Farage helped destroy the Tory party – but he could still end up leading it

The one-time bane of the Conservative Party could end up being its only hope, writes Sean O’Grady. But how likely is the former Ukip leader to jump ship?

If he sees his future in the Tory party, Farage will become increasingly detached from Reform UK, just as he once did with Ukip (Getty Images)

Can a man who helped destroy the Conservative Party then lead it and remould it in his own image? For Nigel Farage the shifting answer to that fundamental question will determine his actions in this general election year.

If he decides that such a trick can indeed be pulled off, then he will go for it, quit the TV role, and become the Tories’ worst nightmare. Again.

If he thinks it cannot, then he will remain where he is now, making his money, maintaining his profile, exerting influence via the political party he actually majority owns, Reform UK, and his still-frequent TV appearances, not least on the GB News channel, which has a modest but devotedly cranky following. However, he will not be actively campaigning for Reform UK, let alone running for parliament. He will wait and see what the scene looks like after the Labour landslide. For the moment it would seem he can’t make his mind up, but is definitely inclined to the second option,

It is for that reason that Nigel is biding his time, weighing his options, teasing us with “never say never” quips and the like. He even declared he’d be Conservative leader by 2026, sometimes saying this alarming prognostication was “in jest”. Yeah, right.

All the time he is engaged in his favourite hobby: attracting attention. He wants to be relevant, and part of the conversation. He is proud of his legacy – Brexit, however loathed or misunderstood it may be. It’s why he did I’m a Celebrity… (that and the £1.5m fee).

He’s just announced he’ll be attending the launch of the absurdly-named Popular Conservativism faction, a Liz Truss leadership campaign and front organisation also supported by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Simon Clarke, playing John the Baptist and Saint Peter to Truss’s Tory messiah. What diabolical role Farage seeks to play in this biblical epic is not obvious, probably even for him, but he may be preparing for an eventual conversion back to the Tory cause, even if not a Damascene one.

Anyway, he’ll hog the limelight, just as he did when he went up to the Tory conference last October and was videoed being cuddled by constituency association chairs and gavotting with Priti Patel. He had no good reason to be there – he owns and is “president” of rival political party Reform UK – but he likes mischief, and the temptation was irresistible. His role at GB News gave him a cover story and a media pass. Rishi Sunak even declared that the Tory party is a “broad church” that could find a pew for the man who so despises it (and him).

Obviously, there’s no chance of Farage taking up Sunak’s cynical offer, because he has said, as if it were needed, that he couldn’t join the party under Sunak’s leadership. But after a Labour landslide and the worst Tory defeat since 1832? Well, as Farage might say, never say never.

Farage’s dilemma is that if he took a far more active role with Reform UK as a national campaigner, parliamentary candidate or (trickier) both, then he’d probably make the Tory defeat even more catastrophic. If you feed some of the more apocalyptic predictions of how badly the Tories will do into the online Commons seat projections, they might even come third behind the Liberal Democrats, with Farage installed in the Commons, if he’s lucky, for some seat like South Thanet, which he actually came fairly close to winning in 2015.

Such a scenario might well fulfil Reform UK’s current ambition of destroying and effectively replacing the Tories as the principal party of the political right, triggering a major realignment. Or, as the deputy leader and candidate in the Wellingborough by-election, Ben Habib sees it: “It [the Conservative party] does not deserve to survive... You can’t reward failure with incumbency, the party needs to be obliterated.” Farage’s presence on the national stage might conceivably boost his party’s current poll ratings in the range of 5 to 10 per cent to the 10 to 15 per cent range – near enough to overtaking the Tories.

While that would be a political earthquake and personal triumph for Farage, it has a couple of drawbacks. First, there wouldn’t be much of a Conservative Party left to take over, and for those walking wounded still in control of it, they would do all they could to prevent the man who obliterated them from taking it over.

But even if he did, such would be the division and disarray on the right that it might take a generation to mend – even if the Tories split and the hard right aligned with Reform, there’d still be a “moderate” Conservative party soldiering on. It would be like the SDP and Labour in the 1980s – split votes and perpetual opposition with no hope of proportional representation. Nigel might get to be leader of the new Popular Conservative Party, but it wouldn’t be much fun, and he’d never win power.

The alternative, which seems to be his current intent, is to excoriate Sunak while chumming up to the Tory right – of which he was once a part before John Major and the Maastricht treaty. Forming links with them is the first flirtatious step towards a more serious relationship that would emerge in the post-general election chaos.

We can’t be sure exactly what precise path to the top of the Tory party will present itself to Farage, but there will be one, especially if the grassroots seize control from a decimated parliamentary party. He’d have to contend with Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, Penny Mordaunt (last doomed hope for sanity, if only she held her seat), possibly Truss and Boris Johnson in various ways – but he would fit pretty easily into a literally “Reformed” Tory party dedicated to his values.

If he sees his future in the Tory party, Farage will become increasingly detached from Reform, just as he once did with Ukip. As of now, he won’t lift a finger to help Reform UK nor its nominal leader, Richard Tice, notwithstanding his major shareholding in the company (Reform is not a conventional party and has no members or leadership elections).

Farage was a notable no-show at the Reform UK general election launch “event” last month (Farage can grab headlines merely by being absent). Nor has Farage been seen out campaigning in Wellingborough or Rochdale, where Reform UK is standing. He might plead his job as a new presenter precludes such partisan activity, but that didn’t stop him making a speech at the Reform party conference last year.

If I were to make a bet, I wouldn’t put it on Farage being Tory leader this time next year (my fiver would be on Braverman, as it happens). It is, though, perfectly conceivable to see him given responsibility for immigration policy and in due course found a parliamentary seat from which he could join the front bench as shadow home secretary.

The trajectory would be a bit like when Michael Portillo lost his seat in the 1997 rout and eventually returned to form an uneasy working relationship with William Hague and their mission to “save the pound”, and a decade in opposition. Seems a reasonable working assumption for the future of Farage and the right.