The Conservative party is braced for a beating inlocal electionsnext week and the conversation has already turned to potential pacts with Reform UK. It is an old topic given fresh impetus by the revelation that Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, discussed the prospects of a “coalition” to “unite the right” at a meeting of Tory activists last month.
Whether that means a formal deal or some looser alignment, there is an obvious electoral rationale for the proposition. But its public endorsement is still taboo in a party that sees itself as the natural ruling authority in Britain, only occasionally and temporarily forced to sojourn in opposition.
The Tories do not like to share power and yet, as the third-placed party in opinion polls, they don’t have an obvious alternative route to victory. In many constituencies the combined Conservative and Reform vote shares at the last election exceeded the victorious Labour candidate’s majority. Basic arithmetic makes chatter about alliances inevitable.
The calculus of a pact is more complex than simply adding two numbers. There is very considerable ideological overlap between Reform and Tory platforms, but their potential support does not come from a single pool of interchangeable voters.
There are people whose trust in the Tory party is irretrievably broken and who are attracted to Nigel Farage because he represents rupture from the old two-party system. The Reform leader has no incentive to indulge talk of a tactical coalition that would only dilute his brand as the scourge of a Westminster establishment. There are also former Conservatives who rejected the party in 2024, oftenin favour of the Liberal Democrats, because Rishi Sunak’s government looked chaotic, incompetent and plain nasty. Those voters might not be lost to the Tories forever, but their concerns are compounded by proximity to Mr Farage.
Conservatives speculate about deals with Reform because it is easier than finding a strategy to rebuild a broad base of support.Kemi Badenochhas failed comprehensively to address this problem. Her analysis of last year’s election result is incomplete at best, more often incoherent. She offers no insight or contrition when it comes to the role that the decline in public services played in voter rejection of Tory rule. She seems drawn to culture war battles and febrile, polarised digital discourse at the expense of real-world policy development. Mr Jenrick, who was beaten by Mrs Badenoch in last year’s leadership contest, and who scarcely hides his ambition to replace her, has nothing new or more substantial to say about his party’s predicament
Much discussion of electoral pacts is really a diversion from the broader question of whether the UK’s voting system is capable of turning public preferences into fair parliamentary representation. The evidencesuggests not. The disparity between Labour’s huge Commons majority and modest national vote share testifies tounderlying volatilityand ongoing decay of the traditional affiliations that once made British party politics a duopoly.
Mr Jenrick is not the first politician to grasp what that means in terms of third-placed parties ever being in a position to form a government. That is an insight of sorts, but Conservative energies might better be spent understanding the reasons why their time in office led to a collapse in support so extreme that they struggle now even to be the main party of opposition.
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