Suella’s defection has brought the Tories even closer to oblivion

Suella Braverman, a former UK home secretary, is the latest high-profile Conservative to defect to Reform UK – the third sitting MP and the second former cabinet minister in just the past few weeks. Having swallowed up much of the Tories’ voter base, Nigel Farage’s insurgent party is sweeping up its major players, too.

While the media are focussing on the personalities involved – whether the conversions of Braverman, Jenrick et al are sincere, cynical or a mix of both; whether Reform is or isn’t becoming a ‘retirement home’ for failed Tory MPs and ministers – the defections very much mirror the public mood. The rising tide of Reform really has cast the Conservative Party asunder.

After the Brexit referendum in 2016, the Tories tried and failed to reinvent themselves for the new populist era. The public expected them to restore control over the borders, revive national sovereignty and push back against woke idiocy. Yet the Tories either limply failed on many of these fronts, or did the opposite of what they had been asked to do – most notably, on immigration. For all the discussion of whether or not Kemi Badenoch has sunk the Tory Party, any Tory leader would struggle to revive the party’s fortunes in such circumstances.

The party continues to haemorrhage support. Between 2019 and 2024, the Conservatives lost seven million voters. Polls suggest it has lost a further 40 per cent of its voters since then, mostly to Reform. As Jenrick revealed in a Spectator interview last week, the Tories’ prospects are so bleak that they may be forced to pursue a ‘60 seat’ strategy at the next General Election. This would involve them throwing the kitchen sink at those posher parts of south-east England that aren’t yet Liberal Democrat strongholds. How far we are from 2019, when Boris Johnson could conquer Labour’s once dependable ‘red wall’.

Predictably, many Tory outriders are taking precisely the wrong message from the public’s rejection of their party. Tory wets are already saying good riddance to Jenrick and Braverman, and to their ‘populist’ policies. The siren calls of ‘sensible centrism’ from certain backbenchers, pundits and the broadsheet press are starting to become deafening. Over the weekend, former Birmingham mayor Andy Street and ex-Tory leader in Scotland Ruth Davidson launched a centrist counter-offensive, hoping to take the Tories back to the not-so-dizzying heights of the David Cameron era, when the party failed to win a majority against a Labour leader as unpopular as Gordon Brown – and only squeaked one in 2015 by promising to hold an EU referendum, something Cameron would live to regret. As more right-wingers and populists jump ship, the pressure on Kemi to turn her party into a Change UK tribute act will only grow, handing the party’s remaining right-wing voters to Reform.

The consistency of Reform’s polling, not to mention its success in real-life by-elections and council seats, seems to have blinded the political class to the significance of this moment. Even if Reform fails to win the next General Election, or falls short of a majority, the fact that it’s on course to replace the Conservatives as the largest party of the right is in itself nothing short of seismic. This is a once-in-a-century event, comparable with the Labour Party replacing the Liberals in the early 20th century, fuelled by the historic widening of the franchise to the working classes.

The rise of Reform, and its devouring of the Tories, is bigger than Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and any individual defector. This is about the casting aside of a party that has made itself irrelevant at best, and repellant at worst, to the voting public. Long may the revolt continue.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.