Tory election hopes hit after Nigel Farage decides to stand for Reform UK
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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s troubled re-election bid was dealt a double blow on Monday, as Nigel Farage seized the leadership of Reform UK and a new poll showed Labour could win the biggest majority of any party in a century.
Farage’s return to frontline politics was long feared by Tory strategists, who believe the high-profile Brexiter will boost support for the insurgent Reform UK and peel off yet more Tory voters.
Only weeks after declaring he would take a back-seat role in the election campaign, Farage announced he would replace Richard Tice as the party’s leader and contest the seat of Clacton in Essex on July 4.
The move by Farage, the rightwing party’s founder and majority owner, triggered alarm in Tory ranks and came just minutes before a major new poll suggested Labour could be on track for a huge 194-seat majority.
The highly detailed YouGov “MRP” poll for Sky News found that Sir Keir Starmer’s party could win 422 seats, with the Tories languishing on 140. That would give Labour the biggest majority of any party in a century.
The poll — a multilevel regression and post-stratification model (MRP) — also suggested the Liberal Democrats could soar to 48 seats after winning just 11 at the last general election, while the Scottish National party could plummet from 48 to 17 MPs.
Another MRP poll for the consultancy More in Common showed Labour winning a smaller but still thumping victory, with 382 seats, to 180 for the Tories, 35 for the SNP and 30 for the Lib Dems.
Farage declared that Starmer already had the election in the bag but that he felt he would be “betraying” voters if he did not give them a serious rightwing option at the election.
“I am going to stand in this election,” Farage said at a press conference. “The election is over, it’s done. Labour have won, there is not a contest.”
Referring to his earlier announcement that he would stay out of the UK race to focus on supporting his friend Donald Trump in the US, Farage said: “I’ve changed my mind. It’s allowed you know. It’s not always a sign of weakness.”
The race in Clacton is Farage’s eighth attempt to be elected as an MP. He has been unsuccessful in previous campaigns.
Clacton voted 73 per cent to leave the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
A series of Tory MPs lamented the announcement. One said that Farage’s move would worsen the Conservatives’ defeat, adding: “We’re not going to be able to wrest the country back from Labour with him in parliament and only a handful of Tory MPs.”
A former Cabinet minister said the move represented “all the legions of hell” being loosed on Sunak, and blamed the prime minister for having “arrogantly rebuffed” Farage’s overtures last week about an electoral pact between the parties, which the Reform politician later laughed off as sarcasm.
Tim Montgomerie, founder of the ConservativeHome website beloved of grassroots Tories and an arch-Sunak critic, said it was the “worst possible nightmare for the Conservatives”.
Party insiders predicted that Reform could potentially win several east coast seats that were formerly Brexit strongholds: Clacton, Hartlepool and Boston.
They also conceded grim respect for Farage’s new slogan “It’s done”, a play on Boris Johnson’s catchphrase “Get Brexit done”, to describe the Conservatives’ apparent slide towards defeat.
Former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told the Financial Times: “There’s a great deal that Reform and the Tory party have in common in terms of their view of how the country should be governed, and we ought to try to work together.”
He suggested that some people who planned to vote for Reform on July 4 might otherwise have stayed at home rather than voted for the Conservatives.
Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, said Farage’s decision posed an “existential risk” to the Conservatives with dozens of seats where Sunak’s party was polling with a majority of fewer than 4 percentage points.
“If Reform takes those four points, Labour doesn’t have to win any more votes, but could gain an extra 30 seats and the Tories [would] go down from 1997 to their worst result in modern history,” Tryl added.
Speaking earlier on Monday, Sunak said he was not worried about Farage standing as an MP. “At the end of the day on 5 July, one of two people will be prime minister: either Keir Starmer or me,” he said.
Tory officials claimed that if Farage succeeds in splitting the Tory vote, it would give Starmer “a blank cheque to rejoin the EU”. The Labour leader says he will not rejoin the EU or the single market.
Several Tory policies announced during the election campaign, including national service, have aimed to secure the support of traditional voters who may be tempted to vote for Reform.
Both Sunak and Farage have ruled out a pact in the election, preventing a repeat of 2019 where Reform decided to stand down candidates in Tory-held seats and helped Boris Johnson deliver an 80-seat majority for the Conservatives.
Additional reporting by Jonathan Vincent
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