Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
The Conservative Party and Reform UK will fight the next election on more or less the same manifesto. This week, the Tories committed themselves to leaving the ECHR and scrapping net zero, the two policy issues most often brought up by former Conservative voters as reasons for leaving.
Of course, political defections are about much more than manifestos, and those who deserted the Tories at the last election won’t magically return because their specific complaints have been addressed.
My guess is that Reform supporters will now switch to arguing that the Tories won’t deliver. More than a decade ago, when I first proposed an electoral pact between the Conservatives and UKIP, the main response from UKIP supporters was “Cameron will never actually hold an In/Out referendum.” It’s how people deal with cognitive dissonance.
In fact, on the ECHR the Conservatives seem more serious about implementation than Reform. They have done an impressive amount of homework. Lord Wolfson spent three months looking in detail at every aspect of the questiony – what would it mean for the Windsor Framework and the Belfast Agreement, what domestic statutes will have to change, etc. – before the policy as adopted.
Robert Jenrick has been doing hugely impressive work on exposing the outrageous bias of some immigration judges. He understands that leaving the ECHR without also tackling domestic judicial activism will achieve little.
Meanwhile, Mel Stride has been identifying specific and plausible spending cuts rather than promising general tax cuts and Claire Coutinho has put forward a realistic alternative to our current expensive energy policy, one that will bring back growth.
My guess is that all this will make barely any dent in the polls. Few normal people know or care about political process. If you argue for, say, school vouchers, the most common response is “I just want my local school to be good”. The connection between those two things, between parental choice and upward pressure on standards, is of interest only to the kinds of political anoraks who read websites like this one.
In much the same way, few people want to be told that, for all the reasons Kemi Badenoch set out in her thoughtful speech on Sunday, the source of most of our problems is an unresponsive administrative state. They don’t want to hear that we have self-serving quangos, left-wing bureaucrats and a politicised judiciary frustrating everything from deportations to oil exploration. “Why didn’t you sort it out? You had 14 years!”
We live in an impatient and screen-addled age. Margaret Thatcher was rarely shouted down with “I’ll never trust the Tories again, not after Edward Heath”. It was understood that, despite having served in Heath’s cabinet, she none the less offered something different.
But voters nowadays seem to prefer slogans to substance. No amount of detailed policy work will convince people who have made the journey to Reform. Party allegiance is now as much about vibes as manifestos.
Still, it is the right thing to do. The right thing for the country and, indeed, no bad thing politically. When the economy tanks, wonkish competence will come back into vogue.
My long-standing call for an electoral pact with Reform is now supported by most of our party members. Although Reform’s keyboard warriors hate the idea, my sense is that Nigel Farage is more open minded. He spoke at his own conference of lack of government experience being his party’s biggest weakness, and he knows how difficult it is to field a full slate of competent parliamentary candidates.
More than this, I think he has a sense of the magnitude of the challenge. Reforming the civil service and judiciary, scrapping quangos, ripping out the entire Blairite juridical settlement – these are huge tasks, not easily accomplished by a government which (like Starmer’s) was elected on barely a third of the vote. I think he wants a mandate, not just a majority, and sees himself as one day becoming leader of some kind of merged party.
It may be too early to discuss all that (though both parties should be careful not to select candidates in places which will make a future accommodation impossible). But either way, the Conservatives are doing the right thing by offering sensible, small government, pro-business policies that can deliver growth and strong borders. It may feel unrewarding, but it is the only credible approach.
