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“The Reform Party is nothing but a hotchpotch, a mess, a corpse infested by waifs, strays, weirdos, charlatans and crooks, offering the whole political spectrum from the seriously deranged to the criminally insane”

It’s a spicy line to start with, but before Reformers blow a gasket and accuse me of libel there is something they should know. This line was written by satirist Mark Taverner, in his novel “In the Red” who died in 2007, eleven years before Reform UK  were founded – as the Brexit Party – and was actually written in 1989.

In 1989 Nigel Farage was still three years from the founding of UKIP. He was then a commodities broker and metals trader and even he’d admit, probably with a grin, they were a gaggle who had their fair share of ‘charlatans and crooks’. But the quote cannot have meant his current political vehicle, first in the polls, and positioning itself for Government.

Besides, outwardly Farage is Teflon-coated to accusations his outfits are full of misfits.

His reaction in 2004 to the accusation from the then Tory leader, Lord Howard, that UKIP was filled with “cranks and political gadflies” was to have a tie made, adorned with both the tool and the insect, for members of a dining club of the same name, in Brussels!

He is, and always has been very good company socially, whatever you think of his politics. As is Lord Howard for that matter.

Attending one of these events at Nigel’s invitation twenty years ago was how I first met him. He wasn’t leader at the time, but chatting it became clear he would be. However the only ambition he’d admit to was his “own show on LBC, that would be brilliant. Did it before and loved it’” You can hear him saying it.

His ambition now is still to ‘lead Britain’s conversation’ – not from LBC’s studios but 10 Downing Street.

Many of Reform’s outriders have nearly as long an association with Farage. Reform UK may be a new insurgent party but many of its passengers and drivers – those not pushed under the bus for ‘disloyalty’ – are old hands in the insurgency business. Some of them demand the Conservatives don’t just recognise past failings, but crawl in ‘shame’. Arron Banks and newbie Zia Yusuf, a Tory until Aug 2024, like the language of snivelling abasement as the Tory price for sharing the same air!

Imagery aside I’ve said before, they and Tory defector Robert Jenrick make a challenge to the Tories that should not be airily dismissed but addressed. This site has seen Tories argue the same in order to avoid the risk of looking like they don’t need to.

It is bizarre to criticise the Tory Government as ‘a total failure’ whilst simultaneously welcoming some of its players into your ranks but there is still a feeling that – even if changing under Kemi Badenoch – the Conservatives haven’t changed enough or fully accepted why the electorate rejected them in 2024?

Suella Braverman says: “The truth is no Tory Party Leader has ever wanted to stop the boats or cut migration”.

Now despite the fact that measures brought in November 2023 by the Conservative government she’d just been removed from, have significantly cut migration – and if only someone like her had been in a position to do that, as, say, Tory Home Secretary – her defence is, the same as Robert Jenrick’s as Tory Immigration Minister; that they tried but Rishi Sunak wouldn’t let them.

It’s hard to utterly dismiss that, when the Conservative leader, who has put the entire party ‘under new management’ says similar; that she argued in Cabinet for certain courses of action but that she wasn’t ‘in charge then’ when challenged with why she didn’t do these things in Government.

Now in opposition, Badenoch and her shadow Cabinet argue they’re relentlessly focussed on the future. There’s a sound logic to that as people are crying out for vision. But having acknowledged the mistakes of the past, they’d have to accept it hasn’t landed as well as they’d have hoped. The argument about blame still continues on ConservativeHome, even this week. 

Those who demand repentance have as many different things they want it for as people doing the demanding, but if the ‘new’ Conservative party has a shrewd idea of what the old party got wrong, then maybe it needs to say so more clearly. You own the future if you can leave the past comfortably behind, not burying it and hoping people forget. Kemi is improving her standing with the public but the brand still has a long way to go.

Reform also have a past. Much shorter but nonetheless instructive.

Farage said, early on, that he knew Reform would “come under more scrutiny than probably any other party ever has”. He wanted to make this sound unfair or conspiratorial but it’s neither, nor true. They are getting exactly the same scrutiny, which they deserve as serious contenders to govern.

They jettisoned their 2024 manifesto within a year, because they recognised it was economically illiterate. They supported the scrapping of the two child benefit cap – for months backing billions of spending on top of an already ballooning welfare budget – only to U-turn on it yesterday and supporting the ‘disastrous Tories’ who’d brought it in and wanted to keep it.

Reform councils, like many others, are putting up council tax having said locally they’d cut taxes, despite denials at the top. In an emulation of Trump’s America, they instigated DOGE into local authorities. Predictably, Cllr Paul Chamberlain, one of their cabinet members in charge of such cuts at Kent County Council, told the FT:

“We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that [Musk’s] Doge found in America … and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”

In Warwickshire the nineteen year old leading Reform on the council – age not in itself the weakness some make out – has admitted “I had to learn very quickly” before complaining about the ‘blockages’ officials had put in his way. Doge-meister Yusuf has yet to visit Warwickshire. These are less ‘failings’ and more a wakeup call that promising the moon often hits hurdles higher than bravado and slogans can overcome in delivery. Reform’s solution to national problems they claim they, uniquely, can solve, too often involve just bravado and slogans.

On Monday Farage launched a telling social media attack on Charlotte Cadden, Conservative Candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. A police officer for 30 years who wants “a proper inquiry on grooming gangs” and “to get rid of carbon taxes“, both policies he agrees with, instead highlighted a fun run she did 15 years ago, as somehow a symbol of the entire Conservative now. But don’t anyone ask him about things he did fifty years ago.

