Toby Young has narrated this article for you to listen to.
When I told an ex-editor of this magazine that I was planning to write about why I’m voting for Reform he didn’t react as I expected. ‘For God’s sake, don’t write another of those more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger pieces,’ he said. ‘Make it a furious, tub-thumping endorsement of Nigel and his gang.’
When it comes to the ‘War on Woke’, Farage really means it – Rishi is all talk and no pedal pushers
I should say at once that this wasn’t Boris Johnson – although he does want Nigel Farage to win in Clacton, apparently. Why? Because if Nigel becomes an MP it will make his takeover of the Tories a more realistic prospect. That way, Boris can re-enter the House of Commons at the earliest opportunity and say to what remains of the parliamentary party: ‘The only way to stop Nigel is to back me. If anyone else is up against him when the final two are put before the membership, he’ll win.’
That isn’t my rationale for voting Reform – I live in Acton, not Clacton – but it’s equally calculating. In my constituency, the sitting Labour MP has a majority of 13,000 and it’s likely to go up, not down. So putting an X against the Tory candidate is a wasted vote. The Reform candidate has even less chance of winning, obviously, but the more votes Reform gets across the country, the stronger will be the case to replace Rishi Sunak with a right-wing firebrand.
Like many Conservatives, I’ve abandoned all hope of winning this election and turned my mind to who’s going to be the next leader. The wets – the people responsible for the coming debacle, in my view – will point to the 2019 Tory voters who’ve abandoned the party for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens (God help us), and argue that the only way back is to elect a centrist dad like Tom Tugendhat. To counter this argument, my lot will need at least as many people who voted Tory last time to plump for Reform. ‘Forget all those wishy-washy listeners to The Rest is Politics,’ we’ll say. ‘It’s the working-class voters who feel betrayed that we need to win back.’
And it’s a pretty close-run thing. According to the latest analysis by J.L. Partners, 20 per cent of those who voted Conservative in 2019 have defected to Reform, while 20 per cent are planning to vote for other parties (15 per cent for Labour, 3 per cent for the Lib Dems and 2 per cent for the Greens). In other words, each side in the forthcoming bun fight can point to the same number of defectors in both directions. For me, this is the real battleground in this election and it’s so close that every vote counts. I’m not voting for the next prime minister. I’m thinking about the next leader of the opposition.
I have other, less Machiavellian reasons for backing Reform. Whether on bringing net immigration down to zero or ditching carbon emissions targets, I’m more closely aligned with its policies than I am with those of the Conservatives. When it comes to the ‘War on Woke’, Farage really means it, whereas Rishi is all talk and no pedal pushers. The Prime Minister is a quintessential citizen of anywhere with no strong emotional attachment to this country. Farage, by contrast, whatever else you might think of him, is a genuine patriot.
Which isn’t to say I’d like him to be the next Tory leader. The problem is, even though he’d win back all those 2019 Conservatives who’ve defected to Reform, he would struggle to coax the deserters on the party’s left flank back into the fold. I want a right-wing leader, but one capable of leading the party to victory in 2029, and that means keeping all the 2019 voters onside, not just the pro-Brexit Red Wall-ers. So, my first choice is Kemi Badenoch, although I do worry that if Nigel wins a seat at the eighth time of trying and is allowed back into the party he will be the right’s preferred candidate, not her. This is presumably why she said last week she wouldn’t let him back in.
I remember something like the same argument being made to me by Grant Shapps at the Tory party conference in 2014. I was promoting the idea of a Ukip-Con electoral pact at the time and David Cameron was sufficiently alarmed by it to ask Shapps, then the party chairman, to have a word. The difficulty with my proposal, he said, was that the Conservatives would end up losing more seats to Labour and the Lib Dems as a result of getting into bed with Farage than they’d gain, even if you added any Ukip wins to the total.
Does the same argument apply today, given that Nigel has gone to some lengths to detoxify himself? That’s a question for the pollsters, but I suspect the answer is yes. In this election, however, he gets my vote.
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