Tory party needs to be destroyed. In many ways I am far less sympathetic to the party in that there isn’t much from the Tory right I would salvage after the wets have been purged. I don’t regard free market radicals and “fwee twade” fundamentalists as conservative. I will be quietly pleased if the so-called PopCons are booted out.

The problem with creative destruction, though, is that without a plan, it’s just destruction. There’s no guarantee what replaces the Tory party would be better. Admittedly, it would struggle to be worse, but we are no further forward if the Tories are replaced with an incompetent populist party. i.e. Reform.

The issue with Reform is that it can never be a serious party. It will only ever be a cult of personality. That may have its short term uses, but eventually you have to get serious, which Reform is singularly incapable of being. It might have been possible under Ben Habib, but not with when you have a bull-in-the-china-shop like Farage.

It’s certainly true that Farage has some considerable leverage if Reform polls well, but that leverage is wasted if you’re not promoting specific policies and agendas - but Reform didn’t do policy before, and it’s not going to start now.

In any case, the best policy work in the world is useless if the leadership doesn't take the time to learn it and promote it. When policy is whatever the whim of the leader is, dependent entirely on what side of the bed he got out of, you simply cannot run a focussed campaign. Especially not with the leadership undermining your manifesto in every TV interview, and having to constantly go into damage control mode.

As such, it is not worth anyone's energy trying to develop Reform or improve it. Farage simply doesn't have the depth or the attention span to stay on message. The most you'll ever get out of Reform is empty soundbites and tropes.

The other problem is that Farage is angling for Tory defections. That, in all probability, means accepting some of the dross who are only hanging on by the skin of their teeth. With the party having no intellectual foundation, they’ll end up with PopCons and Thatcherites who are already damaged goods in the eyes of the electorate.

At that point, there’s no reason to believe the party would be any more electable than Ukip at peak. Though the Tory wets are a problem, a distilled Tory right under Farage pretty soon starts to look like a crank party, and about as amateurish as the Ukip of yore.

The right is absolutely convinced that a pure-bred party of the right under Farage will romp home to victory but that’s an awfully big assumption. The rump Tory party will just about stay in the game, and will probably recover some ground, ensuring neither party gets near power.

In any case, I think the right is getting a little ahead of itself. There is good reason to doubt the size of Labour’s landslide as MRP polling isn’t picking up on local signals, and I just have a gut feeling that Starmer hasn’t won the country over. It’s also not a certainty Farage will win in Clacton, and even if he does, the most optimistic polling puts Refrom on two to three seats which is hardly the basis for a palace coup.

It’s entirely possible that I’m completely out of touch and that Reform really is poised for a breakthrough, but I remember well the cock-of the-walk vibe among Ukippers in 2015, only to end up with egg on their faces. I doubt they’ve learned anything since.

Ultimately Reform’s fate rests on whether Tory voters hate Sunak more than they fear a Labour government. Many have yet to make up their minds and even some of the most ardent anti-Sunak voices are cautious about letting Labour rip. This is a conflict between head and heart. It’s hard to say which will win out.