The Tories edge past Reform, but credibility is the real fight

A YEAR AGO, THE QUESTION HANGING OVER the Conservative conference was not whether the party could win the next election, but whether it would still be the principal party of the British right by the time that election came. Reform UK led the polls, Kemi Badenoch’s leadership was openly in question, and the comparison most often reached for was not with the party’s great recoveries of the past but with the Liberals of the 1920s: a governing party slowly squeezed out of existence by a rival that had taken both its voters and its purpose.

This week, for the first time in that long slide, the numbers pointed the other way. A YouGov survey conducted on 11 and 12 October put the Conservatives on 23 per cent and Reform on 21, with Andy Burnham’s Labour narrowly ahead on 24. It was the Conservatives’ best showing since YouGov restarted its Westminster tracker in January 2025, and the first time the party had finished ahead of Farage’s since 2024.

It would be easy to make too much of it. A two-point gap sits within the margin of error, and a single poll establishes neither a lead nor a realignment. What gives the figures their weight is the story that preceded them, a period in which Reform seemed to have replaced the Conservatives as the natural home of discontent on the right, and the questions they now force on both leaders. For Badenoch, they are the first tangible evidence since the 2024 defeat that voters are prepared to look at her party again. For Farage, they hint that the electorate has begun to judge Reform as it would a prospective government, rather than as a vessel for frustration with the old order.

The contest between them is more than a clash of personalities. It is a struggle between two traditions on the right: an established party trying to recover its authority, and a populist movement whose appeal was built on that party’s failures. To understand where it stands now, it helps to go back to a time when the two were, in effect, on the same side.

The story begins with the European referendum and the coalition Boris Johnson assembled in its wake. Farage had spent the better part of two decades arguing that Britain’s relationship with the European Union was about more than trade rules or budget contributions. For his supporters, Brexit came to stand for sovereignty, for accountability, and for the idea that decisions shaping their lives ought to be taken by people they could vote out. By 2019, the Conservatives had absorbed much of that argument and made it their own.

What followed was one of the most unusual electoral coalitions in modern British history. Johnson joined the party’s traditional shire and suburban vote to former Labour voters across the Midlands and the North — people who disagreed with one another about public spending, state intervention and a great deal else, but who agreed that Brexit needed finishing. Farage helped make it possible. His Brexit Party chose not to contest the 317 seats the Conservatives had won in 2017. It was not a formal pact, but it removed the threat of a split vote where it mattered most, and Johnson came away with a substantial majority.

For a while, it seemed the party could hold economic liberals, social conservatives, Eurosceptics and disaffected working-class voters under one roof. That roof, though, rested on two supports: Brexit itself, and confidence in Johnson’s peculiar ability to speak across lines of class and party. Once Brexit was done and Johnson was gone, rather less was holding it up.

The years that followed tested the structure to destruction. The pandemic, its economic aftershocks, the controversies of Johnson’s final months, Liz Truss’s short-lived government and Rishi Sunak’s attempt to steady the ship came in quick succession, and voters watched a carousel of leaders while their concerns about living standards, public services and immigration went unanswered. The 2024 election delivered the verdict. The Conservatives fell to 121 seats, their worst result in modern history. Reform won around 4.1 million votes, 14.3 per cent of the total, yet only five MPs.

The space between those two things was Reform’s opening, and it is the problem Badenoch inherited.

That disparity said a good deal about first-past-the-post, but it also revealed something that still defines British politics in 2026. Many of the voters who deserted the Conservatives had not abandoned conservative instincts. They had abandoned confidence in the Conservative Party. The space between those two things was Reform’s opening, and it is the problem Badenoch inherited.

When Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick for the leadership in November 2024, her first task was not to write an attractive manifesto. It was to explain what the Conservatives were for after fourteen years in which their principles and their record had often seemed to point in opposite directions. A party of fiscal restraint had presided over historically high taxation. A party that promised to control immigration had faced fierce criticism over migration levels. A party that sold itself on competence had been through three prime ministers in a single parliament.

Not all of that was of the party’s own making; the pandemic, an energy shock and a sluggish global economy constrained every government of the period. But voters judge parties by what happens on their watch, and Badenoch’s answer has been to return the Conservatives to an explicitly economic and philosophical identity. At the party’s conference in Birmingham this month she presented The Right Way, a statement of principles built around wealth creation, personal responsibility, economic freedom and effective government. Around it came a raft of pledges: abolishing inheritance tax on the family home, halving employer National Insurance contributions for workers aged 21 to 24, removing the childcare cliff edge that penalises some higher earners, and a savings programme the party says would yield £71 billion, half of it set against the deficit by 2029–30.

These are promises rather than audited outcomes, and their cost, fairness and deliverability deserve scrutiny. But they show a party trying to define itself by something broader than immigration and cultural disputes. That matters, because the opponent Badenoch faces has built his influence in a very different way.

Farage has never needed to present himself as a competent administrator. His gift has been for finding the places where public frustration has pooled, naming them in plain language, and daring the institutions responsible to explain themselves. Brexit was the most consequential example; immigration is the current one. A major YouGov voter study in July found that 54 per cent of Reform supporters cited trust on immigration as a leading reason for backing the party, alongside a sense that Reform speaks honestly about the country’s problems and represents genuine change. Farage offers dissatisfied voters both an explanation for their dissatisfaction and a vehicle through which to express it.

Badenoch speaks a different political language. Where Farage names the grievance, she tries to connect it to an argument about taxation, productivity, the size of the state and the reform of institutions. That does not mean the two parties are far apart. They share scepticism about aspects of environmental regulation, a commitment to tighter immigration control and a conviction that government has become too large and too ineffective. The difference between them is not that one is conservative and the other more so.

This week supplied a sharp illustration. Farage announced plans to suspend asylum claims for up to five years, reject pending applications and put pressure on countries that refuse to take back deported nationals. The proposals place border control at the heart of Reform’s offer, but they also invite hard questions about implementation, Britain’s international protection obligations and the resources such a scheme would demand. Badenoch’s difficulty runs in the opposite direction. Conservative voters who want firmer action on immigration may welcome tougher commitments, but many of them remember that her party had fourteen years in which to deliver them. Stronger language cannot dissolve that memory.

It lies in identity, in institutional credibility, and in the relationship each draws between campaigning and governing.

Nor does economics offer a clean dividing line. Reform’s 2024 programme promised substantial tax cuts and spending commitments that the Institute for Fiscal Studies judged insufficiently funded, and the Conservatives’ own record on the public finances is hardly unblemished. Both parties must explain how their promises would survive contact with the Treasury. The argument, in the end, is not about who sounds more determined. It is about whether voters believe determination would translate into results.

The clearest picture of the Conservative predicament comes not from this week’s headline figures but from research into the people who used to vote for the party. YouGov’s July study found that only half of those who backed the Conservatives in 2024 still intended to do so. Around 26 per cent had moved to Reform, while others were undecided or drifting towards parties of the centre and left.

Winning back Reform voters would not, on its own, rebuild the coalition. The 2024 defeat was a war fought on two fronts. Alongside the losses to Farage came heavy losses to the Liberal Democrats, particularly in seats full of voters who had once regarded the Conservatives as a moderate, economically responsible party of government. Those voters tend to care more about public services, economic management, standards in public life and Britain’s relationship with Europe, and some are actively put off by confrontational rhetoric on social questions. What the Conservatives face, then, is not a simple two-way split on the right but the fragmentation of an electorate that once accepted the party as a broad enough home for all of them.

That tension runs straight through Badenoch’s programme. Inheritance tax relief and childcare reforms for higher earners may play well in middle-income and affluent constituencies; critics argue they offer little to households struggling with everyday costs. Badenoch rejects the charge that her party cares only for the comfortable, pointing to its proposals on employment, housing and growth. But the dispute shows how difficult it has become to speak at once to voters driven by aspiration and those whose dissatisfaction stems from financial insecurity or a sense of having lost cultural ground. The Conservatives once bridged those differences with a blend of market economics, commitments on public services and a broader story about the nation. Whether that blend can be mixed again is a question no single poll can answer.

Perhaps the most revealing evidence comes from research published by Oxford University’s Nuffield Politics Research Centre on 5 October. In 2024, around 63 per cent of surveyed voters saw the Conservatives as the more locally viable party on the right. After the May 2026 local elections, only about a quarter of respondents in England and Wales thought the Conservatives better placed than Reform to win in their constituency, while 45 per cent named Reform. Voters unhappy with the economy, the research found, had increasingly turned to Reform rather than to the Tories.

