Farage's Reform Party, not the Tories, is Starmer’s real opposition: Adrian Wooldridge

Key topics:Reform overtakes Tories as main opposition to LabourFarage positions party as government-in-waitingPolls show potential collapse of Conservative dominance.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Adrian Wooldridge.One of the great merits of the British political system is that it usually produces clear-cut results: Last July 4, the Labour Party beat the Conservatives into second place with 411 seats to 121. But today something more subtle is happening: Reform is replacing the Conservatives as the effective party of opposition. British politics is now, at its heart, a struggle between Labour’s Keir Starmer and Reform’s Nigel Farage, with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch a mere bystander.A recent poll from Find Out Now puts Reform’s support at 33% — comfortably ahead of Labour on 18% and the Tories on 17%. There is nothing new about this: Reform has been consistently ahead in the polls since the local elections in May. But what is new is the way that Reform is acting as a government-in-waiting, unveiling policies on a range of subjects focusing on crime and immigration but extending to tariffs and taxes. And Farage is acting more like a serious politician than a mere gadfly. Never has a party with just four seats in parliament wielded such might.The transition to the big leagues is not smooth. It only took a day of outrage before Reform backed down over the most controversial measure announced in what it termed Operation Restoring Justice, deporting women and children. Farage’s Cheeky Chappy persona keeps breaking through his new serious mask. But Labour has spent the last few days talking about Farage’s plans nonstop, with nary a mention of the Conservative leader.There is a some opportunism in Labour’s decision to treat Reform rather than the Conservatives as the opposition. Given Labour’s dismal record, its best chance of winning the next election is to define itself as the best defense against barbarism. But there is also genuine fear. A survey by ElectionMaps, which uses constituency-by-constituency polling rather than nationwide surveys, and which came closest, along with YouGuv, to accurately predicting the result of the last election, puts Reform at 339 seats, Labour on 112, the Lib Dems on 77 and the Tories on just 35 seats. This would see Reform take the scalps of such senior Labour figures as Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner, John Healey, Dan Jarvis, and Liam Byrne. Labour’s big beasts are treating Reform as the main opposition because they fear for their careers..Read more:.FT: Farage shakes up UK politics as Reform topples Tory and Labour strongholds.Does it make sense to speculate about political realignment four years before the next election? Badenoch’s supporters suggest that she is biding her time before putting her foot on the accelerator. Why hector the electorate a year after it has told you to shut up? And political commentators note that there is a long history of premature obituaries of the Tory Party: Geoffrey Wheatcroft published The Strange Death of Tory England in 2005 only to see the party enjoy one of its longest periods in power, from 2010 to 2024. Britain’s first-past-the post voting is very good at destroying challengers and keeping Britain’s Conservative-Labour duopoly in power. In the 1980s, the Social Democratic Party promised to break the mould only to collapse into spite and acrimony.Yet there is precedent for insurgents breaking through. In 1906, the Liberal Party had 380 MPs, 80 more than the other parties combined, and a lively reform agenda. By 1924, only 40 Liberal seats remained, and Labour had become the other side in the duopoly club.There are striking similarities between the Liberals’ agonies back then and the Conservatives' today. The Liberals found it difficult to compete with Labour in speaking the language of working-class voters, just as the Conservatives find it difficult to compete with Reform in speaking the language of populist fury. The Liberals were also consumed by internecine quarrels and the personal foibles of their leaders, particularly Lloyd George, the charismatic outsider who led the party to destruction. Beaverbrook accused him of not caring where the car was going so long as he was driving; Baldwin accused him of having a “morally disintegrating effect” on anybody he touched, and A.G. Sylvester, his private secretary, said that he might have been a better leader if he had “given his mind to thinking” about the country rather than sex.The current power structure has shallow roots. Labour won the last election with just 34% of the vote, the lowest vote with which it has ever won an election and the lowest with which it has formed a government since 1923. Parties have been hemourrhaging members for decades: Badenoch’s Tories have just 172,000 members compared with 3 million in the 1950s. And the political system is fragmenting, with Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana setting up a new left-wing party, which pollsters suggest could take between 10% and 15% of Labour’s vote, and a range of other parties, from the Greens to the Liberal Democrats to Palestinian splinter groups, putting down deeper roots. Such fragmentation is mana for a Marmite politician such as Farage who, at best, only appeals to 30% of the population.And the Western electorate is increasingly willing to experiment with radical alternatives to the status quo. This is partly because the internet has trained it to expect instant gratification: Having got sick of the Tories by 2024, the voters are now equally sick of Labour and willing to try a new brand. But it is above all because they think that the establishment deserves a good kicking.Angry voters probably recognise that Farage is a single-issue candidate, and that his emerging position papers fail to paper over the cracks between his Thatcherite instincts and his newfound enthusiasm for state activism. But there is widespread recognition that the current asylum system, particularly its reliance on housing migrants in hotels, is imposing unsustainable fiscal and human costs, with the government promising to end the hotel system during its period in office even as it goes to the Court of Appeals to keep the Bell Hotel in Epping as an asylum center. But even if the government can bring the refugee problem under control — and two party grandees, David Blunkett and Jack Straw, have urged the government to decouple Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights — that will still leave a widespread feeling that the establishment engineered a radical change in the composition of the population without a proper sense of the economic or cultural costs.Perhaps “Nigel is peaking too soon,” as Britain’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, told JD Vance when the vice president asked him to explain what was going on in British politics. There is a difference between having a fling and choosing a government. Perhaps Farage’s policies will collapse under scrutiny, and his party will be exposed as a menagerie of fruitcakes and nutters. Perhaps the Conservatives — a party which has been in business, in one form or another, for more than 200 years — will reveal that it has hidden strengths. But as Reform goes into its annual conference in Birmingham on Sept. 5-6, the momentum lies with the insurgents. Farage is not just Britain’s chief political weather maker, a job that he has had for years, but its prime minister-in-waiting..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Farage's Reform Party, not the Tories, is Starmer’s real opposition: Adrian Wooldridge

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