Martin Ivens, former editor of the Sunday Times, is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement.
The debates ahead of the July 4 election are a reminder that the 2024 race has turned into two electoral competitions at once: The Tories need to head off a huge Labour surge to their left, while at the same time facing a formidable disruption via Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to their right.
On Tuesday night, Sunak highlighted the risk of a switch to center-left government. Starmer would need to raise taxes (according to one disputed calculation) by an average of 2,000 pounds ($2,550) per family and drag pensioners into paying tax for the first time in British history. By no coincidence, the over-65s are the only demographic in which the Tories have a slender lead over their opponents.
Starmer was slow to counter his opponent’s tendentious arithmetic, highlighting instead the promise of Labour’s steady leadership in place of Tory “chaos.” Having greater familiarity with the punishing TV format, Sunak narrowly won the wrangle, according to an instant opinion poll, although such an irritable contest is unlikely to change many minds.
Voters appear simply to want the Tories out, and Labour is the instrument at hand for achieving that, but debate viewers were left none the wiser about what Starmer would do in No. 10 Downing Street. Sunak’s best line was, “You don’t have anything to say about the future, and all you can do is talk about the past” (wisely, on Starmer’s part, given the erratic nature of the Conservative government in recent memory).
The U.K.’s straitened finances rule out plans to build the proverbial British “New Jerusalem” at any speed. Without the cushion of the dollar as a reserve currency, Labour cannot borrow to fund an ambitious green investment program on the scale of what was included in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
One man whom Sunak will likely not be debating is Donald Trump’s best British buddy, Farage, who has returned to U.K. politics this week, assuming formal leadership of the populist Reform Party, which flows from his historic role in prompting Brexit. He is also standing as a candidate for the House of Commons. Farage is one of the most consequential politicians of recent decades and a media star, loved by fans, by turns amusing and caustic — and deemed a dangerous blowhard by others. A strong performance by his party, currently polling around 12 percent, could turn a Tory rout into a massacre.
In the 2015 general election, Farage’s last electoral vehicle, the U.K. Independence Party, drew nearly 4 million votes, 12.6 percent of the total, and placed second in 120 seats. That strong showing persuaded Tory Prime Minister David Cameron to make good on a promise to call a referendum on the U.K.’s continued membership in the European Union. Farage’s raucous appeal to immigration-averse voters in that campaign helped get Brexit across the line. Five years ago, he helped Boris Johnson win an 80-seat Tory majority by standing down his candidates in 317 seats.
The latest YouGov poll shows that Labour is already on course to win 422 seats, against 140 for the Conservative party, a bigger majority than that achieved by Tony Blair in 1997. Twelve cabinet ministers, including the chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, are forecast to lose their seats. However the result works out in numbers and casualties, Conservatives know that Farage’s intervention could cause them a body blow — not just in this election, but in the sour aftermath of defeat.
That is crucial for Farage’s aim: a realignment of the British right. “I certainly don’t have any trust for them or any love for them,” he recently said of Conservatives. “I want to reshape the center-right, whatever that means.”
This is an explicit threat to weaken the Tories sufficiently to make them pliable after the election. The Reform Party’s ambition, therefore, is not only to win seats but also to help the Tories lose theirs; Farage’s inspiration is the wipeout of Canada’s Conservatives in 1993, also due to the intervention of an insurgent party called “Reform.” In that election, Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservative Party was left with just two MPs and later forced to unite with another right-wing group on the long road back to electability.
Now Sunak pleads with wavering Conservative voters: A vote for Farage is a vote for Starmer. The prime minister’s target is Eurosceptic voters who adore Reform but fret that if Starmer wins a landslide victory, he could start reintegrating the U.K. into the European Union. How these calculations could play out is variable enough to divide pollsters.
It could turn out like the many “trad” British elections, in which a power bloc on the center-right loses heavily to the center-left and lives to fight another day, after a time in the wilderness. But the election might well result in a far more dramatic outcome: one that gives a Trump-influenced disrupter with a strong personal following the opportunity to smash up the defeated rump of British Conservatism and remake it in a different likeness. There’s a playbook for that — a slightly politer MAGA, with a British accent.
