If Farage returns to politics, 2024 will be the start of the post-Tory era

New years have a variety of textures. Beyond the common, clichéd theme of renewal, there is a vast difference in public sentiment from one January to another. Sometimes the change of date, despite energetic efforts by the media to generate excitement around it, passes with little awareness, once the bells and parties are over; at other times, such as the first New Year after lockdown, there is a fervent consensus to hype the coming twelve months as a radical departure from a miserable past.

There are also many gradations in between these divergent poles. Only on a few occasions, however, has it been possible to predict with near-certainty a significant change occurring in the coming year. But 2024 belongs to that rarefied category: this year will see a seismic change in Britain’s political landscape. Or, more accurately, it will witness the first step in a sequence of changes that may take years to complete, ending in a radical realignment of our political system.

That system, since the 17^th century, has been binary, based on an alternation of power between two major parties. During the intervening three centuries there has been only one major adjustment of that bipartisan system, when Labour replaced the Liberals after 1918. That changing of the guard, however, did not disrupt the two-party system, it merely replaced one of the contenders. So, the change that seems inevitable in the course of 2024 will be much more radical than in 1918, since it prefigures the elimination of the Conservative Party, without a new equivalent of Labour stepping in to restore the binary balance.

The advent of the new year, with the realisation that the electorate must be faced within the next twelve months, seems to have brought even the tin-eared Tories to a recognition of their predicament. The more intelligent Conservative MPs spent the latter part of 2023 arranging with their constituency associations to find a successor candidate for the next election, rather than suffer the humiliation of hearing the returning officer announce the popular verdict on their stewardship.

The demise of the Conservative Party is not in doubt: the only matter for speculation is the scale of the defeat. Labour, as in 1997, nourishes a strong expectation of becoming the government before the end of the year. But the significant factor is that that expectation, though well-founded, is based on completely different electoral circumstances from 1997. In that year, an exhausted and divided Conservative Party, its reputation for economic competence shattered by the debacle of the sterling crisis on Black Wednesday, 1992, faced a hungry and, in PR terms, ferociously competent New Labour opposition, headed by a telegenic charlatan with a gift of lying shamelessly but credibly.

The outcome of the 1997 general election was a Labour landslide and a 179-seat majority for Blair. The media ran out of hyperbole to proclaim the seismic nature of that historic event. Yet the underlying reality was that the Labour victory, despite being a landslide, was in no way revolutionary: it was simply a striking example of the two-party system doing what it had always done, by replacing one of the binary contenders with the other. In constitutional terms, so far from being revolutionary, it reasserted the continuing monopoly of two parties controlling the country on their own terms.

That is why 1997, though an important political event with lasting consequences, was in a totally different category from the change that is expected in 2024. For this change will break the duopoly by putting one of the traditional contenders, the Conservative Party, permanently out of play. If the old system had remained unchallenged, it is virtually certain that the Tories would still have been roundly defeated by Labour. But such a rout, though deeply dismaying from the Conservative perspective, would not have been an extinction event.

The Tories would have licked their wounds, dusted themselves down and embarked on the long march back to electability, even if suffering two more general election defeats, as in the Blair era, since they would have known that in the Buggins’s Turn electoral system they constituted one of the two monopolist power blocs and that they would automatically return to office whenever Labour fell out of favour with voters.

The fatal difference this time is that the Tories have so provoked the electorate that, as with Brexit, they have conjured a new political force that threatens to destroy them beyond recovery and eventually, in one guise or another, take their place and force the reform of the electoral system. The extraordinary, incredible reality is that Labour, a natural party of government since 1918, merely threatens to exclude the Tories from power for a limited period, whereas Reform UK, which only by stretching the definition to the utmost can be termed a political party, threatens to kill them off permanently.

Reform UK is a curious phenomenon. It has no seats in Parliament, no non-European electoral record (having stood down in favour of the Tories in 2019), no experienced electoral machine, though it has some organisation and is learning as it grows, and no senior political figures, though, thanks to its brief term in the European parliament, it has some familiarity with political procedures. Its greatest asset, Nigel Farage, has been maintaining an arm’s-length relationship with the party. That does not, on the face of it, look like a very formidable force. Nevertheless, it is the entity that will make the difference between Tory defeat and extinction, some time in the coming year.

Reform is consistently polling at around 10 per cent. On current form, it could deprive the Conservatives of 35 seats. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. If Nigel Farage, honorary president of the party, were to return to an active campaigning role, psephologist Professor Sir John Curtice describes that scenario as “Tory MPs’ worst nightmare”. Polling shows that if Farage took a leading role in Reform, 28 per cent of the electorate would vote Reform, including 38 per cent of Conservative voters. That would leave Rishi Sunak’s party a smoking ruin.

As realisation dawns that they are in the killing bottle, panicking Tories are resorting to the most absurd fantasies. The latest is that, since some Labour voters will also defect to Reform, it could end up neutralising the threat. In this ingenious scenario, in a constituency with a large Conservative majority, while many Tories defect to Reform, reducing the majority, enough Labour voters also go to Reform, allowing the now wafer-thin majority just to hold off Labour. 

It could even happen – in some solitary instance; but the Red Wall vote is totally disillusioned with the Conservatives and will either revert to Labour or defect to Reform, neither of which moves could be anything other than catastrophic for the Tories. There is one respect in which 2024 does resemble 1997: this too will be a punishment election. Research has shown that the most alienating experience that motivates voters is to have been promised some benefit, only to have the expectation betrayed. On immigration, Brexit and everything else, the British electorate has been cynically betrayed by the Conservatives.

The public has at last understood the reality that has long been common currency among the elites: that the Tories dislike and despise the electorate. That disdain was especially apparent under David Cameron, but it is the enduring culture of the party. Sunak betrayed his contempt for the public by bringing back Cameron to unelected high office, lowering the proposed £38,000 income requirement for legal migrants to £29,000 and parleying with Dominic Cummings.

Sunak, a cosmopolitan who calls California “home”, knows he will be out of British politics by the end of the year, so this is no time for him to alienate the large corporations who crave cheap immigrant labour. If any one term betrays the Tory-elitist disregard for the electorate it is “populist”: it is the mark of a pariah to wish to implement the public will. Democracy is now demonised as “populism”.

There is no need to rehearse the shameful litany of Tory betrayal, the public knows it by heart. This will be a Punishment Election: the first objective of the public will be to punish the people who have flooded us with immigrants, destroyed our public services and taxed us to Second World War levels to pay for these outrages. That means that destroying the Conservative Party permanently, not just for three parliaments, will be the purpose of many voters in 2024.

That will put Reform – if, and only if, Farage leads it – in pole position to replace the Tories, probably by absorbing disgruntled Conservative factions. Labour will then be the next target, coupled with a Brexit-style campaign to abolish first-past-the-post and replace it with some form of proportional representation and referenda on major issues. One of the most important points Sir John Curtice made recently was his prediction that Reform UK could gain millions of votes but not win a single parliamentary seat.

That is precisely the kind of scandalous situation, in the much-vaunted oldest democracy in the world, that has bred disillusionment with politicians. If millions turn out to be disfranchised by an unjust electoral system, those unrepresented voters will form a formidable core lobby in the subsequent struggle for electoral reform. First, though, the betrayed voters of this country have a vengeful rendezvous at the ballot box with the party that has reduced Britain to its present state.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life