Conservatives are not going to quit – in Gorton or anywhere else – to help a party that insists it wants to destroy them, but the tragedy of trading blows over the past of both parties is that it distracts from directing ire and fire at the party in charge of the present.

The past, is Labour’s well of sour motivation. Deepest dipper is the Education Secretary whose entire ethos is to attack everyone, including her own party’s legacy on education, to settle scores from when she was a school girl in an A-line skirt.

The soul raison d’etre for the now farcical Chagos deal – that no amount of phantom billions ‘won’ in China will pay for – is to apologise, to the wrong people, for the ‘colonial’ past.  Labour demand an apology for the mini-budget, an issue Badenoch has addressed more than once, and soemthing Farage supported, but Peter Mandelson’s past is apparently a closed book. Saw nothing, heard nothing, did nothing is not going to save Starmer and Morgan McSweeny was never going to bite the hand that fed, and is now punching him and his boss in the teeth.

L P Hartley once wrote “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Everyone in this now crowded political landscape is trying to express the same, but it might be an idea for all to visit it occasionally and say ‘you know what? We got that wrong’.

That goes for all politicians not just the ones you want it to.

Clark Vasey is co-founder and Executive Director of Blue Collar Conservatism.

This is part 1 of 2 articles on Re-Introducing Blue Collar Conservatism.

As political activists, we naturally like political campaigns framed as a battle of ideas with a clear mission to transform things for the better. It’s why, despite the increasing passage of time, we still look to transformative Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They defeated the left both at the ballot box and, most importantly, they defeated the left in office.

However, most elections do not look like that. Instead, they hinge on persuading voters that one side will be more competent than the other. David Cameron’s pitch accepted much of Tony Blair’s ‘modern Britain’; we would just do it better. Theresa May was ‘strong and stable’ until voters concluded she wasn’t and almost let in Jeremy Corbyn. Even ‘Get Brexit Done’ was about replacing a political class unwilling to get it done with one that would.

This mindset shaped candidate selection too. How often have we heard that Joe or Jane Bloggs has a background in business, the military, or whatever, ‘they will make a great MP’? This led to a tendency towards managerialism.

By the end of our time in office, too many of our entrenched problems stemmed from Blair-era reforms we left untouched or shamefully expanded.

Today, we face a Labour Government of astonishing incompetence. Its unimaginative socialism offers only higher taxes and more intervention, each compounding the last problem it created.

Kemi and her team are in another league when it comes to capability. However, we must resist the temptation to make the ‘competence’ of one group of people over another our central pitch. It will not work.

The end of the two-party system has changed the rules. Labour’s failures no longer send voters back in our direction. Labour’s collapse in the polls shows people understand how utterly useless they are, but less than two years ago many drew a similar conclusion about us. Reform’s supporters share our diagnosis of Labour; they are just not looking to us as the alternative.

We rightly point out how much worse things are since we left office. But the state of Britain in 2024 was not a winning formula. Talking about getting back to what we were beginning to achieve in government will fall far short, especially when you consider the voters we need to convince.

Labour and the left are our enemy, but if we are serious about winning, we must attract significant votes from Reform. There are too many of these voters for us to write off and there is no fantasy centrist coalition to replace them with.

More than a decade ago, Esther McVey and I founded Blue Collar Conservatism because we believed working-class voters had been taken for granted by Labour. We recognised that they shared our values and stood to benefit most from a genuinely conservative agenda. At the time, the leadership was still more interested in chasing metropolitan liberals, but we predicted that these voters would shift right.

2019 ought to have been a historic moment of realignment. Instead, many of these voters ended up feeling just as let down by us. The rightward realignment has continued but now largely sits with Reform.

Labour understands that working people are no longer part of its base. Its coalition is now a fraying mix of metropolitan left-wingers and state dependents. Labour’s approach to Reform has little to do with winning back lost Reform voters and everything to do with attracting the votes of Liberal Democrats and Greens. Keir Starmer’s increasingly unrestrained Europhilia will not appeal to Labour’s Brexit voting former heartlands but might convince enough Liberal Democrats to help block Reform.

Reform polling in the low 30s is uniquely blockable and they know it. Reform has squeezed Labour to its metropolitan core and there is no more juice in that direction. To build a base that can withstand tactical voting, Reform needs to take support from us in significant numbers. Recent developments have made that abundantly clear.

Our challenge is the inverse, but with greater numbers: persuading Reform voters to trust us.

We will not do this by attacking them. We will do it by presenting a better, clearer alternative. We once talked about ‘love-bombing’ Liberal Democrats (I know, I hate that phrase too), but a similar mindset is required here. We must show Reform voters that we understand their frustrations and yes, their scepticism of us. We must convince them that we will do what we say we will do, and that never again will we take right-wing votes to pursue left-wing outcomes.

We all have family and friends who have gone over to Reform. Many of those who have been involved in Blue Collar Conservatism are now prominent Reform figures. Their values are fundamentally the same as ours. They want what we want: a country that works.

We just need to convince them that we are the best vehicle to deliver an agenda that works for ordinary working Brits.

Blue Collar Conservatism exists to do exactly that: to reshape Britain into a country that works for working people by delivering a programme of national renewal built on a relentless focus on jobs and opportunity, and ensuring Britain’s place in the world by maximising the potential of its people.

In Part Two, I will set out what this means in practice.