The Conservative Party’s most effective communicator, with the clearest diagnosis of how the party and the country have gone wrong, has defected. Cue the usual suspects crawling out of their caves to say now is the moment to bring the party back to the old uniparty centre, ending the insurgency of the nutters once and for all.
They gave this a go back in 2023 when the One Nation dinosaurs were briefly jubilant at the return of Lord Cameron to Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet. Lord Hague declared the Vote Leave occupation of the Tory Party officially over, while Osborneites rolled up their sleeves as they prepared to pursue the sub-15 per cent electoral strategy of their Cotswoldian dreams. The moment came, and passed. Sunak ultimately led the party to its heaviest defeat — but among the many reasons for this, failure to return the party to Cameroon blancmange was not one of them.
The latest Tories to have confused being natural Lib Dems with being “politically homeless” are Andy Street, Ruth Davidson and their colleagues in the new “centre-right” movement Prosper. It looks, sounds and smells like Change UK for 2026.
Emotions are running high, and it’s tempting for Tories to pursue a knee-jerk reaction against everything Jenrick stood for. But viewing his departure as an opportunity to move the party back into the comfort zone of the ancien regime is a profound and innumerate mistake, just as the brief attempt to return the party to its pre-Brexit platform was some three years ago. The advocate-general of this Legitimiste fantasy is of course Matthew Parris, who I don’t believe has ever cited a poll in his life. Forget controlling the border, standing up to extremism, challenging human rights law overreach or championing major economic reform. The future of the party lies with Dominic Grieve, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine and David Gauke, no less, he claims. A comedian could scarcely craft a more perfect list.
The idea that there is a “One Nation” voter bloc out there just waiting to sweep the party back to power is simply numerically untrue
It cannot be stated enough that Reform represents the most serious, existential threat to the Conservatives in its modern history. At the last election it captured nearly a quarter of its 2019 vote share, compared to just 7 per cent going to the Liberal Democrats. This did not convert into many seats — but that’s due to our first past the post system. Quite literally hundreds of Conservative seats fell to the nearest challenger precisely because of the Reform vote. In contrast, Labour barely increased its vote share in most marginal constituencies at all. Sir Ed Davey managed to bag 100,000 fewer votes than his woeful predecessor, Jo Swinson.
The idea that there is a “One Nation” voter bloc out there just waiting to sweep the party back to power is simply numerically untrue. Looking back at the record, this kind of offer failed to win a majority even after 13 years of Blairism in 2010, and was barely able to defeat Ed Miliband in 2015, while the UKIP popular vote surged. Anti-Brexit Tories, often of the more affluent kind, abandoned the party in 2017 and 2019 and there is no evidence that they would consider coming back. But there are not many more of them to lose, either — the pollster Sir John Curtis claims the Liberal Democrats have squeezed the vote on their right flank as much as possible already.
Some within the Tory Party are already reverse ferreting to the mood that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 defeat — that the party had abandoned the centre, ignored its affluent base, leaned too heavily into Brexit and immigration and that now is the time for the Sensibles. There is an important mistake at the heart of this tendency, which is to mistake the smart, Lib Dem-facing Home Counties as their heartlands. This is to ignore the bluest parts of the country that are now due to be lost — Essex, Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk, wider East Anglia and the rural Midlands. Reform is now polling over 40 per cent in seats like North East Cambridgeshire and South West Norfolk. With Nigel Farage’s party projected to win the previously ultra-safe Weald of Kent, the idea that the Tories have become “too much like Reform” is truly baffling.
Conservative voters are flocking to Reform because Farage promises to act on their priorities, which, in Government, the Tories neglected. Controlling and reducing immigration, restoring order to increasingly lawless towns and cities, combating extremism and malignant cultural drift, lowering energy bills and cutting the burden of tax. Yet the old meme of pitching to “fiscally conservative, culturally liberal” voters simply will not die. The pollster James Johnson estimates this as only 15 per cent of voters; previous work by Onward found this to be even lower, perhaps just 5 per cent.
Attacking Reform and emphasising divides is also a foolhardy approach for Kemi Badenoch. Why would you seek to insult the intelligence of your biggest defector group — the precise cohort you desperately need to win back? Even if persuading Reform defectors to come back is not enough to rebuild the Tory base, this task certainly can’t be done without them. There are simply too many of them, and not enough other places to find new supporters. Stressing greater competence and more detailed plans makes sense. Tory has-beens like Robert Buckland calling Reform’s newest star hire “Enoch Powell” does not. And the painfully cringeworthy allegation that “Farage is a socialist” is the kind of political message that will resonate only with about 20 A-level politics students with a nerdish interest in Conservative economic history.
From the economy and energy bills to the border, rule by judges and the European Convention on Human Rights, much of the headline Reform diagnosis is right. These are things the Conservatives should have properly addressed in government and must commit seriously to now. Any indication they are less serious than Reform about fixing Britain — or broadcasting a belief that it doesn’t need fixing — would be catastrophic.
Right now, Reform lacks detailed answers to those questions. But with the passage of time they may find them. And they may get there before the Conservatives if they spend the coming weeks debating a pivot back to a parliamentary centre ground which — for the country — is nothing of the sort.
