This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
News of another Tory defection to Reform will have come as no surprise to Elevenses readers after we chartered their seemingly rapid rise in last week’s dispatch. Dan Barker, the Conservative candidate for Mayor of Greater Manchester, was set to face the current mayor, Labour’s Andy Burnham, as the Conservative candidate in May. However, on Thursday he announced that he had joined Reform UK, following fellow senior Tory Lee Anderson who defected earlier this month, accusing his party of “giving up on the north”.
The move won’t damage the Tories’ prospects in Manchester – They couldn’t win that election if they were the only party running. But it is another humiliating blow for Rishi Sunak and shows that the bleed is real. Recent YouGov polling that shows his party has slipped back to Liz Truss levels of support also shows that Reform is now leading the Conservatives in the north, and are only four points behind them nationally. The imminent return of Nigel Farage to the fore could turbocharge that and see to it that all those seats picked up in 2019 get wiped off their slate in one fell swoop.
It begs the question of whether there are any safe seats left for the Tories. We’ve all seen the polls predicting that they could be left with 80, 36, or even 25 seats at the next election, and when you start to really contemplate that question, it doesn’t seem unrealistic. Recent by-elections show that the rural village dwellers of mid-Befordshire, North Shropshire and Tamworth have turned their backs on the Tories. The cities have never been so red and the farmlands have never been so amber, while Wales won’t forgive Port Talbot and Humza Yousaf is talking about “making history” by making Scotland “Tory free”, much like in Northern Ireland. There is some hope for Sunak in the outer suburbs – Uxbridge, Orpington, and unfortunately for that Gogglebox dude, Hertsmere too – but it’s slim pickings overall.
Yet paradoxically, it’s not like Labour is capturing hearts and minds in those seats either. In the by-elections just gone, they overturned Tory majorities without managing to significantly increase their own level of support. Alistair Strathern took Nadine Dorries’ seat with 13,872 votes last October, which was fewer votes than Labour’s candidate got in 2019. Damien Egan in Kingswood was the same, while both Wellingborough and Tamworth showed only a small uptick in support for Sir Keir Starmer’s party.
What does that tell you? Well, for a start, voters want the Tories out – that bit is obvious. But what is less obvious is a latent desire for full-scale electoral reform. It is becoming increasingly clear to see that the country isn’t split like it used to be. It doesn’t move in the same way. The pendulum doesn’t just swing from left to right, it is more nuanced than that.
Soon, people will realise they don’t just want the Tories out, they want a voting system that gives them more than just two choices, and only by consigning our archaic voting system to the annals of history will we be able to achieve that.
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