Labour will ‘destabilise’ Reform, Badenoch warns

Election day is just around the corner and politicians across the country are pulling out the stops. Now Kemi Badenoch has taken to the fine pages of the Telegraph to urge voters not to back Reform – after new analysis splashed across today’s papers (detailed by Katy here) suggests that 130,000 voters across 100 seats could result in a very different election outcome.

The Business Secretary has opined on the threat posed by an incoming Labour government – which she suggests is Reform’s favoured outcome. ‘Reform leaders have been clear about their aim in this general election,’ Badenoch writes. ‘Not to win it, but to ensure that the Conservatives lose so badly that the party cannot recover.’ In a piece that is not altogether unfriendly towards Nigel Farage, the Conservative candidate for North West Essex warns Reform’s leader:

I don’t know Nigel Farage personally, but like him I know what it is like to be targeted by a disdainful establishment and their luvvie friends. When he was ‘debanked’ by NatWest, it was Conservative ministers like Andrew Griffith and I who intervened and worked quietly behind the scenes to put right that injustice. Labour would not have lifted a finger.

But what will happen if the leaders of Reform get their wish? For a start, just imagine what Labour would have done if it had been in power when the banks started taking away their accounts? What fate awaits Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and their colleagues if they preside over a great thinning of the conservative ranks? I can tell them now. Endless harassment. Impotence. And the slow destruction of all they claim to hold dear. With no serious opposition, the Labour MPs I have watched for seven years would use all the might of the state to destabilise and marginalise organisations like Reform and anyone anywhere close to it…

The people who would suffer most are the people who Reform claims to stand up for – the overlooked and undervalued decent and conservative majority of this country. But that majority will be left defenceless by Reform if it gets its wish and gifts Labour a super-majority.

Strong stuff. Acknowledging there may be ‘unhappiness at what this government has left undone’, Badenoch attempts to woo Reform voters, writing that ‘many good people may be tempted to vote Reform because they share that sense of disappointment and frustration’. The Business Secretary admits that Reform ‘may be correct in identifying what is wrong’ with Britain but concludes a vote for the Farage-founded party will ‘let Labour in’. Slamming Starmer’s army, Badenoch criticises its plans to scrap the Rwanda scheme before turning to its treatment of gender-critical women like Rosie Duffield. The senior Tory then suggests Sir Keir will reverse Brexit and ‘replicate the rules of the single market by stealth’ before concluding: ‘The Commons will be a very cold house for the two or three Reform MPs that you get in exchange for 150 Conservative ones.’ Oo er. Talk about all guns blazing…

Recent MRP polls have suggested the Conservatives could end up with less than 100 seats on 5 July, while another survey suggested Reform could beat the Tories on vote share. The latest YouGov polling suggests over 800,000 voters in the 100 tightest seats could back Farage’s party on Thursday, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would need just under half of these people to back him to deprive Starmer’s party of a majority. Will Badenoch’s eleventh-hour warnings be enough to sway potential Reform voters? Watch this space…