In the playbook of election strategies, there are two canonical campaigns. Incumbents say things are going in the right direction; don’t let the opposition screw it up! Challengers say everything is screwed up already; it’s time for change!
There is a less orthodox, third option, innovated by the Conservatives in competition with whichever party Nigel Farage happens to be leading: our opponent is right; don’t vote for him.
From Europe and immigration to climate and culture, the Tories tested this strategy to destruction under Rishi Sunak. Now, Kemi Badenoch wants to test it some more on the smouldering ruins. Her programme is not easy to distinguish from the familiar Faragist fulminations. Her reward will be a battering in local and regional devolved elections on Thursday.
Badenoch is unlucky to face her first ballot-box test as leader in a defence of councils that were last contested when Boris Johnson was popular, buoyed up by a “vaccine bounce” as Britain emerged from pandemic lockdowns. A brutal cull of councillors seems certain.
Reform UK will be the main beneficiaries. Some of the winners will be former Tories. Farage’s candidate to be mayor of Greater Lincolnshire is Andrea Jenkyns, a Conservative MP until last May. If she wins – and polls suggest she can – she will be Reform’s most powerful elected politician.
Farage’s knack for luring voters and activists from the Tories provokes endless speculation that the two forces could combine. Enthusiasts for this model of a “united right” point to parliamentary seats where Labour’s winning majority last year was smaller than the sum of Reform and Conservative vote shares. Basic arithmetic then suggests an elegantly simple solution to the problem of how to remove Keir Starmer from Downing Street.
But that isn’t how elections or people work in real life. Reform and the Conservatives are separate parties for a reason, and it isn’t just that Farage’s ego needs its own tour bus.
An overlap in ideology masks the conceptual difference between a party that has evolved over generations to inhabit established institutions of power, and a challenger party that wants to see those institutions torn down. The Tories are indigenous to Westminster; Reform are an invasive species.
Farage understands this. He knows that speculation about pacts and coalitions expresses panic in the absence of a plan for recovery, which makes the Tories look weak, as the supplicant party. The vulture doesn’t need to do a deal with the carrion.
Badenoch appears to have understood this asymmetry of interest. She points out that Farage, having pledged to destroy her party, is clearly not its friend. But she doesn’t have a strategy for differentiation, still less an agenda to rehabilitate Conservatism as a proposition for serious government.
The problem goes back to Brexit, the thrill of insurgency, Johnson’s triumph in the 2019 election and the paradox of revolution overseen by a party whose name means wariness of change. Conservatives are still chasing that high, but without a connection to the voters that might supply it. The more desperately they crave the buzz of rampant radicalism, the less appealing they are in the old heartlands of respectable Tory sobriety.
That has turned the Liberal Democrats into a refuge for moderate middle Englanders, as they hope to show on Thursday. The geographic spread of councils up for election, with contests in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, for example, is another factor that makes this particular round of ballots look precision-targeted to inflict Tory pain.
That means Labour should escape an equivalent mauling at council level. Unfortunately for Starmer, there is also a byelection in Runcorn and Helsby. A Labour majority of 14,696 is sure to be drastically reduced and very possibly overturned by Reform.
That, in combination with a strong showing in devolved mayoral contests, will give Farage licence for a victory parade on Friday morning, boasting of his credentials as the scourge of Labour and Tories alike – the man with unstoppable momentum on a road that leads all the way to Downing Street.
Since Tory discomfort at Reform’s hands is a familiar story, and Westminster treats byelection results as oracles of political destiny, a Labour defeat in Runcorn will be treated as a harbinger of ineluctable doom for the prime minister.
The underlying electoral dynamics – and what Starmer can do to change them – will take some time to unpick. Farage takes many more votes from the Tories than from Labour. But Labour’s position is made vulnerable when liberal and left-leaning voters, whose main priority last year was ousting Sunak’s government, lose heart with the replacement. Starmer has a tricky balance to strike. He must attend to the socially conservative sensibilities of voters who might be tempted by Reform, but without Farage’s crass illiberalism, which propels others towards the Greens or Lib Dems.
Some Labour strategists view those progressive defectors as midterm malcontents who will return to Starmer when he is the only thing stopping a coalition of Tories and Reform from seizing power. That dynamic might be accelerated if Farage’s well-advertised enthusiasm for Donald Trump can be mobilised to his detriment, along with his recorded admiration for Vladimir Putin.
That line of attack looks more viable in the light of this week’s extraordinary comeback for the Liberals in Canada’s general election. The ruling party was moribund in polls just months ago. But Mark Carney rallied the nation in solidarity against Trump’s tariff wars and revulsion at his deranged talk of making Canada the 51st US state. The opposition Conservatives found their Maga-inflected rightwing style suddenly out of fashion. Their leader, Pierre Poilievre, was once lauded by British Tories as a model to emulate. He lost his seat.
The practical applications of that case study are limited. Carney was newly installed as prime minister just before the snap poll. Trump has not threatened to annex Britain. But the US president is toxic enough that Farage ought to be contaminated by association. And if there is a credible prospect of him becoming prime minister, liberal waverers should be spooked into reprising their 2024 tactical votes for Labour.
There is a long way to go before that is even the question. Any strategy based on assembling voters into blocking coalitions assumes their behaviour can be accurately modelled and channelled through a wildly dysfunctional electoral system. If party allegiances continue to fragment on current trends, first past the post could go from being an erratic method for allocating seats in parliament to an insane one. This, too, is likely to be showcased in Thursday’s elections. None of the winners of the devolved mayoralties is likely to have secured an overall majority of votes.
That volatility, the unwinding of two-party politics in England, will be the real story on Friday morning. It makes any attempt to forecast what might happen in the rest of the parliament, and what will work in an election not due until 2029, quite futile. With perhaps one exception. It will still be true that agreeing with Nigel Farage is a terrible method for beating him.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
