A Tory-Reform pact now would lock in Reform’s weakness

Good morning. Is there any prospect of an electoral pact between the Conservatives and Reform UK? I frequently get emails asking this question — which is also one being widely discussed in Westminster. Yesterday Conservative mayor Ben Houchen said there will “have to be a coming together” of the two rightwing parties.

My short answer is “not this side of a general election, I think”.

Robert Shrimsley agrees and argues why in his column this week, which seems like a good moment for me to get my own reasoning down on paper so I can’t wriggle out of it later.

Holey alliance

“There’s no such thing as a merger of equals: there is always a buyer.” I think that is, if anything, even more true of politics than it is elsewhere. One reason why I am intensely dubious that there will be any Conservative pact with Reform before the next general election is that, at present, the ultimate buyer would be the Tory party, and on very poor terms for Nigel Farage.

A good yardstick for gauging if there is any prospect of a merger is to ask yourself “do I think that Reform will have more or less than five MPs after the next election?” Because every MP that Reform gains is one that tips the balance of power in any negotiations over an electoral pact or full scale merger between Reform and the Tory party.

Yes, that Reform is consistently ahead of the Conservatives in the polls would help Farage a bit in negotiations. But it’s worth remembering what happened in 1981-2, when the newly formed SDP were negotiating the terms of their seat allocation with the Liberals. Every bit of evidence — the polls, the by-elections where the two parties stood aside for one another — suggested that the SDP were the more electorally potent of the two.

But the Liberal party’s pre-existing organisation and size created its own facts on the ground: they ended up with the best prospects, and after the 1983 election, they emerged as the larger of the two components of the alliance. The modern Liberal Democrats, formed from the merger of the two parties, are still a liberal party before they are a social democratic one precisely because of that.

As Robert notes, any deal now would, for Reform, risk confining them to the 90 seats where they are second to Labour, and of those 90, while some are decent pick-up opportunities, some are very distant indeed. Any deal of that kind means baking in Reform’s second-class status indefinitely: why would Nigel Farage, indeed why would any Reform politician, agree to that at the present moment? As such, the electorate will have to settle the question for them, at least for the foreseeable:

Neither side has any incentive to parley now. The two are in a battle for political territory akin to the Russians and western allies racing to occupy zones of influence at the end of the second world war. Any deal now would be on the wrong terms for someone. The Conservatives still have far more MPs than Reform and know that a pact would permanently embed a rival on the right. They hope that anti-Trump sentiment will deflate Farage or that his party could implode before the general election. Finally, the Reform leader’s history shows he is not a man who finds collaboration easy.

It’s possible that local elections over the next few years will be so decisive one way or the other that a deal is reached, but I doubt it. There’s a useful parallel on the other side of politics: although Labour and the Liberal Democrats did not have a pact at the last election, they pretty successfully kept out of each other’s way in various other votes. But that was in part because they had spent the period from 2010 to 2019 engaging in attempts to knock each other out, elections which gradually established which party was a viable alternative to the Tories and where, just as they did from 1981 to 1992.

There is a really important difference worth noting here though, which is that neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats are as dependent on their leader to sustain their popularity. Nigel Farage’s parties have always tended to collapse into infighting and irrelevance without him. At the next election he will be older than Michael Heseltine when he was forced out of the 1997 Tory leadership election. At the one after that, Farage will be older than Harold Macmillan when, on the advice of his doctors, he stepped down as prime minister.

If there is a quick route to a pact, it probably runs through an unexpectedly Farageless Reform becoming a distressed asset for an eager Conservative buyer.

Now try this

I had a wonderful evening last night at the Southbank in London, watching the Philharmonia play Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. Marin Alsop, the conductor, was a student of Bernstein, so it always feels very special to see her conduct his work — there’s a lovely recording of her conducting it by Naxos, though I don’t think the soloist in that recording is as good as Hugo Walkom, who made his first major solo performance last night.

On the subject of Shostakovich Ten, Deutsche Grammophon released a marvellous set to mark the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death last month, containing the Boston Symphony’s complete cycle of the symphonies, plus new recordings of the cello concertos with Yo-Yo Ma, the piano concertos with Yuja Wang and of the violin concertos with Baiba Skride, and the score for his opera Lady Macbeth. I am very much enjoying working my way through it. You can listen to it on Spotify here, but I really must evangelise for the physical set also.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

Top stories today

• ‘The biggest Tory donors are talking to us’ | Reform is launching a drive to raise funds from wealthy offshore donors in low-tax jurisdictions, including Monaco, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland, taking advantage of Britain’s loose funding rules to bolster its coffers.

• That’s for youth to find out | Britain is edging towards creating a post-Brexit youth visa scheme with the EU, as UK ministers race to contain a potential political backlash to such a deal ahead of a crucial summit next month.

• Charting a different course | Chancellor Rachel Reeves has rejected key planks of Donald Trump’s economic agenda ahead of talks with Scott Bessent, her US counterpart, saying she is “proud that the UK has its global, open reputation”.

• Scottish uni crisis deepens | About 350 staff at the University of Edinburgh have accepted voluntary redundancy as it looks to cut about £140mn from its budget, the BBC reports. In a letter to staff, principal Peter Mathieson also confirmed academic promotions would be frozen for the 2025-26 period. This month the FT’s Scotland correspondent reported on the cash crisis at Dundee university, which had earlier announced plans for 632 jobs to be cut.