Who’s afraid of big, bad Farage? Not the Tories, surely?

Some of Rishi Sunak’s supporters are worried about what will happen when the honorary president of Reform UK emerges from the ‘I’m a Celebrity’ jungle this weekend. John Rentoul wonders why

Wild card: Nigel Farage in the I’m a Celebrity jungle (ITV/Shutterstock)

The Conservative Party is under assault from three directions, I wrote last weekend: from Labour everywhere, from the Liberal Democrats in graduate-heavy seats around London, and from Reform UK taking away some of its core vote.

The Reform revival has been greatly preoccupying some Tory MPs in the past two months. Its average support in opinion polls has risen from 6 per cent to 9 per cent, at a time when immigration is in the headlines. These are overwhelmingly voters who would, if they had to choose between Labour and Conservative, vote Tory. Every extra vote for Reform, therefore, tends to suppress the Tory vote and to make it easier for Labour and the Lib Dems to win Tory seats.

Some Tories are worried that, when Nigel Farage emerges from the media purdah of I’m a Celebrity this weekend, he will take up more of a lead role in the immigration debate, as honorary president and proprietor of Reform.

Rishi Sunak will no doubt be taking advice from Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, on how to fight an election on three fronts at once. I remember Cameron in the 2015 election telling me that, although he normally agreed that elections are fought on the centre ground, “this one’s a bit difficult”. He said: “We also have to coax back people who have gone off to Ukip.”

He secured a surprise victory, despite Ukip winning its biggest ever share of the vote. But in those days Ukip took a lot of votes from Labour as well from the Tories, and Labour was weak while the Lib Dems were vulnerable.

However, there are reasons for thinking that the threat from Reform, the rebadged Brexit Party, has been exaggerated. Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov, has drawn my attention to a difference between the pollsters. While support for Reform is running at an average of 9 per cent, one polling company, Ipsos, puts it at half that, at 4 per cent.

This difference probably reflects the different way Ipsos asks its voting intention question. While all the other companies use online surveys, Ipsos does its polls by telephone. That means the other companies can list more parties in their “how would you vote in a general election tomorrow?” question. YouGov, for example, lists five parties (Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, Reform UK and Green), plus the SNP in Scotland or Plaid Cymru in Wales, followed by “some other party”, “would not vote”, “don’t know” and “won’t say”. All those can fit on one screen.

But a phone poll, in which the questions are read out, offers a shorter list of options: just the three main parties, plus the nationalists in Scotland and Wales, and “another party”. Only if you answer “another party” are you taken to a second question which offers the choice of Green, Ukip, BNP, Reform UK and “other, please specify”.

You might think that this would mean that the Greens do less well in Ipsos surveys, as they too are relegated to the second question. But no. As Kellner says, “Ipsos consistently reports 6 to 7 per cent support for the Greens, the same as YouGov and other companies.”

This suggests that support for Reform in online polls is soft. “It looks as if the Greens have a small but committed band of voters. Seeing that their party is omitted from the first list, they say ‘another party’ and pick Green from the second list. Most Reform supporters don’t make it to the second list. They seem less committed,” says Kellner.

This is a tricky problem for pollsters, because there is no obvious right or wrong answer. Kellner wrestled with when to promote and demote Ukip from the “some other party” list when he was at YouGov.

But he points out that recent evidence from elections “tilts the debate in favour of Ipsos”. In May, the Greens gained 241 local council seats while Reform gained two. The Green candidate won 10 per cent of the vote in the Somerton and Frome by-election; Reform’s best recent score was 5 per cent in Tamworth.

It may be too early to say that Reform this time is going to be more like Ukip through most of its history, and James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party in the 1997 election, which won 3 per cent of the vote – or more like Ukip in its heyday, winning 13 per cent in 2015. (The Brexit Party is harder to judge, winning 31 per cent of the vote in the 2019 European parliament elections, but only 6 per cent in those seats where it stood in the general election, having stood down in Tory-held and Tory-target seats.)

Maybe Rishi Sunak will continue to play into Reform’s hands by appearing to handle the issue of immigration and asylum badly. But he shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the Farage paper tiger is, at this stage, quite as scary as it looks.