Malcolm Cupis: I stood for election as a Reform candidate – here’s how the Tories can fight back

Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He was the Reform candidate in Melksham and Devizes at the 2024 election and a branch chairman, but has since rejoined the Conservatives.

I’m one of the legion of recently resigned Reform chairmen (and was a parliamentary candidate for them last July) who has returned to the Conservative Party that was my home for 25 years until 2021. With the dust settling after the local elections and Runcorn by-election last week, I want to make some points about party strategy going forward.

There is a lot of very damaging navel gazing and distraction going on here and other places online about political direction. Should the Conservatives track right, in order to go after the Reform vote? Or go left, to put clear blue sky between them?

Why damaging? For starters, I think it is a fundamental error to think of Reform as a far-right organisation; some of their economic policies, including nationalisation of utilities, are left of current Labour policy.

Moreover, but I believe that political debate now is far less framed in the traditional East/West, left/right axis. People are now far more influenced by the North/South and authoritarian/libertarian axes; it is more about statism vs liberty than it is about entrenched positions surrounding economics.

Why is this significant in how we set the Conservative Party apart from Reform going forward? Because Nigel Farage is ultra-authoritarian, and that is a weakness with very many natural conservatives that can, and should, be exploited to the full.

This ultimately is what led to me knowing that I could not sustain a future with Reform after two years of donating hundreds of hours and several thousand pounds of my own money to being a parliamentary candidate and branch chairman, and I know it is a significant component of what many others in a similar position have felt.

The moment Farage reappeared centre-stage in Reform weeks before the general election, I knew this would be the case, and I knew that it meant that my future was extremely uncertain. So it has come to pass.

In the last few weeks there has been a McCarthyite putsch against free thinkers and natural communicators in Reform. This has been undertaken under the trojan horse of vetting, administered by Reform’s Chairman, who conveniently sits a step removed from Farage himself. If you are removed in vetting you are given no explanation and no justification.

Reform has insisted that it is the party of free speech whilst demonstrating a complete intolerance of free speech among its own volunteers, candidates, and officers – most especially if that free speech questions Farage’s approach, or the very obvious lack of policy detail behind the headlines that he feeds the media and his devotees.

This authoritarianism has been openly and unapologetically pursued in service of the presidential-style campaign that Farage has embarked upon. The “conferences” aren’t conferences at all – to be a conference, you have to confer. There is no conferring at Reform. These are presidential rallies: endless bright lights and thumping music, rabble rousing rhetoric, and support speakers who are under no illusion about their role as a warm-up act for the supreme leader.

There is no discussion about policy, locally or nationally, anywhere within Reform. It all takes place at the highest level and is filtered down. And if you raise any kind of concern about this or, God forbid, question the approach, then you are dealt with in the most severe way possible.

This is not a political party. It is not democratically organised and run. It is administered as a business, and volunteers are treated as employees. You will pledge your loyalty absolutely, you will not speak unless spoken to, and you will do what you are told.

If you can’t be relied on to do this you will not be selected, regardless of what your merits might be. If you rock the boat you will be removed and vetting is the perfect way to remove you.

So where does the opportunity lie for the Conservative Party?

First of all, forget depicting Reform as a far-right political entity. It isn’t. Forget the navel gazing about left or right as the best position to take going forward. That has been consigned to political history.

What the Conservative Party must do is set out a position and stick to it and simply come up with a range of policies that resonate strongly with the electorate and work tirelessly to convince them that never again will a Conservative government make promises and then, through internal division, deliberately set out not to deliver them.

Kemi Badenoch has in recent weeks invoked the memory of Margaret Thatcher on several occasions – and there are some vital lessons that Thatcher gave us that we would do well to remember now.

The first of these is that you are elected to serve, not elected to rule. Conservative politicians have long since lost sight of this, along with politicians from all the other main parties, locally, nationally and internationally. It is vital for Tories to remember to use their ears in their constituencies and their mouths in Parliament and not the other way around.

You can be certain that Reform elected representatives will be ignoring this vital lesson. They are able to hear only what Farage wants them to hear, and speak only to communicate this to the electorate.

Secondly, that if you stand in the middle of the road you get run down by traffic moving in both directions.

I’m afraid the days of broad-church politics are gone forever. The party has to be united in its strategy and its tactics. It cannot sustain any longer having factions that are permanently at war with each other, dragging the party into endless internal conflict on vital issues, that then lead the electorate to reasonably believe that it cannot be trusted with their vote.

This has to be resolved once and for all. The party must prove to the electorate that it is united in order for it to be credible and to inspire trust.

The word conservative has a very specific meaning. Politics is not football; you do not change your strategy and tactics to win at any cost. You have to have a foundation of core values from which you do not depart if you are to have the unity required to convince the electorate to put its trust in you.

If you do not know what core conservative values are, or if you do not share those values, you almost certainly aren’t a conservative.

It is time to get it right. Failure to do so will guarantee the end of the Conservative Party as an effective political entity and it will herald a future of authoritarian presidential-style rule. It is vital that we win this ideological battle.