Moderate Tories Worry The Party Is Too Preoccupied With Aping Reform
3 min read
The threat posed by Nigel Farage's Reform UK was at the forefront of many minds at the Conservative Party conference, with the dozens of seats lost by the party to Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the last election getting less attention.
One of the major themes of Tory conference was how the party can win over voters who backed Reform on 4 July.
It was discussed at countless fringe events in Birmingham. Some Tories like former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees Mogg suggested that the Conservatives should strike a pact with the right-wing party to avert more electoral pain in the future.
While Reform won just five seats at the General Election in July, the four million votes it received compounded the heavy Tory defeat by helping Keir Starmer's Labour unseat Conservatives in swathes of constituencies across the country.
Farage, Reform leader and now the MP for Clacton, put attacking the Tory government record on immigration front and centre of his party's election campaign — and to significant effect.
The bookies' favourite to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader, Robert Jenrick, has built his pitch to MPs and party members primarily around appealing to voters to backed Reform in July.
In his conference speech on Wednesday, Jenrick warned the Conservative Party would "die" if it wasn't willing to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to tackle illegal immigration.
There are plenty of Tories who agree with the former Home Office minister.
Veteran Tory back bencher Bill Cash, for example, told a conference fringe event hosted by the party's European Research Group (ERG) of avidly pro-Brexit MPs that Reform "has to come, as it were, into our fold" in order to win the next general election.
In her sole appearance at the Birmingham conference, former Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries warned Tory members that the party must pursue a "harmonious relationship" with Reform to be successful again.
Dorries stressed she was not advocating an electoral deal, but that "there has to be some kind of amelioration between Reform and the Conservative Party".
However, in the Midlands there were also Tory voices expressing alarm that the party's post-mortem was too preoccupied with Reform, and not interested enough in the votes the Conservatives lost to the left of them in form of Labour and Ed Davey's Lib Dems.
One of them was Andy Street, the former mayor of the West Midlands, who sought to stress the Tories lost "many, many more" votes to these parties on 4 July, adding that his party risks drifting further away from the "middle ground" in pursuit of Reform supporters.
"If we are obsessed with the people who we did lose one way he will forget that the middle ground is where the election will be won next time around, it always is.
"Look at the lesson of history: Stanley Baldwin, Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath, David Cameron, all of these people won in the middle ground," he said.
A former Tory MP who like many Conservatives who lost their seats in July was in attendance in Birmingham said they were frusrated, as they saw it, by the extent to which Reform was dominating debate at the party's conference.
"Reform is the simplistic answer," they complained to PoliticsHome.
Alicia Kearns, the Conservative MP for Rutland and Stamford and a leading Tory moderate, similarly warned that her party must not become "Reform-lite" in its bid to win again.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Tory Reform Group, one of the party's centrist caucuses, she said doing so would make it even harder for the Conservatives to appeal to young people.
“If we rubbish the last 14 years, if we don’t talk about economics and we just get involved in culture wars and [are] essentially Reform-lite, we will not attract these people.”
Additional reporting by Zoe Crowther and Tom Scotson.
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