BIRMINGHAM, England — “Vile,” “horrible,” “betrayal,” “bastards.” For Conservative aides and politicians gathering at their annual conference this week, the hatred of Nigel Farage’s rival right-wing party Reform UK is real. Since the opposition party’s last gathering, an already icy relationship with Reform’s national leadership has entered deep freeze. The defections of high-profile Tory politicians, including Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman in January this year, added a personal animus to the battle for votes on the British right.
And yet, Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch has not categorically ruled out some kind of tie-up with Reform after a general election. Politically, she cannot afford to take it off the table. Senior Conservatives at lunches and receptions this week were quick to aim invective and mockery at Reform — privately and sometimes in public, fueled by a row that Braverman triggered last week when she said that, as a British-born woman of British-Asian origin, she was “not an English person.” “They’re just not our kind of people,” Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch, the first black leader of a major political party, told the BBC about Reform on Tuesday.
Badenoch’s most senior aides put it even more bluntly. That may be the only practical option left to her. POLITICO spoke to more than a dozen senior Conservative politicians and aides at the party conference.
Almost all indicated that a deal with Reform is not only undesirable, but the hostility is now so bad that it would fail if Badenoch ever tried to enact it. A senior Reform official responded to this story by saying: “Two years of being hammered at the local elections has finally made the Tories crack. Quite clearly they’re obsessed with us whilst their own party crumbles around them.
We look forward to consigning them to the dustbin of history.” If the U.K. held a general election now, almost all polling suggests Britain’s right-leaning vote would be deeply split between these two parties and further undercut by a third — the hard-right Restore Britain. That could allow Labour to squeeze through and win the most seats under the first-past-the-post electoral system, like it did in 2024. If there was a real deadlock, even after a second election, Badenoch would be left with an unenviable choice: team up with Farage, or let Labour — perhaps with a rainbow coalition of Liberal Democrats, nationalists and Greens — run the show?
The relationship between the Conservatives and Farage, who left the party in 1992, has long been fractious and worsened after the 2019 election — when Farage stepped aside to aid a pro-Brexit majority for Boris Johnson, but received no thanks. Since last year the defections (and the fighting talk they attracted) have sent the relationship nosediving further. Most of the opprobrium is saved for Jenrick.
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