Kemi Badenoch has fallen for Nigel Farage’s membership trap – hook, line and sinker

Let the Reform UK leader crow all he likes about having eclipsed the official opposition in terms of paid-up followers – a more moderate Conservative Party could outmanoeuvre him with decent and mainstream policies, says John Rentoul

It was a classic Boxing Day publicity stunt, so you can see why Kemi Badenoch is suspicious of Nigel Farage’s claim – on a quiet news day – that his party has overtaken the Conservatives in members. But she was foolish to amplify Reform’s boast (which is likely to be roughly true).

The magic number of 131,680 might not have been exactly passed on Thursday – just as Andrea Jenkyns was unlikely to have been precisely the 100,000th member when the former Tory MP’s defection was advertised four weeks ago. But Reform is plainly going to have more members than the Tories, so Badenoch would have been better advised to keep quiet about it.

Membership number games are of limited importance. New Labour was proud of the party’s growing numbers when Tony Blair became leader, and yet the Blairites dismissed the even greater number of members attracted by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as entryists and imposters. No UK-wide party has come close to the Scottish National Party’s peak membership as a share of its population, and yet having one in 40 Scots in the party was no guarantee of the success of its cause.

That said, it is embarrassing for the oldest political party in the world to have fallen so low that it can be overtaken by the Farage supporters’ club. Reform is of course not yet a party in the usual sense, as it is still a company in which Farage is the majority shareholder – although he has said that he plans to change it. But the number of people prepared to pay £25 to support him does mean something, even if it means less than Badenoch’s scalded-cat reaction implies.

She called Reform’s automated online ticker “fakery”, thus falling effortlessly into the trap that Farage had set. This dispute could run for days if there isn’t much other news, with Farage offering to get an accountancy firm in to verify Reform’s figures, and counterchallenging the reliability of the Tory numbers. All the while boosting Farage’s message, that his party is eclipsing the Tories as the real opposition.

What should Badenoch have done instead? She cannot simply ignore Reform; she has to defeat it. But that means taking on Farage over policy. She needs to make the point that Farage holds a number of extreme views that put him at odds with most voters.

On the same day that Farage claimed to have more members than the Tories, he posed in country gear and demanded the return of fox hunting – a policy supported by 12 per cent of the population. Awkward for Badenoch to make an issue of it, given the high level of support for hunting among Tory members, but at some point she is going to have to tell them some home truths about what they need to do to win an election.

If she doesn’t want to take on her own members over hunting, there is plenty more to attack in the Reform manifesto that will help make the point that Farage’s values are alien to most floating voters.

The manifesto, called “Our Contract with You”, proposed huge tax cuts for small businesses, a cut in stamp duty and inheritance tax, and tax relief on private school fees and private healthcare – all to be paid for by the magic money tree of a tax on banks that would put up interest rates, a tax on online shopping, and some made-up numbers about cutting government waste. It sounds rather like Trussonomics...

And Farage is vulnerable when it comes to his inconsistent views on healthcare. During the election campaign, he said: “The NHS model is not working. The more money we spend, the less we get.” He said we should have a social insurance system like that in France, and that it should be “managed as if it was a private company”. He may be right on those points, but it is not what most voters want to hear.

Combine that with the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories hinted at in Reform’s manifesto and it becomes clear that a lot of what Reform stands for is not just unworkable and unpopular, but distinctly odd.

A decent, moderate and mainstream Tory party ought to be able to expose the paranoid small-state Trussism that is Reform’s real platform – and relegate it to the fringe status that it deserves. But the Tories are so weak, so infected by a similar virus of extremism, that Badenoch is reduced to arguing about when – not whether – Reform will have more members.