THE BIG READ: Of course Farage is "coming back" but it's more complicated than that

A Reform party with rocket boosters attached is about to go after soft Labour support as well

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

ONE thought was doing the rounds among Tory MPs in the lead-up to the Christmas parliamentary recess: if Nigel Farage comes back then we are toast.

I was put in mind of this as I read the now notorious tweet from the great man a few days ago berating Home Secretary James Cleverly as a “moron” and condemning him and all his colleagues as “liars and charlatans” who deserved to lose their seats. Then there was Farage again on New Year’s Day, popping up on Radio 4’s flagship World At One programme to ram home an attack on illegal and legal immigration levels. He hadn’t yet made up his mind about whether to “come back”, he told presenter Jonny Dymond.

That very morning the influential Conservative Home website had published data revealing that more than half of people on the large panel of followers it regularly polls were viewers of GB News, upon which Farage has the main evening, peak-time show. This puts GB News narrowly behind the BBC and way ahead of all other networks as the main source of news and opinion for these active members of the Tory tribe. Such viewers will no doubt be local opinion-formers themselves, passing on hot takes in their communities and constituency associations for further dissemination. The finding underlined just why Farage received such a hero’s welcome from attendees at the Conservative conference in the autumn. Meanwhile there was further extensive Farage coverage in the main right-of-centre newspapers; the Telegraph, Times, Express, Mail and Sun. One report suggested that his old comrade Arron Banks would raise up to £10m for the Reform party were he to return to lead it.

So I suggest that Tory MPs plug in their toasters right now, if this is their survival metric. Because they are asking the wrong question. The reality is that Farage has already come back. By condemning the Rishi Sunak administration so vigorously and talking explicitly about whether he will be an active campaigner for Reform in the general election, he has in effect already answered his own question: of course he will. To do anything else would amount to not lifting a finger to tackle all the ills he has identified. And his large constituency of supporters would surely find that hard to forgive. Besides, the general election is the biggest show in town this year and Farage is the consummate showman. How could anyone expect him to sit it out? Until he does take the helm of Reform, he will of course be free to launch salvo after salvo against this Tory shower on GB News every evening anyway.

I am told that official confirmation of a far more active role for Farage in the Reform party is a little way off yet. It certainly won’t be announced at the party’s new year press conference on Wednesday and it may well be that Farage does not appear at that event at all. Instead, party leader Richard Tice will launch fresh bombardments against the Government on the immigration issue.

And here there may be a little bit of good news for sitting Tory MPs. For Reform’s new year drive is going to have Labour in its sights as much as the Conservatives. Rather as was the case with UKIP a decade or so ago, the feeling is that Reform has already taken much of the available Tory voting tribe, but that it can now also hope to eat into Labour’s 45 per cent opinion poll share, viewed as being “miles wide, but inches deep”. People who voted Tory in 2019 but have since switched to Labour are judged particularly promising candidates for a further switch to the Reform column now that the insurgent party’s profile is so much higher.

Tice, who was initially reluctant to major on immigration compared to other issues such as Net Zero, is now demonstrating the zeal of the convert and can be expected to pile very hard into Labour’s long-term record on migration matters: after all, it was Tony Blair who launched the era of hyper-migration before the Tories cranked it up even further.

This is unlikely to save the bacon of Tory MPs with majorities of 10,000 or less because it remains the case that Reform will generally take far more 2019 Conservative votes than 2019 Labour ones. But from a Conservative point of view, in the vast majority of seats it will be only half as bad to lose voters to Reform as to Labour.

A more interesting question about Farage and Reform is whether he will actually take up the reins of leadership from Tice. Some internal voices are suggesting he could become party chairman instead. To me, it seems obvious that he will indeed become leader. For starters, Nigel is not a natural order-taker. He generally seeks to lead any undertaking in which he is engaged. Tice is also likely to spend much of the year campaigning in Hartlepool where he is standing again after having won more than 10,000 votes and a 25 per cent share in 2019. To do his 2024 campaign in the constituency – one of Reform’s top three targets – justice he needs to be a highly visible presence on the streets and carrying on as party leader will make that difficult by taking him away too often.

In addition, as party leader Farage can bring his superlative presentational and debating skills fully to bear. He is these days the only fully seasoned top rank political performer we have, having spent more than 20 years going up through the gears with UKIP. Little wonder that he now operates at a level far above Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer when it comes to political communication. Both of the major party leaders only became politicians in 2015 and often it shows.

Predicting exactly what impact a large Reform vote share will have on the make-up of