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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London
If some of the more excitable commentary that has accompanied the news from Kingswood and Wellingborough is anything to go by, then the real story of this week’s by-elections is not so much a dreadful defeat for the Conservatives and an encouraging win for Labour, but the performance of the radical rightwing populist party, Reform UK.
Until Thursday, the story goes, Richard Tice and his colleagues had flattered to deceive, doing nowhere near as well in real elections, whether parliamentary or local, as they’ve been doing recently in the opinion polls. This time, however, things were different: the FT’s latest poll tracker puts them on 10 per cent nationally — a figure they essentially matched in Kingswood, where their candidate took 10.4 per cent of the vote, and surpassed in Wellingborough, where the party’s co-deputy leader Ben Habib, took exactly 13 per cent.
Cue predictable panic in the Conservative party — some of it real, some of it confected in the sense that the results will be exploited by rightwing Tories who, even if they don’t want Rishi Sunak replaced, want him to move further in their (and Reform’s) direction. That would mean cutting taxes, slowing progress to net zero, and taking an even harder line on immigration.
The chances of any of that persuading enough voters to return to the Conservative fold to secure them a fifth successive term in office are slim — not when the priority for most Brits right now is an end to both the cost of living crunch and the crisis in the country’s health service.
And before they do anything too rash, anxious Tory MPs should also remember that Reform’s performance at these by-elections doesn’t even come close to matching the results achieved by its predecessor, Ukip.
In local contests which preceded the 2015 general election (when it took 12.6 per cent of the vote), the party, then led by Nigel Farage, regularly came second, not third — and it did so on shares of the vote that exceeded 20 per cent. Moreover, it managed to take first place in the two constituencies (Clacton and Rochester and Strood) it fought after two Tory MPs defected to Ukip in the autumn of 2014.
That said, what we saw in Kingswood and Wellingborough is not nothing. If Reform manages to stay in double figures throughout the coming year, then the Conservatives are in even more serious trouble than they appear to be right now. That’s because polling suggests that the bulk of those switching from the party to Reform voted Tory back in 2019. Were Tice to follow through on his promise to stand candidates in Conservative, as well as opposition-held seats, then this could, in a swath of more marginal constituencies, easily see tens of Tory candidates lose out to their Labour and Liberal Democrat rivals.
Moreover, Reform has achieved its current level of support with the relatively unknown Richard Tice in charge. Heaven knows what sort of figures it might register were Nigel Farage to decide to return to the fray and lead a party of which he (it being a registered company rather than a more conventional membership organisation) is the majority shareholder.
Rishi Sunak must be hoping that the lure of the big bucks that Farage, as a friend of Donald Trump, could earn as a talking head in the US presidential campaign will ensure that eventuality doesn’t come to pass. He should also be crossing his fingers that none of the Conservatives’ current contingent in Westminster jumps ship to join Reform, especially if a defector has the courage to resign their seat to fight a by-election.
But, in the midst of all this speculation, let’s not lose sight of the bigger story from both Kingswood and Wellingborough — namely that they bare out the results of opinion poll after opinion poll in suggesting that voters are fed up with the Tories and now seem prepared to give Keir Starmer and Labour the benefit of the doubt.
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