Gavin Barwell: The best case against a pact with Reform UK is that they’re openly trying to kill the Tory Party

Lord Barwell is a Conservative peer. He served as MP for Croydon Central from 2010 to 2017, and as Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister from 2017 to 2019.

I am honoured to have been asked by your esteemed editor to cover for my friend and ideological soulmate David Gauke, who is otherwise engaged with his review of sentencing policy this week, though I can only hope to receive the same adoration he regularly gets in the comments section…

I am spoilt for choice about what to write about. How Conservatives should respond to Donald Trump’s attempt to drag the global trading system back into the 19th century? Whether those Conservatives who assured us that Trump could be trusted on Ukraine, was a free trader, and believed in the rule of law are feeling just a wee bit penitent?

The desperate need for a political party in this country that is totally focused on growth, and not on a bigger state and more regulation of our labour market – or maintaining unnecessary trade barriers with our nearest neighbours, and reducing even economically beneficial migration?

But I decided to write about the future of politics on the right in this country.

In a few weeks’ time, Kemi Badenoch will face her first electoral test in the form of this year’s local council elections and the Parliamentary by-election in the Runcorn & Helsby constituency.

She couldn’t have a much harder baptism. She has inherited a situation if anything even more difficult than that which confronted William Hague in 1997. Two of her three immediate predecessors did immense damage to the party’s reputation: Boris Johnson by repeatedly lying about Partygate, and by promising to take back control of our borders and then putting in place a new immigration system that trebled net migration; Liz Truss by trashing our reputation for economic competence.

Unlike in 1997, we now face a challenge from our right in the form of Reform as well as the challenge from Labour and the Liberal Democrats to our left.

And whereas William Hague’s first electoral test – the 1999 local council elections – offered a chance to regain some ground in local government, Kemi is almost certain to preside over a further loss of council seats: most of the seats up for election on 1 May were last contested in 2021, when the Conservative Party was riding high in the polls in the wake of the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine.

And on top of that, the first by-election of the new Parliament in Runcorn & Helsby is one of the last seats where she would have wanted a by-election: Reform were in second place in July and are therefore likely to be able to portray themselves as the challengers to Labour.

If, as seems likely, Reform win hundreds of council seats and the by-election, while the Conservative lose hundreds of seats, it will inevitably lead to more talk about whether the two parties should merge or at least do a deal where each would stand down in certain constituencies to avoid splitting the anti-Labour vote.

I should declare an interest at this point: I would not want to be a member of, or vote for, a party in which Nigel Farage had a prominent role.

But too many people in politics proceed on the basis that if only their party adopted their set of views as its policies, it would lead to everlasting electoral success; clearly in many cases they are wrong. I will therefore try, as objectively as I can, to look at the case for and against merger and/or a deal.

The case for is simple. For as long as the right is divided, it is going to be very difficult to defeat this government, just as Margaret Thatcher was able to win fairly easily in the 1980s against a divided left.

Labour will all most certainly lose seats at the next election. But if the Conservatives and Reform continue to roughly evenly split the right vote, Sir Keir Starmer is highly likely either to win a majority or to be able to achieve one with the Liberal Democrats.

The case against merger is more nuanced. Proponents of a merger assume that a merged party would secure the support of everyone who currently says they intend to vote Conservative or Reform, but that is highly unlikely.

Polling suggests that there are plenty of current Conservative supporters like me who wouldn’t want to support a Faragist party. Likewise, there are plenty of Reform voters who wouldn’t vote Conservative even if the party were led by Farage (I am assuming here that Conservative proponents of a merger envisage Reform folding into the Conservative Party rather than the other way round).

If you look at the constituencies Reform is currently projected to win, many are in some of the least Conservative parts of the country – the North East, South Yorkshire, the Welsh valleys.

Polling also shows that on many issues 2024 Conservative voters are more like Labour and Liberal Democrat voters than Reform voters. Take attitudes to Trump: YouGov polling in mid-February found that only seven per cent of 2024 Liberal Democrat voters, eight per cent of Labour voters, and 28 per cent of Conservative voters have a favourable view of him, compared to 66 per cent of Reform voters.

Or take attitudes to tax. YouGov polling in mid-March found that only 18 per cent of 2024 Labour voters and 20 per cent of Liberal Democrats voters thought the government should look to reduce taxes, compared to 61 per cent of Reform voters, with Conservative voters somewhere in the middle on 41 per cent.

Or Net Zero. YouGov polling in mid-March found that 80 per cent of 2024 Liberal Democrat voters, 79 per cent of Labour voters and 52 per cent of Conservative voters strongly or somewhat support achieving net zero by 2050, but only 26 per cent of Reform voters.

Even if you are not convinced by these arguments, there is another point to consider: it takes two to merge, and all the signs are that Farage isn’t interested. He returned to frontline politics at the last election with the express intention of doing the maximum possible damage to the Conservative Party, and he remains intent on killing it off.

If Reform gain hundreds of council seats and win Runcorn, it will confirm that he has the momentum in British politics. Next year, we have elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd. Reform are currently polling ahead of the Conservatives for both of these elections; in Wales, they are in with a chance of topping the poll. Why would Farage agree to a merger right now?

It might be that if the Conservatives and Reform are still polling roughly the same a year out from the general election then he might be more amenable to a merger, or at least some kind of deal. But right now we have the bizarre spectacle of Reform trying to kill the Conservatives off while some Conservatives eye them admiringly.

If we want this great party to survive, we need to renew it and to make the case for centre-right politics and against both this failing government and Farage’s brand of Trumpist populism.