Most dads will have been on a beach holiday where they helped their children build a sandcastle near the water’s edge and then waited for the tide to overrun it.
Sometimes there are false alarms, when a rogue wave comes in a bit further than expected but then its successors return to the holding pattern and the castle stands proud and safe a while longer.
Up until now this has also been true of the threat posed to Tory fortunes by Reform UK, the successor to the Brexit party, currently led by the property developer and broadcaster Richard Tice.
Has a Reform tide started lapping up against the walls of the Tory fortress?
Tice’s outfit has bumbled along on 3 or 4 per cent, occasionally notching up a 5 or even a 6 during a bout of Tory self-immolation. It is helped as well by the fact that many opinion pollsters include it on a list of parties that voters can select when asked about their vote – a position it inherited from the Brexit party, and which most minor political parties do not have.
Conventional wisdom has held it that Tice is wasting his time. Lacking the campaigning charisma of Nigel Farage, or the latter’s well-honed instinct for the issues that capture the imagination of voters on the populist right, he seemed to be leading a band that would merely flatter to deceive. It would serve as a flag-bearer for small-state economics and scepticism on carbon net zero, but end up being squeezed down to nothing come general election time when voters choose between the big parties.
That may still prove to be true (though Tice’s recent embrace of the issue of illegal immigration has belatedly pointed him in the direction of the biggest potential source of votes). But a new opinion poll suggests the contrary may also be the case: that a discernible Reform tide has started lapping up against the walls of the Tory fortress.
The survey, by British Polling Council member People Polling, puts Reform on 8 per cent, just one point behind the Lib Dems. The Conservatives are meanwhile marooned on 21 per cent, with Labour miles ahead on 42 per cent. Inspection of the detailed data shows Reform scoring 11 per cent with male voters and 17 per cent among people who voted Leave in 2016.
This is potentially disastrous for the Conservatives, especially in the red wall seats they won in 2019. It also suggests that the very modest polling bounce they got when Rishi Sunak took over from Liz Truss was of the dead cat variety.
Sunak appears to have settled far too easily into a conventional centrist mode of government – all smart suits, back-slapping with overseas counterparts and carefully calibrated language on emotive issues – at a time when various elements of the Tory tribe are ravenous for red meat.
Tax-cutting Thatcherites are deeply unhappy about his apparent determination to over-correct the rash course set so briefly by Truss. Social conservatives look askance at the transformation of large chunks of the British hotel industry into taxpayer-funded accommodation for illegal immigrants and wonder where Sunak’s zeal is for tackling this. Seeing him swanking round COP27, tacitly accepting the ideology of climate reparations rather than speaking up for the British geniuses of the industrial revolution only adds insult to injury.
So there are an array of issues on which many Tory voters are looking for an outspoken alternative to the right of their party’s leadership. Tice and Reform really don’t have to do very much to be the obvious recourse for such protest voters. We are at a moment when just a general realisation that they exist and sometimes espouse ideas more to the taste of the Tory base is enough to boost their ratings.
And the higher they score, the more people will get to hear about them. Should Farage himself decide to commit to UK politics again and take up the reins at Reform, then it is not hard to envisage 15 or even 20 per cent vote shares being recorded.
The waning political fortunes of Donald Trump – which may well lead to Trump missing out on becoming Republican nominee for President – surely make Farage refocusing on the UK political scene more likely too.
In his absence, Tice has been quietly working away on the fundamentals of a strong general election campaign, in particular getting hundreds of candidates in place and guaranteeing them that this time there will be no last-minute deals to stand them down for any Tories.
The conventional argument deployed by the Conservatives to quell uprisings on their right – that voting for them will let in Labour – has lost its teeth. Far too many disenchanted former Tories these days look across from Conservative to Labour and back and simply can’t tell the difference between them. Rishi Sunak better watch out.
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