Much keener on Trump, less sure about Charles III

In 2023 the delegates at Reform UK’s annual party conference just about filled a smallish room at a hotel in London. This year’s conference, which opened on September 20th, is taking place in a cavernous hall in Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre. Under the leadership of Richard Tice, the party routinely failed to win enough votes to keep its deposit in parliamentary by-elections. This year, under the leadership of Nigel Farage, Reform UK garnered more than 4m votes in the general election and returned five MPs to Parliament, Messrs Tice and Farage among them.

Neither of the two big parties can afford to ignore Reform UK’s election success. Mr Farage has made no secret of his intention to target Labour MPs at the next election. But the burning questions are for the Conservative Party. In July Reform UK drove a wedge through the right-of-centre vote. The next Conservative leader, who will be elected in November, will hope to close this divide. But a look at Reform UK’s voters shows why that will not be easy.

In demography and policy preferences, Conservative and Reform voters look similar in many ways. They are generally older, less likely to have a degree and more likely to be white, British and straight than other voters. They are sceptical of immigration, authoritarian on crime, opposed to European integration and uninterested in wealth redistribution or climate change. In July the most pronounced difference between the two groups was their view of the then Tory government. Before the election, pollsters at YouGov found that 73% of Conservative voters had a favourable opinion of Rishi Sunak, compared with just 18% of Reform voters.

That provided Conservatives with some measure of comfort in defeat. Reform UK voters would “come home” to the larger right-of-centre party under Mr Sunak’s successor, they believed. The path back to government would be assured. But this schism may be difficult to undo. Although the policy substance is similar, style matters too. Reform UK voters have an anti-establishment streak that is at odds with the natural instincts of conventional Tory voters. Take the rioters who trashed English cities in August: 51% of Reform voters said that rioters’ sentences were too harsh, compared with only 20% of Conservatives, according to YouGov. Reform voters are more likely to believe ordinary people are taken advantage of by the rich. They are 20 percentage points less likely to have a favourable view of King Charles III than Conservative voters and 40 points more likely to have a favourable view of Donald Trump.

This anti-establishment instinct is reflected in the differences between the respective voter bases of Reform UK and the Conservatives. Although Reform voters skew older than the British public in aggregate, they are six years younger than Conservative voters on average, according to the British Election Study, a survey of voting behaviour. They are substantially more likely to be male and to have fewer qualifications than Conservative voters. The group that is most likely to have voted for Reform UK in July is white, straight British men aged 26 to 35, whose highest qualification is lower than A-levels (see chart 1).

This electoral coalition would be familiar to those who have followed the rise of the hard right in much of Europe, which has built its support on working-age, working-class voters. Conservatives are more likely to be home owners; Reform UK voters disproportionately rent from a housing association or local authority. Conservatives are evenly split between identifying as middle class or working class; Reform UK voters say they are working class by more than two to one.

This profile helps explain why Reform UK’s success in July was not confined to Conservative-leaning areas. Of the 98 constituencies where Reform UK came second, 89 are now held by the Labour Party. Labour is also an obvious target for the upstart party in some of the elections that will take place before the next general election. Labour has won each of the six elections thus far to the Senedd, Wales’s devolved parliament; the next vote is due in 2026. But Labour’s vote share in Wales fell by four points in July whereas Reform UK improved by almost 12 points—almost beating the Conservatives into second place in Britain’s poorest country. The Senedd is elected under a proportional system, which could allow Reform UK to establish a foothold there.

It is nonetheless the Conservatives who have the most to fear from Reform UK’s rise. According to the British Election Study, when given an 11-point scale from zero (strongly dislike) to ten (strongly like), 68% of Labour voters give Reform UK a flat zero (see chart 2). The same is true of only 22% of Conservative voters. Although the Conservative Party could double down on anti-immigration policies, voters who place themselves to the Conservatives’ left on immigration outweigh those to their right by 36% to 28%. In other words, policies designed to woo Reform voters could cost the party moderate voters they need to win back from Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

As it stands, Reform UK’s support still has a relatively low ceiling. On the scale above, only 28% of voters scored the party at five or higher. But Reform UK has already demonstrated its ability to wreak havoc on the bigger parties. Its supporters will not be won back easily or without alienating other voters. It will need to keep booking big venues. ■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.