Back in the limelight

Today’s the day you’ve all been waiting for. The Nick Dixon interview with yours truly. In other news, though, former Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, has claimed the throne of the Reform party, perhaps giving it a new lease of life - just when I’d written its epitaph. A week most certainly is a long time in politics.

It’s difficult to say what effect this will have in what’s turning out to be a wildly unpredictable election, but it certainly seems to have enthused many on the right who were far from impressed by the efforts of Richard Tice.

My feeling is that Farage has left it far too late in the game. Reform should have been building over the last few years but instead it's been left with just the pilot light flickering. Consequently, it has no ground operation to speak of that can mobilise at short notice. Farage may struggle to mount an effective local campaign in Clacton and, traditionally, voters don’t like opportunistic carpetbaggers.

Reform should have been working a long term plan to threaten Tories to the extent that those in danger of losing their seats would fare better by defecting to Reform, but Reform just isn’t making a big enough dent in the polls to leverage defections, and was never going to under Tice.

If that plan was going to work, we'd already have seen a few high profile defections. That could, in theory, have resulted in a few Reform MPs which would have created the basis for a merger between them and what's left of the Tory right, only now there's going to be no Reform MPs and a Tory right that's probably reduced to handful, who are better off staying put.

As such, Farage is not in a position to leverage any deals. The sum total of Farage's return will be to whittle Tory numbers down even further, handing Keir Starmer a super majority in the process. From there, it’s difficult to see what further use Reform can be. It’s even more difficult to see how we’re in any way better off. Destroying is the easy bit, which everyone seems up for. Nobody seems interested in thinking about the next step.

The return of Farage makes Reform into a wrecking ball for sure, but given the Tory determination to self-immolate, I'm not sure it's needed. Either way, there is still no party with a coherent ethos, vision or policies to take us forward. It was unlikely Reform was going to be that party, but it's especially unlikely now. Nobody has a greater aversion to detail than Nigel Farage. With that in mind, today’s developments change little. If we want a genuine conservative party we’re going to have to shape it ourselves. It’s still the only way forward.

Of course, I’m not entirely blind to my own biases. I do not like populism and I do not like Nigel Farage. It’s conceivable that Reform could surprise us, as many are predicting, but my hunch is that Farage doesn’t have quite the same pull the right wing bubble on Twitter thinks he does. The media is overrating his impact while completely ignoring the potentially more impactful divisions on the left.

I also keep in mind that Ukip had far more momentum at peak, and an active grassroots. Reform has neither. A last minute spark of energy doesn’t give the party time to get organised. And for all that Ukip seemed unstoppable to the experts such as Matthew Goodwin, Ukip failed to score a single MP.

I suppose it all rests on how much the Tory party is hated and whether voters hate the Tories more than they fear a Starmer government. I think voter turnout will be higher than we've been anticipating. The danger Labour poses will focus minds closer to polling day. By an accident of numbers, though, Reform could pull of a surprise or two.

From there, the threat of Reform could may influence the Tory party’s next moves, but that’s very much contingent on who is left standing. With Reform even going after the better Tory MPs, Reform MPs could be sitting by themselves the whole time.

The danger here is that is that Reform are far too easily plactated. That’s what happens when you trade in lightweight populist tropes. During Farage’s last go around, he made the “points based immigration” trope his central theme instead of calling for more far-reaching and detailed policies. He was easily mollified and far too quick to claim “mission accomplished”.

This is the basis of my aversion to populism. It’s lazy and simplistic, and always incompetent. We need more than just policy tweaks. We need a complete overhaul of governance and an ambitious reform agenda. Something Reform never bothered to develop. They have no agenda to push, no policies to promote, and will squander yet another opportunity for real change.

In politics, I always bet on our own side screwing it up. It's the safest bet there is. We've had a referendum and a major election where the right was led by a populist blowhard with no grasp of policy. Both victories turned to ash. Why should we expect different results this time?