Last week I published a very slightly tongue in cheek blog about how the Conservatives might change the outcome of the next election. I hope you don’t mind another one before we get back to serious stuff.
On Easter Sunday 2024 The Sunday Telegraph front page has a scoop. Boris Johnson is the new leader of the Reform Party, and is standing as the Reform candidate for Clatcton on Sea at the forthcoming General Election. A joyous photo graces the front page of Boris with Richard Tice, and mega-donor Jeremy Hoskings. Some Conservatives greeted this with joy:
Nigel Farage was less happy, and gave a terse welcome message.
Within 2 days a poll appears in the Telegraph showing Reform and the Tories neck and neck on 18%, a result that gives Reform hardly any seats, but loses the Conservatives a huge amount. There are immediate defections from the Tories to Reform; Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley, Jonathan Gullis. GBNews welcomes this as a chance to unite the right and urges the Tories to stand down in their seats. The Conservative twittersphere is electric with the news.
Outside of Reform, GBNews and the Telegraph there was cynicism. Jeremy Hoskings had previously loaned Andrew Bridgen £4m to fight a court case against his family potato farm, and there was speculation that Boris’s new found love of Reform party was motivated by large sums of cash and an opportunity to get back at those who ousted him.
This was a big change for Reform, the Brexit Party and UKIP before them. While they had stood for Parliament before they had never really been bothered about winning. All these parties were vehicles for a very rich very right wing elite clique to exercise a massive influence on British politics will avoiding democratic accountability. Winning vague referenda was so much easier.
Boris wasn’t the hero he had once been to the red wall – his indiscretions offended their values – but he won Clacton on Sea at the General election, one of 5 Reform MPs. It turned out that the rich right wingers harvesting ex-pat votes had been from Reform, not the Tories, who were too dysfunctional to get organised.
With the right wing vote split Labour won an unexpected landslide, leaving the rump of the Tory Party shell shocked.
Rishi left quickly to return to California, and a brutal battle for the soul of the Tory Party was waged, tearing the party apart. Predictably the Telegraph and GBNews ran with a “unite the right” campaign, a coalition of the remaining Tory and Reform MPs under the leadership of Boris.
The Tory/Reform coalition led by Boris was little different to the difficult electoral coalitions that Tory leaders from May onwards had dealt with, the only difference now was that it was formal.
And the rich donors who had used Reform/Brexit/UKIP and all kinds of fake think tanks and lobbyists got a huge prize – a whole political party, with it’s own newspapers and TV stations doing nothing but promoting their own narrow policy agenda. If they couldn’t buy polices from the Government any more this was the next best thing.