Reform UK threatens to topple the Tory stronghold: Rosa Prince

Key topics:Tory support declines as Reform UK gains ground in polls and council seatsConference attendance drops, signalling party's waning influence and relevanceInternal rifts over leadership, Farage pact, and party’s future strategy.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 Rosa Prince.Just as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement carried out a hostile takeover of the US Republican Party a decade ago, the UK’s Conservatives are watching as the new firm next door pitches policies to voters that are shinier and claim to cost half as much. Nigel Farage’s upstart populist Reform UK party is driving the Tories out of business.The Conservative party’s growing irrelevance was writ large at this week’s annual conference, held this year in the northern city of Manchester — where not a single Tory MP won a seat at last year’s general election. Attendance was sparse, with gaping spaces among the audience for speeches by some of its most senior figures including Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride. Following the party’s drubbing at last year’s vote, some 3,700 activists were loyal enough to turn up to conference; this week, there were only 3,300, and it felt like genuine delegates were outnumbered by the journalists and corporate lobbyists paid to be there.The cavernous exhibition hall, where attendees wandered lonely as clouds in a space they recently packed like sardines, featured tributes to the lost leader Margaret Thatcher, but no photos of her current successor, Kemi Badenoch..Read more:.FT: Farage shakes up UK politics as Reform topples Tory and Labour strongholds.For those used to regarding the Conservatives as the dominant force in British politics, it was an unsettling sight: Like a beloved but neglected department store preparing a final reductions sale before shuttering for good, a party that’s existed for nearly 200 years and been in government for all but 37 of the last 100 felt in inexorable decline.Perhaps a more apt comparison is not the US Republicans but France’s Gaullists, currently Les Républicains, squeezed to a shadow of their former selves by Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance and the Rassemblement National on the right. Current polls have the Tories sharing third spot with the Liberal Democrats on 17% of the vote, behind Reform with 27% and the governing Labour Party in second on 20%.The only flicker of excitement at conference came with the arrival in the hall or at an event of Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary who Badenoch beat to the leadership last year and who clearly fancies another run at the top job. Of the many who seek to succeed Badenoch should she be toppled, Jenrick is publicly the most open to some kind of pact with Reform — a suggestion his leader flatly rejects.These were the conversations absorbing Tories chattering over drinks they once queued four or five deep at the conference bars to purchase but could now order with ease. As the party falls down around their ears, should they jump ship to Reform, seek some kind of accommodation with Farage — or just give up and go home? Continuing a steady drumbeat of defections since the summer, Reform announced its capture of another 20 Tory councillors on Tuesday, the eve of Badenoch’s keynote closing speech to conference.A YouGov poll of Tory members released Monday showed 50% don’t want Badenoch to lead the party into the next election, with 34% saying they would be better off with Farage — head of a rival party, don’t forget. Remarkably, 64% of Tory members favour an electoral pact in which candidates would stand aside for each other, and 46% want a full merger with Reform.The problem for these Conservatives is that there’s nothing currently for Reform to gain from a deal — why defer to people the polls suggest they can beat easily? Given the strength of Farage and his entourage, a merger would resemble the Republicans’ MAGA takeover; the Conservatives would simply cease to exist. Despite this, the YouGov poll found 94% of members would support helping Farage into 10 Downing Street over Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the event of a hung parliament requiring a coalition government. This may be psychologically understandable — of course the Tories disdain Starmer and his policies — but would be tactically disastrous, the final nail in the Conservative coffin.So is it all over, or is there anything the Conservatives can do to pull themselves out of the doldrums? Six months ago, I argued Badenoch should tack to the center, pick up voters turned off by Reform’s more far-right rhetoric and hammer Labour over its economic incompetence. She did the opposite, abandoning the centre for policies Reform already owns, including withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights and rowing back climate-change commitments. The all-too predictable result is that voters with concerns about immigration are flocking to Reform, while the Lib Dems hoover up those switched off by the shift to the right.Meanwhile, Tory attacks on Labour competence and economic credibility continue to ring hollow, as do Badenoch’s reversal of a self-denying ordinance not to announce new policy, given the Conservatives’ recent record in government. On Monday, as Stride made a case for cutting welfare bills, it was impossible not to recall that, until last summer, he was running the welfare department that oversaw the surge in benefits he now condemns..Read more:.Farage's Reform Party, not the Tories, is Starmer’s real opposition: Adrian Wooldridge.At conference, even true believers had little positive to offer — beyond wishful thinking that an economic crisis will topple Labour prematurely or some scandal will snuff out Farage. Maybe. But if the wishes don’t come true, the Conservatives may be forced to shut up shop for good..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Reform UK threatens to topple the Tory stronghold: Rosa Prince

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