Why are the Tories playing Farage’s game?

How should Rishi Sunak respond to the unwelcome insertion of Nigel Farage into the election campaign? The Prime Minister called the election for 4 July in part because he hoped it would wrong-foot Reform, but that hasn’t worked, with Farage electrifying the challenger party and near-electrocuting many Tory MPs who were already terrified of losing their seats. 

The response from the centre has been to move even further into Reform’s territory. Home Secretary James Cleverly was out and about this morning talking about immigration, and dropping hints that the Conservatives could make leaving the European Convention on Human Rights a manifesto commitment. Asked about it, Cleverly said: ‘The point that we have made is that we have got a package of measures including the Rwanda scheme, which will form part of how we crack down on illegal immigration.’ He did not rule out leaving the ECHR, which will be seen as significant by Conservative MPs who have been campaigning for a tougher line for months.

Cleverly was also announcing an annual cap on migrant visas, as well as reducing the size of that cap annually for five years, and giving parliament a vote on the annual limits. The Migration Advisory Committee will recommend the level the cap should be set at, which conveniently means the Conservatives don’t have to talk about numbers during this campaign. 

But is there any point in making these promises? Sunak wanted to squeeze the Reform vote as much as possible by showing wavering Tory voters that his party is still on their side on hot-button issues including immigration and the sex/gender debate. But the Conservatives are never going to out-promise Reform, especially with Farage at the helm. Today the newly-installed Reform leader said he wanted net migration to be zero, meaning the number of people leaving the UK would be the same as the number arriving. The Tories, meanwhile, have spent 14 years being followed around by their own back-of-a-napkin pledge to bring net migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’. The numbers will fall soon, partly because they had been artificially boosted by arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong, and also because of recent changes to student entitlements. But no half-sensible Conservative would try to match Farage’s pledge. 

The more they talk about immigration, the more the Conservatives highlight the paucity of their (still probably unachievable) immigration promises in comparison to Reform. They’re feeding the Reform beast. It would be safer to move back to areas where the Conservatives remain trusted, such as security and defence, rather than play Farage’s game.