How do you solve a problem like Farage? Without a solution, Tories are fated to opposition

This too shall pass. Perhaps more quickly than we think.

At first glance, Labour looks impregnable. Sir Keir Starmer has won a majority on the scale of Tony Blair’s in 1997. The Conservatives have suffered their worst defeat in 200 years.

But look a little closer. Sir Keir’s own majority in Holborn and St Pancras was slashed by more than 50 per cent. Nationally, Labour secured just 33.8 per cent of the vote, the lowest share by a winning party.

Measured by the number of votes, Starmer has even more cause for disquiet. Jeremy Corbyn convinced 12.9 million people to cross their ballots for Labour in 2017, and 10.3 million in 2019. Sir Keir managed only 9.7 million.

If we want to play the Remoaner game of measuring votes as a proportion of all those eligible to cast them, 80 per cent of the country did not back Labour. Could it be that this colossal majority, this parliamentary Burj Khalifa, is built on sand dunes?

Until now, there has been a structural unfairness in politics. The Tories take over when our coffers are empty, do the unpopular work of restoring order to our finances, and allow Labour to take over just as things are starting to improve. Well, not this time.

In the short term, Labour will benefit from falling inflation. But spending is still much higher than it was before March 2020. With an ageing population and unproductive public services, we need either to cut spending or remove barriers to enterprise. So far, Rachel Reeves, the new Chancellor, has shown no readiness to make unpopular decisions in pursuit of growth, instead hailing herself as an inspiration to young girls.

The Prime Minister, for his part, has spoken largely in clichés. His speech outside No 10 was a series of platitudes about service and the need “to move forward together”.

Starmer appears genuinely to think that the chief problem in Britain is that nasty people have been in charge. He does not acknowledge the costs of lockdown or the Russia-Ukraine war or an underperforming NHS. Instead, he wants us to understand that he will put “country before party”. Well, yes, one hopes all politicians do that. But then what?

The idea that Britain is in a mess because of Bad People, and that things will improve now that the Good People have arrived, is widespread among Labour activists. The disillusionment when our structural problems linger unaddressed is going to be quite something.

We might not have to wait long. Labour MPs are keenly aware of how vulnerable they are to the sectarian voting that, for partisan reasons, they used to encourage. Four independents were elected on an anti-Israel ticket – five if we count Corbyn – and several sitting Labour MPs clung on by tiny margins, including the impressive Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.

There may well be an early push for an arms boycott against Israel. However Starmer reacts, those who insist on seeing politics as a Harry Potteresque battle between goodies and baddies are in for a shock.

Whether over foreign policy or spending restraint, Labour will end up losing people. The question is whether, by then, the Opposition is offering a plausible alternative. And that in turn depends on whether the Tories and Reform are still at each other’s throats.

During the 1980s, first past the post rewarded a united Right and punished a divided Left. Today, it does the opposite. Reform won five seats, but cost the Tories more than 100. The two Rightist parties together got 10.6 million votes and 126 MPs; Labour got 9.7 million votes and 411 MPs.

Obviously, the Conservatives have no automatic claim to be the main party of the Right. Still, some of those contests did seem odd. Reform made a point of standing even in seats where the only possible result of its intervention would be to remove a Right-wing Eurosceptic.

One of the MPs I canvassed for was Jacob Rees-Mogg, the most articulate of Brexiteers and small-staters. Rees-Mogg always struck me as having a friendly relationship with Farage, his fellow GB News presenter, going so far as to call for the Reform leader to be made home secretary. But Farage insisted on putting up a candidate in what has always been a tight two-way seat and, sure enough, thereby gifted it to Labour.

While Reform has every right to stand where it pleases, getting rid of the Moggster strikes me as an example of, as Starmer might say, putting party before country. Even when Reform disowns a candidate whose name is already on the ballot paper (as happened in several cases), or when its candidate recants and tells people to vote Tory, the vote-splitting still often puts the Left in.

What is the answer? In theory, there are few obstacles in the way of some kind of rapprochement. There are no great differences of principle, as there are in France between Les Républicains and the Rassemblement National, or in Germany between the Christian Democrats and the AfD.

Reform is a pro-enterprise, anti-tax party, whose instincts reflect those of almost every Conservative. The differences have to do with practice rather than principle. The Tories believe that some Reform proposals are unrealistic; Reform retorts that the Tories need to try harder. Either way, there is no great ideological rift.

Nor is the problem with Reform’s MPs. Four of the five are known quantities: Farage himself, Lee Anderson, who was recently a popular Conservative deputy chairman, Richard Tice, the polished party chairman, and Rupert Lowe, the new MP for Great Yarmouth, who struck me when we were MEPs together as a patriot in politics for all the right reasons.

The bigger challenge has to do with Farage’s ambitions. Suppose that Rees-Mogg’s proposal had somehow been taken up, and that the Reform leader had been offered the Home Office. Can you imagine him as a party politician, accepting collective responsibility, giving the official line at the Dispatch Box? That has never been his style.

Farage has made it clear that he wants to take the Tories over and remake them, rather as Donald Trump took over the Republicans. But only on his own terms. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n,” as Milton’s Satan puts it.

But the Conservatives won’t accept a reverse takeover from a party that, even in the Tories’ current depleted state, is less than a 20th of its size. This is where the parallel with Canada after the 1993 election breaks down. In Canada, it was Reform that emerged with 52 out of 295 seats, and the Tories who were reduced to two – the mirror image of what has happened here.

Are we doomed, then, to years of Labour rule, its majority holding even as its vote diminishes, because of a divided Right? Will we be ruined by a personality clash, rather as the Liberals were ruined by the Asquith/Lloyd George feud?

Possibly. But there are options short of a merger. One is to have an alliance, such as the National/Liberal coalition in Australia, or the CDU/CSU pact in Germany. Another is to have an electoral entente, at least in seats where it makes a difference, rather as the DUP and UUP used to do in Northern Ireland. I proposed such an agreement between the Conservatives and Ukip as long ago as 2015.

The fact that the two parties have a different geographical appeal (Reform is strong in northern seats where the Tories are weak) and a different demographic reach (Reform runs Labour close among first-time voters) makes collaboration easier.

The Tories have been around for three-and-a-half centuries, largely because, like Doctor Who, they can regenerate in new forms. There is no reason why they should not do so again – provided that, unlike Doctor Who, they do not sacrifice their traditional appeal in pursuit of wokeness.