If Reform win a by-election on their own incompetence, a Tory leadership election beckons
Parliament Square wonders if a by-election comes in South Basildon and East Thurrock whether it’ll be the thing that finally changes British politics? James McMurdock was always a bit of an accidental Reform MP, and has done the reputation of Essex man no great favours. But with the news that even he doesn’t see himself coming back to Reform the way is free for Nigel Farage to select a candidate he’s presumably heard of and then winning any vacancy which crops up.
Reform’s bad luck in not triggering the six-strong threshold needed to qualify for Short Money was one thing. Nigel Farage’s ability to lose MPs just the way the cynics said he inevitably would was another. But the fact of British life this summer hasn’t been Reform’s poll leads over the Tories of frequently two to one, with Badenoch’s dismal “strong third” place over the Lib Dems looking like a very poor fourth place in terms of the seats which would be won. The real story is that the Tories haven’t panicked, yet.
All the reasons for the Conservatives holding their nerve, as Badenoch loyalists would see it, are obvious: there’s no general election for four years: the Tories have more than a hundred MPs, whereas Farage fails to hold onto five: Reform have to go on holding a lead while being able to do very little to justify it. It’s Micawberism for the world’s most successful political party therefore: something will surely turn up?
But what if the thing that turns up is a by-election in McMurdock’s seat, in totemic Thatcherite Essex of all places, where Reform wins, however badly they have cocked things up? With Badenoch’s candidate, whoever that unlucky person taking a shufti over Basildon is, faring truly disastrously?
Tory MPs wouldn’t win the plaudits for nerveless complacency they do if they hadn’t been able to take the worst result in their party’s history in their stride last year. But the claim that Kemi Badenoch’s leadership has been a disaster, with the party heading backwards on all metrics, save for Dom Johnson’s superlative fundraising, would become very much a fact with Matt Goodwin, MP. Or whichever treat Nigel Farage serves up and wins with, in what should be the unlikeliest of terrains: a self-inflicted by-election.
Watch this space: if Farage wins in Basildon, the holding pattern the parties are in will be over. And Kemi Badenoch’s leadership will follow soon thereafter. She cannot afford to lose this seat.
