Keir Starmer v Nigel Farage is the only game in town
Having spent his morning in meetings he walked past the Reform press office as they watched it on television. At this point Badenoch was paying tribute to Tory members of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Without breaking his stride, Farage said: “Not for long! That is a time-limited statement.”
For Conservative MPs heartened by what they heard in Manchester, there’s a reminder of the existential stakes. In little more than six months it may no longer be possible for Badenoch to invite applause for those Tory legislators at Holyrood or Cardiff Bay, because on current polling they’ll be lucky to keep their jobs.
Those same Tories know this, of course. They too have seen more than 125 consecutive polls that Reform has led. It’s why, until Badenoch gave her speech on Wednesday morning, most of the private conversations they were having at conference were debates over when, not if, she should be deposed for Robert Jenrick. For now she has succeeded in rebutting what only last week appeared to be a slam-dunk case for a change of leadership.
Outside the parliamentary Conservative Party, however, the judgment remains final. Reform’s leadership thought the Tories were irrelevant last week and will be of the same view next week. Conservative membership may have risen this week, but not by the 1000 a day claimed by Reform. Not only did Farage decline to watch Badenoch’s speech, he and his colleagues took the deliberate decision to offer no public response to its contents at all. When Reform shares the results of those polls and their weekly victories in council by-elections on social media, the Conservative tallies are excluded.
That’s the toughest question for the new Kemi. Who cares? Anyone in Downing Street? Perhaps they should. The Tories finished second in about 80 of Labour’s 100 most marginal seats and the average majority of Sir Keir Starmer’s MPs – 3000 – is low by historical standards. Much is made, not least by the two parties in question, of the battle for supremacy between Labour and Reform, and whether a Conservative revival might force a reassessment of that electoral calculation. But even a modest Tory recovery could end up hitting Starmer hardest. About 4 per cent of his 2024 vote say they would vote for Badenoch tomorrow, a not insignificant number in a game with no margin for error.
But the view of No 10’s strategists is this. Voters want what Starmer has taken to calling our new “age of insecurity” to end. Really only two parties are offering a remedy, hence why the prime minister took the personal decision to talk up the threat posed by Farage in his conference speech. Labour’s prescription is for an active state to renew the country from the centre-left. Decision-makers in Downing Street describe Reform’s offer, by contrast, as strongman populism from the right.
That arguably flattens the subtleties out of Faragism, particularly its class consciousness and embrace of state intervention in the economy. But I doubt Farage himself would disagree with Starmer’s judgment that politics in England, at least, is now a conversation between two people. Is there room for three? On this the Labour and Reform leadership would also agree: not if we can help it.
As we approach the budget, we will hear more from Starmer and Rachel Reeves on why the strongman could weaken Britain in the world and in the eyes of the markets, while Farage dials up his anti-Labour rhetoric. But there’ll be just as much of ministers evoking the memory of Liz Truss, as Pat McFadden did Thursday morning, and Reform using this line from one of its senior officials: “It’s going to take more than a single policy announcement for the British public to forget 14 years of Tory failure.”
Does that underplay the significance of what we heard in Manchester? One charitable reading of Badenoch’s speech from inside No 10 was this: you can read it as a Conservative answer to the age of insecurity. Abolishing stamp duty offers, at least for some people, a better chance of security through home ownership. Sound money equals security through fiscal stability and lower debt. Welfare reform could mean security through work. Emphasis, though, on “some people” and “could”. For many others, it will just mean cuts that make them feel rather less secure in their own lives.
The one thing that divides Starmer and Farage as one from Badenoch is their shared belief that Thatcherism, the economic doctrine that shaped their youth, has had its day. The Tories are turning back to it just as it goes out of fashion.
That’s not to say the Tories are necessarily wrong. If you were to ask an economic historian which politician had the best answer to Britain’s woes in 1929 they might say David Lloyd George, whose Liberals ran on a Keynesian manifesto, or Oswald Mosley, whose career as a Labour minister died on the hill of the same philosophy that year. By contrast, Ramsay MacDonald’s umbilical attachment to the gold standard and strict fiscal orthodoxy seems suicidal in hindsight. But leaders can’t win elections in hindsight, as the Liberals and Mosley’s New Party then learnt in 1931. You do that by convincing voters you understand what they want in the here and now.
What would really worry Starmer’s inner circle is if the Conservatives sent a clear signal they had broken with the past and wanted to reinvent the centre-right into something truly distinct from Reform. Badenoch now has a big retail offer on stamp duty yet at the same time defends the record of her predecessors, at least up to 2020. And on immigration she offers an almost identical policy program to Farage – even as the sum of her party’s critique is that Reform are “socialists” with hardline policies on borders and crime.
Maybe change “socialists” to a less pejorative description of statist economics and it’s not a million miles from a fair description of how this government and Reform’s leadership might see themselves. And it’s probably a politics that could win you a parliamentary majority.
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Is it time to start taking the Conservative Party seriously again? Not if you ask Nigel Farage. From his lofty perch at the top of the opinion polls and Millbank Tower, the leader of Reform UK sees no shift in the tectonic plates of British politics. Nor did he bother with Kemi Badenoch’s speech to Tory conference.