Nigel Farage knows the Tories are there for the taking

The one thing that had gone right for Rishi Sunak in the election campaign to date has now gone wrong.

Nigel Farage has been so energised by the first ten days of the election that he has taken back the leadership of the Reform party and decided to stand for parliament in Clacton after all.

Tory staffers who had expected to be running a ‘Stop Farage’ operation but were then stood down will now have to be stood back up again.

Farage has discerned that this time round, the Tories are truly there for the taking. They have drifted so far from their base on immigration, taxation, crime and net zero as to ignite white hot hostility among parts of it. They are also so far behind Labour that the traditional squeeze message that voting for a Farage vehicle will risk putting socialists into power has lost its potency. 

Rishi Sunak’s catastrophic November reshuffle – in which he sacked Suella Braverman as Home Secretary and made David Cameron Foreign Secretary – was the moment he made everything possible for Farage.

Reform’s poll ratings increased, and Farage himself began to actively ponder and scope out a frontline political comeback. Perhaps the electorate would take against an ordinary political mortal who had messed it around about standing or not standing in this contest. But Farage is one of those figures who makes his own rules and U-turns are very much allowed.

Sunak’s battered and demoralised inner circle must now find a way to de-fang Farage inside a month, having not made the usual preparations to fight him. They will know that the blanket media coverage of today’s gambit and the sheer excitement it brings to a drab contest is bound to create an initial Reform bounce too. Were there to be polls in the next ten days showing Reform very close to level-pegging with the Conservatives, it would come as no great surprise. Are there enough grizzled veterans left in the Tory machine to hold it together, were that to transpire? One has one’s doubts.

Who does Sunak have that can compete with Farage for the parts of the right-wing electorate that the PM struggles to reach? Around the cabinet table, only Kemi Badenoch knows how to play any of the tunes and she does not yet have a wide following in the country. On the backbenches, the likes of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have made their disappointment with Sunak all too clear. 

Outside parliament, a certain blonde bombshell may be persuaded to interrupt his lucrative ventures on the international speaking circuit to make a couple of ‘ra-ra for Rishi’ contributions. But his price will be high and most of us will know he is joking. It’s all opening up for Nigel now.