THE BIG READ: Rishi Sunak is preparing a con-job general election campaign and only Nigel Farage can halt it in its tracks

Reform UK must avoid a Charge of the Light Brigade debacle that will see it cut down by the Tory heavy artillery

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

THE Conservatives were dubbed the “stupid party” by the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill. Yet Rishi Sunak is not a stupid guy. So why is he pushing out an obviously stupid message in the wake of the local elections?

Sunak’s public stance – that they show we are on course for a hung parliament – is a ludicrous interpretation of a bloodbath result for the Tories. Barely a Tory MP will believe it to be a credible summary of latest electoral events and neither will the vast majority of people who seriously follow politics.

Drawing out an estimated national vote share from local contests and then mapping it directly onto a general election and claiming this is what will most likely happen is not serious psephology. For a start, the Reform UK party only stood in a sixth of council wards, but where it did stand on Thursday, the Tory vote plummeted compared to 2021 when these seats were last fought by a precipitous 19 points. Yet Reform has pledged to stand everywhere at the general election. Then there is the issue of the Greens and Lib Dems traditionally getting bigger vote shares in council contests than at general elections – to the disadvantage of Labour in the former. Then there is the failure to consider opinion shifts in Scotland that could be worth 25 seats to Labour compared to the 2019 general election.

The only fair point that can be made on behalf of the Conservatives from last week’s local elections is that turnout was about half of what it will be at the general election: for every voter who turned out, there is another who didn’t but who probably will when it comes to voting in a new House of Commons. And arguments can certainly be made that these abstainers are likely to contain a relatively high number of people who might yet be persuaded to vote Tory in the contest that really counts. But that is not what Sunak is saying or pointing to.

Instead he is pushing an interpretation of catastrophic reverses that would put to shame the Black Knight in Monty Python, claiming that entire lost limbs constitute a mere “flesh wound”.

It is tempting just to think that Downing Street is run by useless rookies in bunker mode who are so panicked that they are clutching at straws. But I think there is more to it than that.

Namely, the Sunak regime is deliberately attempting to conjure up a false picture of party fortunes and turn it into conventional wisdom among the vast majority of the British public who do not obsessively follow every twist and turn of politics.

Its primary motivation is not to shore up the position of Sunak so he can limp on for another six months. In fact, there is now no serious parliamentary plot against him and he is oddly, almost surreally secure. No, the real motivation is to create a general election binary in the minds of all right-of-centre voters: stick with the Tories or see Keir Starmer heading a ragbag “coalition of chaos” involving Lib Dems, Greens, Celtic nationalists and perhaps even a smattering of newly-elected Islamist MPs. The real target of this message is the Reform UK vote. The Tory machine thinks this is squeezable and squeezable very hard so long as it can get this binary up and running among right-leaning people. And as things currently stand, I think the Tory machine is correct.

Reform leader Richard Tice and his deputy Ben Habib risk looking like a couple of Kamikaze pilots in their current public outpourings. Celebrating their role in the Labour victory over Andy Street in the West Midlands and saying they aim to obliterate the Tories may seem sensible to Reform’s true believers – the folk who think it is really on the verge of a massive general election breakthrough that will see it replace the Tories and then form a government in 2029. But such people have drunk far too much of the Kool Aid.

The reality is that although Reform candidates scored a respectable ten per cent vote share where they stood in council contests, only two of them managed to actually get elected across the whole of England. And this is under first past the post at ward level – a much easier nut to crack than the same system operating in vastly bigger parliamentary constituencies.

No wonder Conservative Campaign HQ is trying to push the message “vote Reform, get Labour”. Messrs Tice and Habib should ask themselves whether pushing the preferred narrative of their main opponent themselves can really be a good idea.

Back in 2015, I was one of those running the UKIP general election campaign when the Tories first alighted on the concept of a “coalition of chaos”. I remember feeling satisfied when our rather brilliant and fully-costed manifesto proved strong enough to fend off a preliminary Tory attack that had been based on the idea of it containing lots of unfunded and unrealistic pledges. Instead, George Osborne went on the teatime TV news to hammer home a simple message: that at the end of the election voters would either have a government led by David Cameron or a coalition of chaos under Ed Miliband. This attack did not crush our vote share – we were a much stronger and more battle-hardened outfit than is today’s Reform party – but it did shave off a point or two causing us to end up with more than 120 second places and only one MP. Meanwhile the Tories secured an unlikely election win (one that soon turned into a pyrrhic victory, ha-ha, but that’s another story).  

So Sunak is guilty of cynicism but not really of stupidity. This is the Tory plan: 1) Lodge in the public mind the idea that the alternative to them is not dull Labour under steady Starmer and snoring boring Rachel Reeves, but a nightmarish and unpredictable leftist coalition. 2) Depict the Reform party as the electoral autobahn to such a destination. 3) Squeeze Reform very hard at a constituency level during the campaign proper, probably deploying Lib Dem-style bar chart leaflets to make the point that only the Tory candidate can stop the Britain-hating Left. 4) Hope via these tactics to persuade millions of right-leaning voters who sat on their hands last Thursday to instead hold their noses and vote Tory in the autumn. In my view the Tory starting position in the polls is so weak that even if the plan works it will most likely lead to 5) a Labour government with a comfortable working majority but not a landslide one and a Tory party with 200 or so MPs that still has secure ownership of the runner-up slot in our two-party system.

Under this scenario, Reform gets crushed down to a five or six per cent vote share and returns zero MPs.

It doesn’t have to be like this. If Reform’s leading lights were to become less tribal and more imaginative then they could further divide and weaken the Tory parliamentary party over the summer. But to do so they should start love-bombing its best and most high profile right-wingers rather than just bombing them.

I fear such subtlety of operation is beyond either Mr Tice or Mr Habib, neither of whom have sufficient experience of politics to steer clear of traps and otherwise negotiate the minefield set for them by opponents who have been in the game for far longer.

It is not, however, beyond a certain Nigel Farage. Today there is a story in the