Then on Tuesday there were two more good news stories. The press were awash with reports that Elon Musk was set on donating $100m (£80m) to Reform. Which, in turn, would catapult Farage into the leagues of the very wealthy considering the "party" is his personal property. Cue frantic rebuttals and backstairs briefings about Labour's intention to impose donation caps, or only allowing donors to be UK residents. It's probable nothing will come of it, and is yet another episode in Musk's negative fixation with Keir Starmer.
A bit more significant than either is the passage of Tim Montgomerie from the thinning ranks of the Tories onto the rolls of Farage's customers. Announcing his decision during his regular slot as most-favoured right wing commentator on Times Radio, he said it was Tory failures over immigration that did for him. In a refrain anyone familiar with the Tory leadership election would have heard time and again, because the Conservatives promised to cut immigration while overseeing almost a million new arrivals in the last year, they had lost his support.
Why is the recruitment of a politics commentator a big deal for Reform? Firstly, "Montie" is as establishment as they come. A former bag carrier/speech writer for William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, the co-founder of the misnamed Centre for Social Justice and a year later Conservative Home, he was able to leverage this as a vehicle to build a profile and from there a career as a ubiquitous talking head. He's even been on a Radio 4 discussion panel with me. Because of his connections, for Reform he offers the promise of a conduit for more Tories - especially sitting MPs - who might take the plunge. With someone as urbane and "respectable" as Montgomerie on board it knocks off some of Reform's rougher edges, at least where elite opinion is concerned. And with such an influential Reform-supporting voice in the bourgeois media - for Montgomerie's defection will harm his career not a jot - Farage and his backers hope to steer the Tory party and with it mainstream politics further rightwards. They have a a desire to fulfil, after all.
That said, no one who knows Montgomerie's politics would be the least bit surprised. He was one of the first Tories to try and introduce the fringe ideas of the far right into the party, attested by his championing of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory long before it was a twinkle in Suella Braverman's cynical eye. As connected as he is, every Tory on his contact list knows about his straying off the piste of what passes for mainstream conservatism. And while some, including the Kemi Badenoch can divine a path to election victory by heading right, being too close to Reform, absorbing them, or effectively half-inching their programme makes it much harder to win back the swathes of seats lost at the general election. Especially with the process of long-term decline continuing unchecked and so there's no guarantee the voters who'll be impressed by displays of right wing extremism today will be around tomorrow.
As far as our Tim is concerned, he can now shrug off the heavy overcoat of Toryism and give us the full montie of where his politics are really at. And who can say, it might help with defections now and in the future - Richard Tice has teased another "big announcement" next week. But in the medium to longer term does it change the fundamental facts of British political life? It does not.
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5 comments:
Yet another spear-carrier of Boris Johnson's has joined Reform UK. Johnson was the Prime Minister of Net Zero. He was a very big spender long before Covid-19. He even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him the most pro-immigration Prime Minister ever, since Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. The lockdowns were Johnson's. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson's. The war in Ukraine was Johnson's. If Reform UK is now the party of Tim Montgomerie, then it is the party of all of that.
Even if it were not, then while there are easily 326 wannabe Donald Trumps in this country, there are not 326 constituencies in which each of them would be the First Past the Post. Using the far more favourable Single Transferrable Vote and having uncharacteristically managed their candidates to avoid cannibalisation, those broadly in that vein have made only limited progress, if any, in Ireland, while the hard core has been humiliated. Reform looks set to do fairly well under the Additional Member System for the Scottish Parliament, and very well under the closed list system that will be used for the Senedd from 2026. But it is a different question what its supporters will be voting for.
Nice opening snark, but Reform came a decent 3rd in vote share. More than double the Greens and various “left” groups (scare quotes if we include the Workers Party, which could itself use scare quotes) put together. I suppose you can argue it’s disproportionate but I also don’t see any prominent figures decamping to the left…
"being too close to Reform, absorbing them, or effectively half-inching their programme makes it much harder to win back the swathes of seats lost at the general election"
It would do, if all those seats had been lost because of McSweeney's "hero voters" switching directly from Tory to Labour. But that's not how Labour won the election. as I said a bit back and Peter Kellner recently confirmed. If the drop in the Tory vote since 2019 had been held to the level of the rise in the Labour vote – in other words, if the Tories had held on to all their votes except those lost to Labour – the Tories would have held almost all the English seats they lost.
https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2024/09/03/understanding-the-2024-election-7/
A large group of Tory voters abstained in 2024 and another large group went to Reform; win both of those back and Labour are right back to 2019 (appropriately enough, as their vote hadn't actually increased on 2019).
Eagerly awaiting our blogger's take on several of the cluster of rapid-developing events this week.
Not quite "in some weeks, decades happen" just yet, but could<\i> get there from here. Especially the big US story.
In the preferred Westminster bubble framing, "the left" hasn't just suffered a catastrophic political wipeout, but rather is sitting pretty on a huge majority and a freedom from united opposition the likes of which were last seen in 1997. Why on earth would anyone occupying a prominent position in that bloc be decamping anywhere, unless they had been forced out by their own internal rivals?
You'll probably have to wait a few years at least to see that kind of activity. One would expect it to require not just prominent cracks beneath the Starmer regime (we already have those), but the looming of UK elections which matter.
Very different story on "the right", where it's been transfer season since long before the GE. A historic opportunity to gut and bone the Tory Party was recently seen by folks at both extremes of the political spectrum; Nige's political vehicle temporarily had allies in unlikely places.
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