Birmingham is welcoming back Reform UK for the second year in a row today, with a shiny new defector in the form of former Conservative culture secretary (and fierce Boris Johnson fan) Nadine Dorries.
“The Tory party is dead,” Dorries announced on 4 September. “Its members now need to think the unthinkable and look to the future.”
Reform’s membership numbers suggest many erstwhile Tories have been doing exactly that. As Nigel Farage notes in his welcome letter in the programme booklet, since last September the party has grown from 80,000 members to 240,000. It might be down from five MPs (having lost two and gained on in a by-election), but it has made huge inroads in local government terms, with 900 councillors and two mayors – many of whom are Tory defectors, most notably the mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkyns. And from a baseline of 14.3 per cent of the vote share in the last election and 19 per cent support last September, the party is now consistently polling above 30 per cent.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the rise of the Reform has been one of the big political stories of the past year. A YouGov poll released yesterday finds that 44 per cent of Brits think Reform are doing the most to set the agenda, with Labour lagging way behind on 14 per cent. (Lobbyists are increasingly agreeing – as Will Dunn explores this morning, noting that some are attending this conference not necessarily because they think Farage will soon be in No.10, but because of the party’s influence over the Labour government and how they are able to “make the political weather”.)
But with that kind of rapid growth, it’s worth taking a step back and considering who all these new recruits to Reform are and where their political priorities are. Not all of them fit the mold of Dorries, or Jenkyns, or former Tory party chair Jake Berry, or Lee Anderson, who became the party’s first MP when he crossed the Commons floor last year.
With perfect timing, this morning the pollsters More In Common and the think tank UK In a Changing Europe have released a joint report, entitled “From Protest to Power?”
The topline finding is this: Reform is going mainstream. The party often described as “fringe”, “insurgent” and “hard right” has broadened its appeal to a degree that should alarm the traditional parties. The “scale of opportunity”, the report finds, is huge: Reform could capture up to 42 per cent of voters. (As a reminder, Labour won a three-figure majority of 34 per cent.)
Already, the average Reform supporter looks less like a stereotype and more like the average voter. The report finds that the party’s base “Reform supporters increasingly resemble the everyday average Briton in demographics, habits and everyday lifestyle”. That applies to age (while Tory voters skew old and Labour voters skew young, Reform’s base are more evenly distributed) and gender. While the public might see it as the “blokey” party, Reform’s gender gap is now almost identical to Labour’s. Perhaps the concerted efforts of the party to attract women, making the most of figures like Lincolnshire Mayor Andrea Jenkyns and its newest MP Sarah Pochin, as well as spending the summer talking tough on migration and crime with a specific focus on the risk of sexual violence, have paid off. Still, it will be interesting to see how the balance looks in Birmingham.
As I reported over the summer, the average-ness of Reform’s base maps onto lifestyle and pop-culture trends. Essentially, if you look at the TV shows the average Brit likes to watch and the summer activities they most enjoy, Reform voters tend to agree. Labour and Tory supporters are more likely to have niche interests.
The Reform supporters differ from the average Brit in some ways you might expect: they are more likely to be white, more likely to watch GB News and distrust the BBC and less likely to have attended university (and thus avoided hotbeds of wokeness). But overall, they’re a far more diverse bunch than is often assumed.
This is clearly a massive opportunity. But it also comes with some obvious pitfalls. Once your voter coalition broadens beyond a certain extent, divisions are inevitable. Unsurprisingly, the voters attracted to Reform from the Conservatives have very different priorities to those attracted from Labour. (Incidentally, the best way for the government to win back Labour voters who have been lured away is to make concrete progress on the cost of living and the NHS, as well as immigration. The best tactic for the Tories is to exploit the fault lines of Farage’s closeness to Donald Trump and ambivalence over Ukraine. Good luck to them both.)
Concern over migration unites supporters, but cracks are already appearing between Labour and Tory switchers on issues like economic redistribution, net zero and Ukraine. And let anyone imagine that Reform HQ can paper over such cracks by taking a hardline stance on social issues (a playbook pursued by populist right-wing parties across the world), its supporters once more defy neat categorisation. On support for gay marriage, access to abortion and gender equality, they mirror public sentiment. (As the report notes, this puts Farage and his speculation about lowering the abortion term limit out of step.)
Farage will be delighted with his newest recruit, but accepting too many high-profile former Tories like Dorries comes with its own risks. If the Conservatives did such a dreadful job running the county, as Reform likes to argue, why is the party accepting so many of them? “We can’t keep sucking up the worst dregs of the last failed government,” was the assessment of one exasperated Reform insider in response to the Dorries news. And that’s before we get into all the ways Dorries’ past political positions clash with those of Farage (the Online Safety Act – spearheaded by Dorries when she was in government and decried by the Reform leader as “dystopian” springs to mind).
Zooming out, the From Protest To Power report finds that Reform’s newest supporters are emphatically not keen on figures like Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson (and, indeed, Trump), who might have more appeal amongst the old guard. And there are further differences between Reform’s current base and people who might consider voting for them in the future (the converts needed to get up to the 42 per cent figure). Reform won’t be able to reach its potential simply by preaching more loudly to the choir.
All in all, it’s a lot for Farage to keep in mind when he takes the main stage later today. We can count on the Reform leader to be full of swagger about the achievements his party has made. But like every party seeking to grow beyond its niche, it will need to diversify and hold together a coalition that will increasingly disunited. How that diversification will go down the with faithful assembling in Birmingham is impossible to say – but bases often have strong views when they feel their party has strayed too far from its core values. Just ask Labour members.
[See also: Nigel Farage, the free speech champion we deserve]
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