That is a striking inversion of how British politics normally works. An unpopular government ordinarily hands its opportunity to the main opposition, as disappointed voters look to those positioned to replace ministers. For a significant part of the electorate, Reform appears to have taken over that role, even though the Conservatives remain the official opposition at Westminster. Reform’s performance in May, when it won more seats than any other party across the English councils holding elections, showed that its support is more than a polling phenomenon.

But electoral success brings obligations that protest does not. A movement built on opposition to the political class must eventually show that it can run institutions, recruit sound candidates and keep its own house in order, and recent weeks have tested exactly that. An undercover ITV investigation exposed offensive and extreme remarks by Reform-linked candidates and councillors, and on 18 October the party suspended prospective parliamentary candidate Jason Powell over comments about Muslims and migrants. Farage has defended Reform’s vetting while conceding that no party can foresee everything its candidates will go on to say.

Neither the old party’s record nor the new party’s novelty settles the matter.

None of this defines Reform’s voters, nor does it make concerns about immigration any less legitimate. It does, however, raise the kind of questions that matter far more to a party seeking office than to one content to protest. And the Conservatives, with their own history of controversies and misjudgements, are in no position to claim that experience guarantees competence. Neither the old party’s record nor the new party’s novelty settles the matter. Both now have to be weighed against evidence.

All of this is unfolding against a transformed Labour Party. Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street has altered the government’s tone and the terms of its confrontation with the opposition, and the approaching Budget will test the competing arguments on taxation, borrowing, welfare and growth. Badenoch’s conference announcements acquire their significance in that light: the Conservatives are trying to recover not merely a share of the vote but their claim to be a coherent alternative government.

There is a gap, though, between that ambition and evidence that it has been realised. Before the conference, YouGov found that only 20 per cent of Britons thought the Conservatives ready to return to government, against 59 per cent who did not. The October improvement is a shift in voting intention, not a restoration of trust. Equally, it would be a mistake to overstate Reform’s decline. Its supporters remain strongly attached to Farage personally, and the dissatisfaction it draws on long predates the current government. A movement in national polling says little about constituency organisation, voter loyalty or the durability of political identities. What it has done is change the conversation. For the first time in months, the question being asked is whether the traditional party of the British right still has the resources to defend its place.

The rivalry between Badenoch and Farage ultimately poses a question larger than either party’s next poll: what is conservatism supposed to offer Britain after Brexit? For some voters it means lower taxes, enterprise, property ownership, personal responsibility and limits on the power of the state. For others it means borders, national identity, social continuity and institutions that command public confidence. Those ideas are not incompatible, and for most of its history the Conservative Party held them together within a single tradition. Its failure since 2024 has been in persuading enough voters that it still has a convincing account of how they fit.

Farage has prospered by exposing the distance between Conservative promises and Conservative government. Badenoch is trying to show what separates conservatism as a programme for government from populism as a challenge to the establishment. That distinction will mean something only if it is backed by credible policy, consistent conduct and an honest reckoning with the party’s past. Neither dismissing Reform nor imitating it offers an answer on its own. Ignore Reform, and the party overlooks the dissatisfaction that carried millions of voters to Farage. Imitate it without confronting the record, and the question of trust remains exactly where it was. Pitch everything at Reform’s electorate, and the moderate voters lost to the Liberal Democrats stay lost. Rebuilding a coalition is not a matter of assembling a majority around a single grievance; it means reconciling competing expectations of what a governing party ought to achieve.

For decades, the Conservatives could assume that disillusion with Labour would eventually come their way. Reform’s rise has shown that the assumption no longer holds. The latest poll gives Badenoch an encouraging moment, but not a conclusion. Her party remains weighed down by memories of its time in office, by the competing demands of its former supporters and by an electorate increasingly willing to look beyond the established parties. Farage, for his part, is discovering the scrutiny that comes with turning an insurgency into an organisation with councillors, MPs and national ambitions. Neither has yet resolved the contradictions within their coalition.

A decade ago, the argument on the British right was about Britain’s place in Europe. In 2019, it was about getting Brexit done. In 2024, it was a verdict on fourteen years of Conservative government. By October 2026, it has become an argument about credibility.

The question facing Kemi Badenoch is no longer simply whether she can convince voters that Nigel Farage has the wrong answers. It is whether her party can convince them that it finally understands why they stopped believing its own.

Two percentage points will not settle that. ∎