BITE SIZE: Why Nigel Farage will NEVER form a pact with Boris Johnson

The Reform Party leader would have to be off his rocker to bring the creator of the vast "Boriswave" of migrants in from the cold

Photo by Jannes Van den wouwer on Unsplash

THE idea – floated in today’s Mail On Sunday – that Nigel Farage will team up with Boris Johnson to launch a Reform/Tory “mega-party” is so stupid that one can discount it without even reading the fantastical details (although, I have done).

The plan, apparently, is to team up because the combined Reform/Tory poll share (47 per cent at the moment) would ensure that the pact parties would win a sweeping Commons majority.

This is even dumber. Literally millions of people currently inclined to vote Reform are of that mindset because they despise the Tories. More precisely, they despise what the Tories did to Britain in the field of immigration policy.

Net migration of 800,000 or 900,000 a year between 2022 and 2024 – mainly concentrated among low-skilled and culturally non-aligned incomers – has been the most ruinous policy visited upon these islands in my adult lifetime.

Increasingly, it goes by the name of the “Boriswave”. That’s right, Boris after a certain Boris Johnson – the man who happily presided over the visa relaxations which brought it about in complete contravention of his manifesto promise to bring overall numbers down. Johnson’s loyal lieutenant Priti Patel may have been the home secretary who drew up the detail of the liberalisation of rules, but he was the boss she was trying to please.

Delivering fundamental change in this policy area is easily Reform’s number one selling point to voters. Their number two selling point is probably dumping the prohibitively expensive Carbon Net Zero timetable and undertakings that Johnson signed up to after the replacement of Dominic Cummings by Carrie Johnson as his de facto chief strategist.

Yet folks at the Mail On Sunday, or at least folks briefing the Mail On Sunday, think that if Farage formed a pact with a restored Johnson at the head of the Tories then the vote share of the two parties could simply be added together! Far more likely, at least half of Reform’s members would walk away in disgust, along with an even bigger proportion of their potential voters. Among diehard voters who are currently sticking with the Tories there would be a similar – though smaller – “falling off at the edges” of support.

Labour would have a field day, depicting both ends of this new pantomime horse of politics as duplicitous, opportunist and lacking in principle.

I note that Reform and Farage have today put out a very strong statement ruling out any prospect of a pact with Johnson and/or the Tories. It reads as follows: “There are absolutely no circumstances in which Reform would ever do a pact with Boris Johnson or the Conservative Party. Johnson was responsible for the betrayal of Brexit, threw open Britain’s borders and collapsed standards in public life through his lack of integrity. Reform intends to win the next election, repair the damage caused by Johnson, the Tories and Labour. We will then return Britain to greatness.”

That would seem pretty definitive. Yet, as I have noted on this site before, there is no need for any kind of formal pact between Reform and the Conservatives in order for them both to do well. Aping the undeclared understanding Labour and the Lib Dems had during last year’s general election could lead to an organic movement among right-of-centre voters to back the candidate best-placed to turf out Labour in each seat.

Perhaps the Conservatives, for example, won’t try very hard to persuade people in Hull East – where Reform came second last year – to back them. What would be the point when they cannot win the seat and the only consequence would be to increase Labour’s chances of hanging on?

Perhaps Reform will throw more resources into winning Labour-held seats in the East Midlands than in trying to oust Robert Jenrick in Newark, where he is the last incumbent Tory across either Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire. Why risk Labour winning Newark when there are a dozen more fertile seats in the region for the Reform brand?

This idea of organic anti-Labour voting (and anti-Lib Dem where they are incumbent)