The Tories must strike a pact with Reform or be obliterated.

Not my words, the words of Simon Heffer.


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Last week I read the draft programme for the Reform Party. It did even more than the pitiful Budget presented last Wednesday to convince me that this government is toast.


A smaller state, lower taxes, a one out, one in immigration policy, a deregulatory programme to capitalise on Brexit – and that is only the tip of the iceberg – sounded like everything Conservative voters in 2019 expected their party to do.

Instead, their reward was years of inaction, ideological implosion, lies and incompetence for which the pandemic (grotesquely mishandled) is simply no excuse.


Yet I suspect Reform – even if the charismatic Nigel Farage returns from television to lead it, which I think unlikely – will struggle to win a single seat.


Taking on long-established parties under a first-past-the-post system is tricky: it is exactly a century since it last happened with any degree of success, when Labour had its first taste of office thanks to the Liberals deciding not to chuck it out.


But what Reform can, and almost certainly will, do is garner enough votes in many seats to prevent Conservatives from winning them. I have said to people for months that this feels more like 1974 than 1997, but the Conservatives’ utter failure to behave politically and to show the slightest sign of an ability to campaign makes me fear I was wrong in this assessment.


If so, Reform will help put in a Labour government not for four or five years, in all probability, but for eight or nine at least. Many former Conservative supporters seem unperturbed by this: they argue there would be little difference in having a Labour government after the record of charlatanry, incompetence and intellectual paralysis that characterised the Johnson, Truss and Sunak administrations respectively.


If the majority was small – and Labour must win 124 seats it did not win in 2019 to obtain a majority of one in the House of Commons, with boundary changes against it – the sceptics might be prove to be right.

However, a landslide would precipitate an expansion of the already bloated welfare state, of absurdly expensive Sadiq Khan-style stunts in local government, of wokeness paralysing the entire education system and public sector, and of an already entirely dysfunctional immigration system effectively ceasing to exist as Labour continued the old Blairite policy of teaching the middle classes a lesson through mass migration.


Productivity and competitiveness would languish, and Labour seems not to know what “deregulation” means. Some may consider all this (and let’s chuck in gratuitous constitutional reform, such as more Khan-like executive mayoralties, and reform of the House of Lords that would ensure most of the rubbish appointed in recent years stays in) a rather high price to pay to teach an admittedly atrocious Conservative party a lesson.


With odd notable exceptions, much of the Conservative high command appears to be in denial about this strong possibility. The denial persists even though so many of their backbench colleagues are either running up the white flag – 59 have said they won’t fight again, plus three who won as Conservative in 2019 but have lost the whip – or desperately looking for a career after what they expect will be their defeat.


And a glance at the Reform programme, which reads like a document drafted by Mrs Thatcher’s policy unit, ought to remind them of what they should be doing, but lack the guts to do.


That lack of guts was underlined not just in the Budget but in the failure with each day that passes to be seen by an angry public to address the issues most concerning to them – that pitiful border control system, but also incontinent public spending and an apparently increasing demoralisation among of those of working age.


Some of us are old enough to remember such demoralisation in the winter of 1978-79; we were rescued from it by Thatcherism breaking a sick consensus. With Reform now flying the Thatcherite banner in a way the Conservatives dare not, the consequences should be distressingly obvious. In 2019, gaining very little in return, Mr Farage stood down Brexit party candidates to give the Conservatives a clear run in sufficient seats to allow them to thrash Labour. I am assured no such concessions will be made this time. Therefore, if any sort of pact is to be done between these two Right-of-centre forces, the initiative would have to come from the Conservatives.


Yet even at only 18 per cent support in the latest poll – 28 points behind Labour, and just five points ahead of reform, which has 13 per cent – the Conservatives are maintaining their impersonation of lemmings.


How low does their polling have to go before they realise that they are no longer the authentic voice of Right-of-centre Britain? Would it help if Reform overtook them in the polls, as, at this rate, it soon might, especially if its own programme becomes more widely known among the electorate?


It is too late to replace yet another Conservative leader – though replacing some of the dunderheads in his cabinet might be helpful.


However, someone should start talking to Reform about a pact, or a form of coupon election: such as Tories standing down in “red wall” seats they are doomed to lose and giving Reform a clear run, and Reform not fighting seats defended by sound Conservatives.


The alternative appears to be near-obliteration, and the time to prevent that is fast running out.