Vote Now, Govern Never: How Reform Wants the Rage, But Not the Responsibility

The problem with Reform is they're not serious about power either

Perhaps one of the most damning accusations you could ever make about the Conservatives is that they are cunning—or worse, and most controversially, smart.

And yet, in recent weeks, they’ve done something that looks suspiciously clever—though whether it was by design or complete accident is anyone’s guess: it’s no longer taboo within the party to openly discuss plotting with Reform. Whispers of coalitions and backroom deals are now out in the open.

This, in a narrow tactical sense, is intelligent.

Sensing the depth of public blame for the doom-loop of dysfunction and mismanagement they’ve presided over, the Tories have started sidling up to Nigel Farage and Reform.

And Farage—despite cultivating a party packed to the brim with ex-Tories, making Reform a sort of Poundland UKIP reboot—insists he wants nothing to do with it.

And there’s a reason for that: Farage knows, just as the Tories seem to have realised in a rare moment of self-awareness, just how toxic the Conservative brand has become. The closer they get to him—openly, in full view of the public—the greater the risk of a kind of contagion that’s politically devastating.

Essentially, the Conservatives are now willing carriers of a political virus—and out of sheer spite, they’re hoping to infect someone else. If they’re going down, they’re taking Reform with them.

It’s quite smart, in a deranged, Titanic-kind of way—having hit the iceberg, without ever admitting doing so, the Conservatives are now offering Reform a seat on the deck and a brandy, as if this were a cruise rather than a catastrophe.

The strangest part is that Farage has invited this offer himself.