‘The Conservative Party is on the brink of extinction’

Reform UK has had an unbroken lead in the opinion polls for the past seven months in a row. Nigel Farage is odds on to become Britain’s next prime minister, potentially smashing up the Labour-Tory duopoly for the first time in a century. So who are the voters driving the Reform surge? And how can Farage keep them on board while expanding his base?

Pollster James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners, caught up with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss the state of the main UK parties. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the full interview here.

Fraser Myers: Reform UK is topping the polls. What sort of people make up Nigel Farage’s supporter base?

James Johnson: Half of Reform’s current support in the polls is made up of people who voted Brexit in the EU referendum. They’re more likely to be white, working class and to have not gone to university. They’re feeling a strain on their finances, and they’re frustrated about things like immigration and the state of public services. Having already tried Labour, as well as the Conservatives under Boris Johnson, they’ve settled on Nigel Farage.

The rest of Reform’s voters are a mixed bag. There are some pensioners. There are some who are middle-aged. There are also some younger people on the right as well. The sense I get when I run focus groups in the UK is that people aren’t really running towards Reform with open arms – they just feel they’ve got no alternative. They have been failed by the two main parties, and Reform is the only place left to go. I do think, however, that Nigel Farage’s brand has been a huge driver for Reform’s success. These people are looking for someone authentic, and they feel like that’s what they get with Farage.

Myers: If Reform wants to expand its support, what does it need to do?

Johnson: I often refer to the white working-class Leave group as the ‘pessimistic patriots’. They’re very patriotic, but also feeling very negative about the future of the UK. Our modelling shows that around one in four current Conservative voters match the profile of those pessimistic patriots, so Reform actually has more to win there. That’s actually amazing news for Reform, because it’s quite rare to have all this support as well as more potential supporters out there who look just like your current ones. In that regard, Reform doesn’t need to do much different from what it’s already doing.

There is another group, however, that Reform needs to work a bit harder to win. This is the ‘final stand’ for the Conservatives – the last spluttering life force that the party has – and that’s the pensioner vote. These people are over 65, quite affluent and worried about their pension security. They aren’t yet ready to come over to Reform, despite agreeing with it on a lot of other issues. So while Reform can certainly still grow in popularity, it also needs to think about that older vote.

Myers: How badly are things going for the Labour Party, as far as the voters are concerned?

Johsnon: It’s pretty bad. I was a pollster for Theresa May when she was in government, and I used to write a note for her each month on her approval rating. It was never particularly good news for her. But even her ratings look fantastic compared with Keir Starmer’s. The public is very disappointed with the work of the Labour government so far. Few feel like it has addressed the country’s key issues, and they don’t feel like the party’s values are in the right place either.

However, I still think Labour is underpriced when it comes to the next election. The reason for that is we are not in a space where it needs to get 40 per cent to win a majority. It just needs to be ahead of the other parties. It can win a big majority even on 30 or 31 per cent of the vote – all Labour needs to do is rally the left. If it can get back some of those Green and Lib Dem voters, it could well sneak back, even with a very competitive Conservative or Reform Party. This is why you see Starmer asserting this ‘Starmer vs Farage’ argument, because he’s trying to get the left behind him.

People might think there’s no way Labour could get re-elected while it has an approval rating of minus 50 (or minus 60 in some polls), but my view is that it’s actually on track to do just that. After all, Labour is still the main left-wing party. It’s the right that has split.

Myers: Is there a viable challenge from the left?

Johnson: Zack Polanski, the new Green Party leader, is clearly making an impact. He reminds me a little bit of the New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who is running a similar campaign aimed at exciting younger left-wing people. These voters feel that Labour (or the Democrats in the US’s case) aren’t representing their views, and they’re looking for a more insurgent populist candidate on the left. I do think that’s eating a bit into Labour’s vote.

There’s a bit of pressure from the Lib Dems, too. And there was also a lot of excitement earlier this year about whether Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ would cut through. I think we’ve seen such organisational chaos on that front that I can’t see many people voting for it as it stands. But if Corbyn and Sultana do end up launching a party properly, things could be very different in a year’s time. So there are definitely competing forces on the left that Labour needs to be aware of. I do suspect, however, that if it really does come down to a choice between a Labour prime minister and a Reform prime minister, I think quite a lot of those voters may well come home to Labour.

Myers: What about the Conservatives?

Johnson: This is a very dark moment indeed for the Conservative Party. It is not hyperbole to say that it is on the brink of extinction. It’s lost 40 per cent of its vote since the General Election in 2024, mostly to Reform, and there aren’t many signs of that coming back.

Voters feel that the Conservatives failed in government, and they want to see something completely new, as well as a real sense of contrition for what went wrong. Although there were some feel-good vibes at the recent party conference – and although Kemi announced a popular policy on stamp-duty removal – that didn’t manage to rewrite the party’s brand in the same way that Tony Blair did for Labour in the 1990s with Clause IV, or the way that Cameron did for the Conservatives in the late 2000s with modernisation. We haven’t seen that moment for the Conservatives yet, which means that they’re still in a very dangerous place.

James Johnson was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch the full conversation below: