Reform UK topping the opinion polls and winning local council elections has prompted several leading Tories to defect. But now Nigel Farage’s insurgent party is riding so high that it is getting choosy about which Conservatives it will accept into its swelling ranks.
If too many Tories join Reform they will begin to look like a convenient vehicle for rats leaving the sinking Tory ship
Sources in the party have told the Mail on Sunday that it would spurn any attempt to defect by former Prime Minister Liz Truss or former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, as both are so unpopular that they would ‘damage Reform’s public image’. Reform leader Nigel Farage confirmed that any approach by the two women would cause a heated debate in his party over the wisdom of admitting them.
Truss became prime minister in September 2022 after being chosen by Tory party members over Rishi Sunak, following the resignation of Boris Johnson. But she was forced to quit herself after just 45 days in No. 10 when world markets reacted negatively to a tax cutting and borrowing budget from her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, causing financial chaos. She was speedily replaced by Sunak.
Truss lost her Norfolk seat in the Tory rout in last year’s general election, but Braverman is still MP for Fareham in Hampshire. Both have been considered possible future recruits for Reform, especially after Braverman’s businessman husband Rael joined the insurgent party in December. It is a measure of Reform’s current confidence – or arrogance – that it feels able to reject such senior figures should they contemplate crossing the floor.
Last week, it was revealed that former Tory party chairman Sir Jake Berry and former Welsh Secretary Sir David Jones had quit the Tories and joined Reform, becoming the fourth and fifth former MPs to have done so since the election. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch reacted angrily to the defections by saying that the pair had never been real Conservatives anyway.
Reform has been topping the opinion polls for months, pushing the Tories into a humiliating third place behind Labour. And the party is winning real elections too. They took control of ten local authorities in May, and in the ten council by-elections held last week, Reform won four and came second in another five.
But the spate of Tory defections carries a danger for the populist party: if too many Tories join them they will begin to look like the old Conservatives dressed in new clothes, and become a convenient vehicle for rats leaving the sinking Tory ship who are seeking an easy way of rejoining the Westminster gravy train.
Reform’s entire USP is that they are not Tories or Labour. They may be untried and untested, but they claim to offer a real alternative to the two old parties who have failed Britain so dismally in government. While recruiting seasoned professional politicians like Berry and Jones adds welcome weight and experience to the party, it also risks tainting Reform with the failures of the past.
Critics of Sir Jake’s defection, for example, pointed out that as a stalwart Remainer during the Brexit referendum and a staunch supporter of net-zero policies, he was hardly a natural fit for the Brexiteer populists he has joined. Berry’s old colleagues accuse him of unprincipled opportunism in signing up to Reform.
Nigel Farage’s successful strategy has been to target Labour leaning working-class voters in the red wall areas of the north, Midlands and Wales, so he must be very careful not to alienate such people by looking like the Tories who they have so firmly rejected. Disillusioned voters are looking for a real fresh and new alternative – not old wine in new bottles.
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