The size of Labour’s landslide is down to one man: Nigel Farage

Reform UK will only end up with a handful of parliamentary seats, but their impact on the campaign has been devastating for the Conservatives, writes Andrew Grice. Labour will also need to take the Farage threat seriously if it wants to stay in power for more than one term

After Reform UK’s electoral gains, many Tories will want to hug Nigel Farage close to ‘unite the right’ (Joe Giddens/PA Wire)

A broken Rishi Sunak took responsibility for the Conservatives’ historic defeat, and a jubilant Keir Starmer said there was “nothing preordained” about Labour’s remarkable victory. But neither man acknowledged that the scale of Labour’s landslide was also down to someone in neither main party: Nigel Farage.

His Reform UK will win only a handful of seats, including Clacton in Essex, where Farage was finally elected to the Commons at the eighth attempt. But Reform’s role was decisive in many other places – including Liz Truss’s unexpected defeat.

As John Curtice, the election experts’ expert, told the BBC: “This does look like an election the Conservatives have lost and lost primarily because of the votes they lost to Reform… Around two-thirds of the seats the Conservatives have lost are seats where, if Reform voters had voted Conservative, they would still have hung on to.”

Curtice pointed out that Labour’s vote, while up spectacularly in Scotland since the 2019 election, was down in Wales and barely changed in England. Of course, Labour – and the revived Liberal Democrats – needed to be trusted enough to win Tory seats. But Farage undoubtedly gave them a helping hand.

This has huge implications. Starmer deserves the plaudits he is getting for matching Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, from a much lower base, and after Labour’s worst defeat since 1935 in 2019. But Labour’s share of the vote, probably less than the 40 per cent it won under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, will raise questions about its mandate. Unusually, Starmer will have to “seal the deal” with voters after winning the election, rather than before it.

Newly elected Labour MPs are rightly worried his honeymoon will be much shorter than Blair’s, and the new government might not get the benefit of the doubt for long. Labour will need to take the Reform threat seriously in its heartlands as it plots how to ensure it wins a second term in 2029 to give Starmer the chance for the “decade of renewal” he wants.

However, Farage’s shadow falls most heavily on the Tories. Its strong performance is another body blow to Sunak, already reeling from his disaster-prone campaign which saw him and his party’s ratings go down when everyone expected it to erode Labour’s 20-point opinion poll lead.

The inquest into the Tories’ catastrophic defeat will be painful for Sunak. In another universe, he could have lost by a smaller margin and resigned with dignity and respect, if his party had retained 200 to 250 seats on which to build. He could have rightly pointed to the damage of Boris Johnson’s lies and Partygate and Truss’s mini-Budget, after which perhaps any Tory leader could not have won an unprecedented fifth term.

But Sunak’s decision to call a snap election this month will now haunt him forever. If, as most of his cabinet and MPs wanted, he had delayed the contest until October or November, Farage would probably have then been helping his friend Donald Trump in the US presidential race.

Sunak judged that Farage, although Reform’s honorary president, would not return to the front line in a summer election. It was a fatal miscalculation. Farage believed he could inflict enough damage on the ailing Tories to revive his project to supplant them. His return to the fray gave Reform the booster rockets they lacked under their previous leader Richard Tice (who had been urging Farage to come back).

Although Reform overtook the Tories in a few polls, Sunak’s party retained an overall lead of about four points over it. Arguably, Reform could have won more seats, but peaked too soon. It fell back in the closing two weeks of the campaign after Farage blamed the West for provoking Russia into launching its war in Ukraine and a string of damaging revelations about racist remarks by Reform candidates, a dozen of whom were disowned by the party.

Yet Reform’s stalling did not prevent it inflicting huge damage on the Tories when polling day came. Farage now has a platform in the Commons. He might get bored with it. But there are plenty of bars, and he will like that. When attending EU summits in Brussels when he was an MEP, I always knew where to find him.

The Reform leader has suggested he wants to mount a reverse takeover of the Tories, though has also said he does not want to join the party. So he seems unlikely to defect to it; he wants the Tories to come to him.

He will be the ghost at the feast at the coming Tory leadership election. One candidate, Suella Braverman, who retained her seat while potential rivals Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps lost theirs, has made clear she wants Farage back in the Tory fold. But the rows over Russia and Reform candidates have probably made that less likely than it was before the election.

Mordaunt, who cannot now run for the leadership, is a big loss to those in the Tories who want them to take a more aggressive stance towards Farage. Many Tories will want to hug Farage close to “unite the right” and prevent a repeat of Reform’s devastating damage at this election. But a link-up would be toxic for many of the voters the Tories need to win back.

Sunak tried appeasing Farage with his unworkable policy on the small boats, rather than taking him on. The Tories didn’t even attack Reform in this contest until Farage made his unforced errors. To return to power, the Tories will need to move back to the centre and see off Reform. They won’t come back by becoming Reform.