Back in July I wrote in these pages that if too many Tories joined Reform, Nigel Farage’s party would risk looking like a rescue raft for rats leaving the sinking Conservative ship.
Since then, the trend for repentant or redundant Tories to desert their old party – so comprehensively rejected by the voters – and flee to the rising Reform rebels has only accelerated. Recent Reform recruits include the former Conservative party chairman Jake Berry, former Tory Welsh secretary David Jones, and senior former Tory MP Adam Holloway.
Ex-Tory minister Dame Andrea Jenkyns is now Reform’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, and Reform’s latest MP, Sarah Pochin, who won the Runcorn by-election in May, is also a former Conservative councillor. The whole process was capped this week when another well-known female Tory politician, Nadine Dorries, joined her old colleague Ann Widdecombe in Reform.
North of the border, Reform have also been making inroads into the ranks of the Scottish Tories. Last month, Reform acquired their first MSP when Tory Graham Simpson and a number of Tory local councillors defected to Farage’s insurgents.
So, is Nigel Farage’s vaunted ‘new’ party really just a retirement sunset home for old Tories? And if they notice this, will the masses of working-class people in the north and Midlands who used to support Labour and now form the bedrock of Reform’s voter base, and who have never voted Tory, desert Nigel and write Reform off as just a bunch of old Conservatives dressed in new clothes?
To counter this danger, and prove that they are more than another right-wing group who only care about the interests of the rich and the better-off, Reform surely need at least a few defectors from the other side of the political divide: from Labour.
If Reform is to become a genuinely new national force, uniting Britain in a supreme effort to restore our broken country and end decades of decay and decline, then they need to attract people of goodwill from all parts of the political spectrum: left, right and centre.
There are people in the Labour party such as the coiner of the ‘Blue Labour’ movement Lord Glasman, or the Brexiteer Manchester MP Graham Stringer, who represent traditional Labour values: patriotism, pride in Britain, and their local communities, and reject the metropolitan, ‘woke’ takeover of the party by well-heeled globalists residing in Islington.
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