Kemi Badenoch is being suffocated by Nigel Farage. It is too soon to pronounce her condition terminal, but it appears dire. And if she can’t break free, it’s possible that Farage could complete his reverse takeover of the Conservative party and lead a united Reform/ex-Tory party by the next general election.
Democratic politics is about leadership, message and votes. For nearly a decade now, since David Cameron unleashed Brexit with his promise of a referendum and then proceeded to lose it, Farage’s Brexit has been the Tory message. And now it is being supplemented by immigration, where both Farage and Badenoch are united in condemning the immigration surge—legal and illegal—which happened at the end of the last Tory government. Since Farage is the far better communicator of the two, and Badenoch has not found a way of effectively disowning responsibility for the government of which she was a part, she is losing this message battle comprehensively on the right.
It is a supreme irony in this respect that Boris Johnson, whose communication skills converted the Tories—and a majority of the electorate—to Brexit, outshining Farage in the process, should have been the instigator of the quadrupling of immigration in the years after Brexit, which gifted Farage his latest populist campaign.
None of Johnson’s successors as Tory leader in the last two years has demonstrated even a fraction of his communication skills. This was a part of their wider failure leading up to the loss of the general election to Labour, of course. But until July, Rishi Sunak was able to keep Reform in check to his right because its leadership wasn’t a credible contender for power. Farage didn’t even become leader of the populist party until the election campaign itself, and only then won a seat for himself. The only credible opposition party to the Tories, for those wanting a change of government, was Labour led by Keir Starmer.
In a few short months, all that has changed. Farage is an MP, firmly in charge of Reform which he runs as a private company, with Starmer and his now not-so-new Labour government plunging in popularity. Farage’s favourability ratings are higher than either Badenoch’s or Starmer’s in some polls. He also generally has higher negative ratings than the other two, but that is mostly with voters on the centre-left. Among non-Labour/Lib Dem voters his net popularity is on a par with Badenoch, but with far higher profile and salience.
Badenoch may yet have hidden reserves of charisma and political strategy to outclass Farage. But there is no sign of them in her first six weeks of leadership, which have been memorable mostly for her views on sandwiches. She does however have three undoubted assets: the status of leader of the opposition, with 121 MPs compared to Reform’s five; an established national party machine and local government base; and a strong Tory brand as the customary alternative to Labour.
So, that brings us to votes. The latest voting intention polling shows Reform, Labour and the Tories all now sitting around in or around mid-20 per cent, with the Lib Dems stuck in the low teens, which means that Reform has been the main net beneficiary of Labour’s post-election decline and has crucial momentum. Next year’s local elections, and any parliamentary byelections, will be crucial tests of whether Reform can get ahead of the Tories in winning actual seats and present Farage as a credible winning alternative to Starmer.
