Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. For 25 years he was an active Conservative but stood for Reform UK at the 2024 General Election. He resigned from Reform in February and has since rejoined the Conservative Party.
Last month, Reform UK offered the Conservative Party an open goal to make a hard-hitting political attack, following the announcement that the case brought against Rupert Lowe by Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, supported by Lee Anderson (a whip), has been thrown out by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Up until now, however, the Conservative Party has conspicuously failed to put the ball in the back of the net. Why is this?
It feels to me as if the party is mired in a state of collective inertia. It remains so intent on navel gazing and introspection, so focused on what is behind it, that it is unable to focus on what is in front and move forward.
I almost get the sense that there is a reluctance to admit the threat from Reform, as if facing it somehow dignifies it. That certain sections of the party would rather bury their heads in the sand, convincing themselves that they can cure the recent party woes simply by repenting their sins rather than taking on their attackers.
Reform UK doesn’t play by the conventional rules of British politics and the Conservative Party has been unable to understand how to combat this, so it has chosen, effectively, to do nothing. This must end and it must end now.
The truth is that now is absolutely the time for the Conservative Party to get on the front foot; to lower the shield, pick up the sword, and get moving forward again.
Reform is vulnerable to attack right now. It might not feel like it from the recent local elections successes it has enjoyed, and the undeniable impetus it has in the media.
But it is, and in several different ways – not least as a result of those elections.
I had a chat with an unsuccessful Reform candidate this week. He told me that a local group have been unable to elect their own group leader in the council: they have had to wait while Reform HQ has gone through the list and made the decision for them. Apparently, this is being repeated all over the country.
This very much points the way for the future. Reform selected candidates who were safe and filtered out those who were going to be difficult to manage. It thus selected candidates who had little or no political experience, who were not free thinkers, and had little or no social media presence. They chose candidates who need to be micro-managed, on the understanding that they would centrally manage them.
(Those experienced candidates they did select have joined from the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Party has been railing against careerist politicians and what it calls the “uniparty”, but has then made a point of crowing about bringing them in.)
As it has done this, the party has also lurched towards the centre ground.
My great friend, Gawain Towler, gave a typically direct and honest interview to Unherd recently. Towler is a man who loyally and highly effectively served Nigel Farage as his Press Officer for 30 years, throughout UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform, and who was rewarded for this by being given five minutes to clear his desk immediately after the general election.
Despite this, and it is a true measure of the man, he remains unfalteringly loyal to Farage and to Reform, and in the Unherd interview he made the definitive point. “Nigel wants to win”.
Nobody should doubt the significance of this, and the threats and opportunities that result from it. Farage reasons that in order to win he has to shift the party to the centre, and he has set out to achieve this with absolute focus and determination.
In so doing he is effectively taking the right-of-centre for granted. It seems he thinks that he has sewn up this great mass of votes, and no longer has to work to retain them.
As such, Reform is now focusing on winning votes from people who up until now would not have contemplated voting for it – and to achieve that, the party has to change policy focus and the way that it communicates in its attempt to woo them.
Reform also has to convince centrist voters that people who they perceive to be on the right are no longer prioritised in the party. Many, in fact, have been removed altogether; they are the free thinkers, those who have strong opinions that they have not been previously reticent to express.
Many of them are people who have been scrupulously loyal to Reform, to the Brexit Party, to UKIP, and to Farage personally – and they have been ruthlessly removed and replaced with others who have come from centrist parties, or who have not similarly contributed to the growth of Reform… but are more easily managed.
What Reform apparently fails to recognise (or alternatively, has calculated to be a risk worth taking) is that in moving to the centre it cannot in fact take right-wingers for granted. That they are more sophisticated than that. That they have already noticed and are very aware of this significant strategic shift and they are, by shades, discontented, let down and, increasingly, furious.
The great gamble is not just that Reform can successfully win votes from centrist parties by rebranding itself as a centrist party with centrist policies to appeal to them, but that the Overton window itself is shifting, with attitudes hardening on key issues for increasingly large numbers of people; that the old ‘centre ground’ may actually be losing appeal, and that space is opening up for more right-wing policies
Nowhere is this truer than in what has become the highest profile policy area of all: immigration.
Farage has focused on this issue beyond all others to the point that, due in some considerable measure to his efforts, it has become the biggest current issue in British politics. Even the Labour Party has spent the last week indulging in rhetoric that might, a few months ago, have got you arrested for expressing on social media.
Reform’s dangerous assumption, however, is that the mass political opinion remains in what we currently regard as the ‘centre’.
Away from immigration, I would argue the same is true in economics. People are sick of statist economic interventionism with its high taxes and unceasing regulation interfering in private business, stifling growth and investment and leading to lengthening business failures and dole queues. You can make similar arguments over culture, security and law and order.
Towler is absolutely right. Farage wants to win. But politics is not football. You don’t change your tactics and strategy at half time to win at all costs.
To be a member of a political party you have to share core values. Otherwise it isn’t a party. In his desperation to win, Farage is showing that he will forget core values and say and do whatever is necessary to win votes. That may be the way to try to pick up votes of people who would otherwise not vote for Reform, but it is at the real risk of vacating the core and undermining all the values that have driven its emergence.
Farage’s objective is to win. But what this country desperately needs right now is a political party whose objective is to save the nation from the real and immediate threats it faces, from globalism and socialism.
Doing that means putting good people together, united to achieve the overriding purpose. That is the only way of crossing the divide between centrism and the right wing.
Farage won’t do that. He is focused on destroying people with whom he should be working, because it is more important to him personally to win than it is to do what is right and save the nation.
We have seen that with his constant rhetoric about the need to never forgive the Conservative Party and to destroy it. We have seen it with Rupert Lowe, his own MP, who dared to stand up to him. We have seen it with loyal Reform volunteers, candidates, and officers who have been discarded as soon as they are suddenly seen as expedient.
This is a significant weakness and one that must be exploited right now, by a galvanised Conservative Party that is looking forward, that understands opportunity and which needs to win back the trust of voters as a party that understands them and represents them.
Kemi Badenoch should be driving this point home in the media, right now, without delay. She should not be afraid to be seen to reach out to people on the right of politics – people such as Lowe, Ben Habib, and former Conservatives like Andrew Bridgen – and prove she understands that we must have political unity in order to see off the existential threats the country faces, and that only she can deliver it.
