Malcolm Cupis: The Conservatives may have had a better than expected innings, but Reform just aren’t playing cricket

Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He stood as a Reform UK candidate in the 2024 general Election and was a constituency chairman. He resigned from Reform UK in February 2025 and has joined AdvanceUK. 

Summer is over, stumps have been drawn and now the Conference season is behind us.

The Conservative Party Conference turned out to be fascinating on a number of levels. Heading into it the party resembled a team that had its best years behind it. The victories of the past fading into distant memory. Test match specialists in a 20/20 competition.

The sense of gloom was palpable.

The thronging crowds of dwindling members barely bothered to turn up to the event. Unthinkable in the not too distant past. The grandstands were significantly empty and the commentators seemed to find it all too much effort to try to raise too much enthusiasm. Everybody expected another pasting.

As if that wasn’t enough, on the eve of the event there was a strong rumour that Romford MP Andrew Rosindell was making a carefully timed and choreographed announcement, that he was joining the recent drip of high profile Tory names to up sticks and head off into the dubious embrace of Nigel Farage. This was guaranteed to lower the mood of even the most hardy and committed Tory as they made their way through Storm Amy up the M6.

As party leader Kemi Badenoch strode out to the middle it brought to mind the infamous remark made by Geoffrey Howe, suggesting the opening batsman had been sent out  to face the fast bowlers with a bat broken by the team captain. A reminder, in itself, of how long the Conservative Party internal struggles have actually been going on for.

So the Conference started not so much with a bang as with a sharp intake of breath and a roll of the eyes. And then something quite fascinating happened. In her opening address Kemi Badenoch, to her credit, took her broken bat to the opposition with a steely determination, immediately casting all ideas of defence aside and aiming lusty blow after lusty blow at the opposition attack.

In the course of this Kemi successfully identified many of the issues that resonate most with natural Conservatives and promised to take immediate action to instigate policies that address them. Among those most prescient, the matters of immigration and membership of the ECHR, flagships of Reform and Advance and without question the matter most on the minds of anybody who occupies a traditionally Conservative perspective.

Barely had the reverberations of the speech died away though before Robert Buckland QC immediately and vocally raised a crooked finger from square leg to send her back to the pavilion, declaring that leaving the ECHR would be a “grave mistake”. This is a desperate blow for the party. This is not 1990. The members and supporters of that time would have shrugged off such a remark in the assured understanding that the broad church must tolerate such a thing and that unity would be restored in public. The electorate now sees this in the light of the party’s failure to deliver on its promises over 14 years’ of Government and simply has it reinforced, once again, that what the party promises and what it is able to give them are mutually exclusive. That the promises are hollow and that putting your faith in the utterances of the leader, no matter how well phrased they are, is bound to lead to nothing more than even greater disappointment.

The Conservative Party is damaged by what it has failed to deliver and the damage is made ever worse by the words of those associated with that damage who remain in the public eye and who try to convince the electorate that having let them down once, they should be trusted to do what they promise to do all over again.

For all that though the Conference wasn’t the disaster that many predicted and the party leader showed that perhaps there is a path to a better future after all. And that path is to go on the attack and to stop defending. It is to leave behind those who are intent on undermining the party from within and trying to drag it away from Conservatism, a la Robert Buckland.

In doing that though awkward truths have to be faced with regard to those within the party who are irredeemably associated with the failures of the recent past.

The truly extraordinary thing that immediately followed was that Andrew Rosindell seemed to suddenly vacillate. It is no secret that he has been seen at Reform events. He has told the media that he thinks his seat will go to Reform in the next election. Suddenly he started to backpedal and then pledged his commitment to the Conservative Party…but with a clear caveat.

That caveat being that he wants the Conservative Party and Reform to work together for the benefit of the nation.

Andrew Rosindell needs to be given a clear message.

There should be no doubt he is motivated by the best intentions but he needs to face a simple reality.

It doesn’t matter what you or anybody else might want, Nigel Farage will not share power with the Conservative Party, with any other party or with any other person within his own party.  Anybody who does not bow down before him, he regards as an enemy to be destroyed. If you are contemplating joining him, you join him not as a colleague, or a peer, but as a servant.

I wonder if Rosindell’s vacillation was actually a message to Farage and Reform more than a message to Badenoch and the Conservatives. That he may have belatedly realised that buying the opposition fast bowler a pint in the bar before the game doesn’t stop him from trying to knock your head off in the middle.

This sense can surely have only been further reinforced by all the headlines of yet more Reform Councillors suddenly finding themselves surplus to requirements in the last few days, most notably in the current Reform heartlands of Kent and the North East.

As time goes on more and more Reform members and Officers find themselves being forced to face the truth and I know that many of them increasingly are turning to Advance, whose membership is rapidly expanding and whose application to the Electoral Commission is due to be ratified imminently. Advance has been crafted by those who built Reform and who Farage forced out because he could not control them. As a result, it is no surprise that Advance is becoming what Reform should have been.

If Andrew Rosindell and other Conservatives truly want to put the needs of the nation first and work with others who share the same aspiration, I think they need to look away from the self-serving, authoritarian ego machine that is Reform UK and towards the rational, democratic, collegiate and rapidly expanding ranks of Advance UK.