Nadhim, Nadine, and Nigel are all in play for Reform’s inevitable New Year battle with the Tories

In many ways it was only to be expected.

Not Nadhim Zahawi’s defection. That was a surprise.

No, to be expected was the general outbreak of proper fighting in the predictable Tory-Reform battle, the moment the Conservatives proved they weren’t as ‘dead’ as Labour and Reform had wished.

More and more polling proves this. Not, as some giddy Conservative social media accounts would have it, that the Tories are riding high. They aren’t, but anybody but the most dyed-in-the-wool Reformer can see, far from withering, the direction of travel, albeit slowly, is back up.

I pointed out some months ago, that when that happened, it was likely there would be an almighty Reform switch away from attacking Labour and towards an assault on the Tories.

Nadhim Zahawi crossing to them was a renewal of that assault.

In one sense this has as much to do with Labour as the parties of the right. With Starmer pulling the sort of handbrake U-turns that would astonish a boy racer and yet driving inexorably into a political brick wall, the assumption this time last year that politics was now about a straight fight between Labour and Reform has not proved true.

Veteran Labour MP Karl Turner thinks ‘U-turn14’ (two more than Starmer once claimed was curtains for Boris Johnson) on Jury trials is just round the corner Labour insist the UK has now turned, and the Tories would welcome it, if it is.

If Labour would add a U-turn on Chagos, the new Chinese Embassy, and assisted dying, we might all applaud.

But Labour’s tangible and obvious doom spiral – one I’m now increasingly convinced they cannot pull out of – has left a vacuum.

To bend a phrase: Nature and Nadhim abhors a vacuum.

Zahawi sees his move as the best way to ensure Labour is a one term government. I know because he told me. Honest cards on the table – we’ve known each other for a long time and are friends. But there are some home truths that enlighten the bigger picture here.

His defection has not gone down that well.

Yes, as ever – and I’m unconvinced it ever looks great – some Conservatives have done the usual  ‘I always thought they were a wrong ‘un. Never really one of us. A has-been’.

The problem for Reform is that too many of their supporters, outriders and commentators are saying the same thing.

Let’s start with the good news for Reform. Richard Tice – trying a little too hard to deal with some Reform backlash – pointed out Zahawi is by any measure a business success, has quite literally ‘a wealth of contacts’, and has been in Cabinet in a number of roles. It’s now cliché that Farage needs experience. Zahawi is experienced, and he can get things done.

It is also true that Zahawi had run out of road for a political career inside the Tory party. If anything, the reports he’d lobbied for a peerage from the Conservatives – and they said no – rather underlines that.

Zahawi is like almost all the now long list of Conservative defectors to Reform – and indeed the two that defected to Labour in 2024 – a group of people that had decided, and correctly assumed, any further progress in politics for them was not going to come within Tory ranks.

One of the things Badenoch was told, in that period where she seemed quiet and absent and the party really did look lost if not dead, was that to go forward with any chance at all of renewal and revival the party needed to change their candidates and how they were selected. The election removed scores of people, who were going to struggle even if they wanted to, to get back in.

In some quarters the more ex-Tories Reform takes, the harder it is for Reformers to say how bad the Tories are. Zia Yusuf pointed to Labour’s moves on online safety as an authoritarian law – the Online Safety Act – brought in by the failed Tories. What he left out is that the Bill’s champion was Nadine Dorries, now Reform, and brought in when Zia was a Tory. The repository of failed Tories, all of whom were in the party when Reform say it betrayed everyone, is not a very helpful place for them to be.

However if you are a former Tory MP realistically thinking you won’t get back into Parliament under a blue rosette  it’s perhaps not surprising you might eye that poll lead of Reform’s and think ‘that’s the only way back’. That’s pretty logical. I get it.

More importantly, the ‘failed Tory’ jibe, ironically most often levelled by Reformers, is far too umbrella.

Most defectors were strong Boris backers. Nadine Dorries is the apogee.

To many Tory members, even now, that made these individuals better Conservatives than that handful who remain and are frequently, if erroneously, labelled the ‘closet Lib Dem cabal’. But now it seems BoJo is not coming bouncing back it reinforces that lack of option most of them felt.

Just remember, if Farage has a source for his anger with the Tories, and why the tone from the get-go has been one of ‘destroying’ more than beating, it is Boris Johnson. Farage genuinely feels Boris betrayed him in 2019 and to be fair that’s something of a theme with people who trust Boris Johnson.

Betrayal is also the worst crime in Farage’s eyes – unless you are betraying the Tories, and then it’s fine. Just not him.

I predict there will be further defections, and names swirl all the time, but Jenrick shouldn’t be one of them. He’s not going.

The future for further Tory defectors inside Reform is also far from certain, if the backlash to Zahawi tells us anything. Remember Zia’s promised them nothing, even though of course Reform have!

The interesting point is that for all the betrayal narrative, and Tories must accept that runs deep and is genuinely felt by many former Conservative voters, but I don’t buy it at the top of Reform.

It’s a vehicle. It’s the tip of a very calculated electoral spear.

The exuberant Arron Banks said the quiet bit out loud, as he sometimes does, within his regular and robust forays on social media:

“In order to win Reform have to destroy the Tories or weaken them so badly they can’t compete and then take on Labour in a two horse race”

It’s blunt, it makes sense, and it’s been their strategy from the get-go.

She knows this, and has explained why, but ‘early Badenoch’ looked as if the work was being done for them. The bitter war of words between Conservatives and Reform right now is a result of the fact the Tories just haven’t laid down and died, but via Kemi, come out fighting.

I said countless times on ConHome: telling people who’ve still committed to the Tories, that you are out to destroy them just fires them up to fight back. Just, by the by, as Labour obsessing about the supposed ‘evils’ and ‘racism/fascism/wrongism’ of Reform more often helps advertise Reform, not hurt them.

Labour are not just bad at government but bad at politics.

The Tories would do well to stick to their strategy of firing at Labour, as that is their job as the official opposition. We know Reform want a fight, because it’s in their game plan. Perhaps don’t give them one. It’s one they want, and according to Banks, they need.

It’s an odd fight. Agree or disagree there are still many Conservative members who want a rapprochement between the Conservatives and Reform to ‘unite the right’. This is the year where that conversation, or shouting match if it must be, will resolve one way or the other.

The key is to do so without destroying each other in a way that simply helps the left, or lets them off their deserved hook.

Zahawi is significant not so much for what he brings them, or grit his defection causes for them, but because it’s the big opening gambit in an ongoing plan. And battle plans famously don’t always survive first contact.

The ‘game’ is most assuredly afoot but will get kicked off the headlines by what’s coming in Iran.