Editors may relish the drama, but behind the scenes they must be tearing their hair out as the feud escalates. “Stop fighting each other and end the Labour nightmare,” pleaded the Daily Mail, like a weary parent begging quarrelling children to behave.
A new soap opera has launched in British politics: the battle for domination on the right. Egged on by a right-wing media that is instinctively loyal to the Tories, yet weirdly enamoured by Farage and Reform UK, every Conservative defection is framed as another step towards an inevitable pact. The question is: are the Conservatives and Reform on a collision course, or a slow march towards alliance?
At a first glance, Reform appears to have the upper hand. Each new defector feeds into the narrative of a Conservative Party in decay, haemorrhaging talent and authority to a populist challenger that looks increasingly like the Conservative Party 2.0. But appearances can be deceptive and the surface drama obscures a more complicated, and less comforting, reality for those craving a merger of forces.
Take the recent defections. Ahead of Robert Jenrick’s defection, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch had already kicked him off the Tory frontbench and suspended his party membership, citing evidence that he had been “plotting in secret.” Days later, despite Badenoch declaring herself “100% confident” that there would be no further defections from her shadow cabinet, Andrew Rosindell, followed Jenrick out the door.
The true heir to Thatcherism?
Yet Rosindell’s decision was hardly unexpected. In October, while serving as shadow foreign affairs secretary, he publicly stated that he would be willing to serve in a cabinet alongside Farage, a declaration entirely in keeping with his long history of hard right and thoroughly reactionary views. In his resignation statement on X, he described himself as “a loyal and committed supporter of the principles advocated by Margaret Thatcher,” language clearly designed to reassure voters that Reform, not the Conservatives, is now the true heir to Thatcherism.
With each defection, Reform looks less like an insurgent protest party and more like a familiar political home for disaffected Tories. So why not bring the two ships together and sail against Labour?
Farage’s strategy offers one answer. Last week, he warned that any Conservative MPs considering defecting to Reform must do so before May’s local elections. As journalist Peter Kellner has observed, his tactic is clear: “Attract, say, a dozen more Tory MPs in the next few weeks, create panic in the Conservative Party, win the votes of even more right-of-centre electors, and dictate surrender terms to the Tories soon after.”
In other words, Reform doesn’t want a pact now. It wants capitulation later.
Badenoch has other ideas
Badenoch however has shown no interest in playing along. If anything, the defections may have strengthened her hand. Her response to Jenrick, that Farage had done her “spring cleaning,” was calculated and effective. It reframed the story from Tory weakness to leadership resolve, casting Reform as a source of instability and defectors as liabilities she was better off without.
And that message appears to have landed with her MPs. Far from triggering panic, the split was welcomed by many on the Conservative benches as overdue discipline.
“Historically, the party has suffered from two weaknesses: too many people trying to bring down the leader, and not enough leaders getting rid of those people,” said one shadow minister said. “Hopefully now we’re all pulling in the same direction.”
Another noted that internal WhatsApp groups were “almost silent,” and “nobody cares about it.”
Such a response undercuts the assumption, eagerly pushed by sections of the right-wing press, that a Tory-Reform pact is both inevitable and necessary.
Editors may relish the drama, but behind the scenes they must be tearing their hair out as the feud escalates.
“Stop fighting each other and end the Labour nightmare,” pleaded the Daily Mail, like a weary parent begging quarrelling children to behave.
And their anxiety isn’t hard to understand. To go all-in on one leader or party risks alienating readers loyal to the other. And the idea of a full-throated pivot to Reform remains close to unthinkable. After all, the Telegraph has endorsed the Conservative Party at every general election since 1945. Likewise, the Mail has consistently supported the Conservative Party apart from a brief flirtation with the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. For both newspapers, a clean break would mean abandoning not just a party, but a tradition.
There is precedent for this awkward balancing act. During the 2015 general election, the Daily Mail appeared to agree with almost everything Nigel Farage said. Yet when Farage’s adviser asked why the paper would not simply endorse UKIP, the answer revealed the limits of that flirtation. “Orders, dear boy, orders,” replied the journalist, with a knowing nod to the paper’s unshakeable bond with the Conservatives.
And if Reform sweep the board?
Yet, if Reform were to sweep the board, as some polls suggest, and no pact is required, who would the traditional Tory papers back then?
More in Common’s January MRP polling shows a snapshot of that dilemma, while also hinting at tentative Conservative stabilisation.
Based on a survey of more than 16,000 Britons, the model estimates that if a general election was held today, Reform would win 381 seats, with Labour and the Conservatives fighting for second place. On just 31 percent of the vote, Reform would secure 60 percent of the seats, a level of disproportionality rivalled only by the 2024 general election.
Labour would slump to just 85 seats, down 326 seats from its July 2024 landslide. Yet the poll is not so bleak for the Conservatives. Although it still projects losses of more than 50 seats, it is the first time in a year that the model has increased the number of seats the party is forecast to win. As More in Common notes, this may mark the beginnings of Tory stabilisation rather than terminal decline.
This improvement comes at Labour’s expense. The Conservatives are projected to cling on to more affluent seats in and around London, where Labour and the Liberal Democrats are their competitors, while the seats they continue to haemorrhage to Reform are concentrated in more working-class, Leave-voting areas. One suspects that Tory Party private polling would confirm that the loss of their liberal leaning seats would not be offset by gains in Reform voting areas should their embrace of Nigel become even more intense.
Selective reporting
The right-wing press seized selectively on these details. The Sun, firmly loyal to the Conservatives, splashed on Badenoch overtaking Farage in favourability ratings for the first time in over a year. Her net rating now stands at –11, compared with Farage’s –13. Half of respondents approved of how she handled Jenrick’s defection, just 12 percent disapproved. More than 80 percent of Conservative voters backed her decision to expel him.
The Express struck a more sympathetic tone towards Farage, highlighting his setback while stressing Badenoch’s limited public recognition. Nearly three in ten respondents said they did not know enough about her to offer a view, hardly a ringing endorsement, but hardly fatal either.
What about the donors – and what about policy?
In December, the Financial Times reported that Nigel Farage had told party donors a pact between Reform and the Tories is “inevitable.” Farage denied the claim but acknowledged he would like to absorb the party by winning over defectors and replacing it.
“No deals, just a reverse takeover,” he said. “A deal with them as they are would cost us votes.”
His comments allowed Labour to argue that Reform and the Tories were ideologically the same, with Keir Starmer hitting out at their “unholy alliance.”
That such remarks were made, allegedly, in a conversation with donors is hardly surprising.
As Henry Hill, deputy editor of ConservativeHome, noted in response, serious donors, of the sort Reform is attracting, expect clarity about contingencies. Writing on UnHerd, Hill argued that these figures will naturally want to know what the “Plan B” is if, as polling has suggested, Farage falls short of the numbers required to form a majority government.
But donors are not only concerned with electoral arithmetic. They also care deeply about policy. That raises a more substantive question: what would a Conservative–Reform pact actually look like in practice?
The answer is potentially troubling. Any formal alliance or merger would likely pull the combined project further to the right, explicitly rejecting the “centrist” approach that many on the Conservative right blame for the party’s 2024 election defeat. The result would almost certainly be a harder line on immigration and a more aggressive retreat from Net Zero commitments.
A pact may still come, but only if one side clearly breaks the other. For now, the battle for the right is exactly that, a battle. Those expecting a neat, media-brokered truce are likely to be disappointed. Politics, like soap opera, thrives on conflict, and on the right, no one is ready to call the final episode.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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