At Reform UK’s press conference this morning, Lee Anderson took to the stage obscured, initially, behind a Union Jack flag.
Irritated by chuckles from the crowd of gathered media, the former deputy Tory chairman, former Labour councillor and MP for Ashfield, demanded: “Who’s laughing?”
The obstruction was wheeled away and, as Reform leader Richard Tice’s Cheshire cat-like grin got wider, one thing was all too clear: it certainly won’t be Rishi Sunak.
Reform UK’s rebirth from the ashes of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party has seen it grow from a relative outsider to become the consistently poll at around 10 per cent, according to Politico’s ‘poll of polls’.
While it’s still only a fraction of the support for Labour (44 per cent) and the Conservatives (24 per cent), Reform, in January this year, overtook the Liberal Democrats to become the third most popular party in the polls.
This matters. Not because we could see Reform in coalition with Sunak or Keir Starmer. It is because the party, with Anderson as its first MP, could eat into the voting pools of both major parties.
Emma Levin, associate director of pollsters Savanta, said Anderson’s move “highlights the issues” his former party are having around immigration, including the ‘stop the boats’ pledge.
“It’s embarrassing for Sunak, it’s a problem and it potentially forces him to move further to the right… and that puts him in a difficult position when he’s already behind Labour in the polls,” she added.
Having to fight on two fronts – Labour to his left and Reform on his right flank – is certainly likely to break Tory strategists out into a cold sweat.
But crucially it’s the type of Tory voter they risk losing which could really prove damaging.
Some 2019 Conservative voters, those who ‘lent’ the party their backing and built Boris Johnson’s infamous ‘Red Wall’, are “fleeing” into the arms of Reform, Levin said.
Losing that broad church, which is already being reflected in Labour’s entrenched poll lead, is a surefire way to lose seats and lose No10.
And to make matters worse, Levin adds, the public “don’t tend to like division”. Meaning any further defections or additions risk only adding to the Conservative’s current unpopularity.
“We cannot pretend any longer that ‘the plan is working’,” leaders of the New Conservatives, a group of rightwing, socially conservative MPs, wrote on X today.
But the responsibility for Lee’s defection sits with the Conservative Party. We have failed to hold together the coalition of voters who gave us an 80 seat majority in 2019. Those voters – in our traditional heartlands and in the Red Wall seats like Ashfield – backed us because…
— The New Conservatives (@thenewcons) March 11, 2024
Labour, naturally, are only too happy to sit back and take full advantage of the tight spot for Sunak, while playing up their own messaging on the PM’s “weakness”.
“What does it say about Sunak’s judgement that he promoted Lee Anderson in the first place?” asked campaign co-ordinator Pat McFadden. “The Prime Minister is too weak to lead a party too extreme to be led.”
Already on course for a likely election win, Reform’s antics may not shift the dial much towards Starmer.
But while Lee’s mum and dad may be thrilled, Anderson’s former boss will be cursing his name.
