DAN HODGES: The Tories must strike a deal with Farage. He speaks for some voters who've been neglected far too long
Six weeks ago I wrote this: ‘It feels as if a reckoning is coming. Rishi Sunak needs to get a grip, and fast. Because if he doesn’t, this could be the Tories’ last campaign.’
Sunak never did get a grip. The D-Day debacle. The pledge to press-gang the nation’s youth into the Army. The betting scandal. The tale of emotional hardship as a child at not having Sky TV. The Supermajority Strategy.
The 2024 election – called at a time and place of Sunak’s choosing – was the Tories’ last chance to save themselves. And it was a debacle. The worst political campaign in modern British political history.
So that reckoning has duly arrived. It’s over. The Conservative party is now the political equivalent of Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue parrot. Jacob Rees-Mogg. Grant Shapps. Gillian Keegan. Penny Mordaunt. Liz Truss. This morning they, and hundreds of their colleagues, are pining for the fjords.
Nigel Farage on a visit to a sports club in Essex today. The Tories must strike some kind of accommodation with him, writes Dan Hodges
Meanwhile, among the handful of survivors, the inquest begins. Or rather, the fight over who gets to wield the mortician’s scalpel. Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat are all reportedly preparing bids to be the next Tory leader.
They should stop. It is an exercise in utter futility and denial. Because there is no longer any Tory party left to lead.
So instead of spending the next few months staring quizzically down at the corpse of modern Conservatism, this is what should happen next.
First, Sunak should be persuaded to stay on for the rest of this year. Yes, the election has been a personal humiliation. But he is essentially a mature and decent man. As his resignation speech was being drafted, an aide queried the passage where Sunak took sole responsibility for the loss. ‘He was adamant,’ an aide told me. ‘He insisted that bit stayed in.’
Next, the final remnants of the old Conservative party need to be swept away. Everything has to go. The name. The brand. The constitution. The governance structures. The whole sorry lot. Britain should never again be expected to be governed by people who attend Black and White balls and conclaves in shadowy 1922 Committees.
Then the New Conservative party must bite the bullet. Some sort of accommodation has to be struck with Nigel Farage and Reform.
Last week, I discussed their insurgency with a senior supporter of one of the Tory leadership candidates. ‘We need to unite the Right. We’re going to reach out to Reform voters and activists. But we’re not doing a deal with Farage.’
That’s a fantasy. There is no unification of the Right without Farage. By securing 17 per cent of the vote and five parliamentary seats, he’s made his decisive breakthrough. And he will have to be brought into the New Conservative tent.
One suggestion is for a formal merger of the two parties – The Reformed Conservatives. But that would represent a step too far.
Farage speaks for a selection of voters who have been neglected for too long by the two major parties. But his own party is also a home for some unsavoury elements that have no place within the British political mainstream. And until he faces up to that and acts – rather than continue to peddle conspiracy theories – the old Tory party will have to sup with a long spoon.
More plausible is some sort of electoral pact along the lines of the old Liberal/SDP alliance. Or a non-aggression pact of the sort Keir Starmer and Ed Davey surreptitiously cooked up in advance of Thursday’s electoral rout.
But before all this can be put in place, something more fundamental has to happen. The New Conservative party needs to decide what Conservatism actually is.
Over the next few weeks, a perception will take hold that the reason for the Tories’ annihilation was that they were ‘not Conservative enough’. The opposite is true. They were beaten because they were unable to appeal to anyone but a tiny sub-section of the old Tory base.
Kemi Badenoch hung on to her North West Essex seat on Thursday, and is reportedly preparing a bid to be the next Tory leader
Turn back the clock five years. I was in the Red Wall on the night of Boris Johnson’s greatest political triumph. He didn’t win by being ‘a True Conservative’. He won by being a New Conservative. By securing the votes of those who had never voted Tory, and would never have dreamt of voting Tory even a few short years before.
Back in the Red Wall over the past month, I heard time after time people say: ‘We gave them a chance, but they let us down. They’re just the same old Tories.’
What did people vote for last week? Change. What did the old Conservatives offer as their first major initiative of the campaign? National Service, a policy abolished in 1963.
Yet there are some in the old Tory ranks who still don’t get it. As the results were declared, some MPs and advisers began to focus on Labour’s relatively low national vote share. ‘Starmer hasn’t got a proper mandate,’ one said to me. ‘He’s there for the taking.’
But that’s to totally miss the point. The fact that Starmer managed to secure his Supermajority on just 35 per cent of the vote only further underlines the scale of the challenge the New Conservatives face.
They are confronted by a political machine far more efficient and ruthless than that constructed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The way Starmer took out the Corbynites, then mobilised his electoral coalition to defenestrate the old Tory party, was brutal.
The idea of putting Robert Jenrick or Tom Tugendhat or Kemi Badenoch up against such a lethal political operation – and expecting them to prevail – is laughable. Or it would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.
The fact is that Britain still needs the Conservative party. Or a Conservative party. Initially to keep Sir Keir Starmer honest. Then gradually to provide some sort of structured opposition. And finally to offer the nation a viable alternative government.
But that will not be provided by the old Tory party. Because it no longer exists. The heirs of Churchill and Macmillan and Thatcher have fought – and lost – their last campaign.
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