I’ve written about this before on my blog, but Suella Braverman’s defection to Reform just reiterates the point, so I’m making it again here for clarity.
Farage is hoovering up defecting Conservative MPs like they are bargains in the middle aisle at Lidl. Every one of them comes with a little speech about “principle” and “accountability”, and every one of them has somehow discovered these virtues at the exact moment their career prospects in the Tory party have started flashing red.
And yes, defecting sitting MPs are useful to Farage. They swell his numbers, they swell his headlines, and they swell the impression that Reform is “a serious force now”. But it’s not strategy. It’s tactics. It’s influence, pressure, and optics. The defectors think they’re joining a project. In reality, they’re joining a press cycle.
Political theory has a very old distinction that helps here: politics as persuasion versus politics as mobilisation. Liberal democracy is meant to be persuasion. You assemble coalitions, you accept pluralism, you compromise, and you treat institutions as constraints that protect everyone from arbitrary power. Populism is mobilisation. You generate intensity, identify enemies, and keep supporters emotionally engaged. It is far easier to do that in opposition than in office, because mobilisation doesn’t require delivery. It only requires grievance, momentum, and a permanent sense of betrayal.
Most of the defectors are fuelled by naked ambition. They are not political geniuses executing a master plan. They are careerists trying to keep their seats and their status, and they are mistaking attention for achievement. In older conservative thought, politics was supposed to involve duty, prudence, restraint, and a loyalty to institutions. What we have now is politics as a marketplace, with MPs acting as rational agents inside a degraded system.
But it’s worse than mere careerism. It’s the absence of self-awareness. These people are being used, cynically, and they don’t even have the self-awareness to realise it because their judgement has been hijacked by instantaneous opportunism. They are not defecting into a coherent programme of government. They are defecting into a brand. They are being deployed tactically, not embraced strategically, and once they’ve served their purpose they’ll be discarded the moment they become inconvenient or start demanding a share of the spotlight.
Because I still don’t believe Farage actually wants to be Prime Minister. Not in the way normal politicians do. Governing is where slogans go to die. It is budgets, courts, trade-offs, civil servants, international obligations, and the small matter of reality. It forces what Max Weber called the ethic of responsibility: you own consequences, you compromise, you choose between bad options, and you accept constraints. Farage’s entire political brand is closer to an ethic of conviction: moral certainty, simple answers, and perpetual accusation. That is a brilliant way to run a movement. It is a terrible way to run a state.
And we have seen with Trump where accountability leads. The moment reality and scrutiny arrive, the instinct is not to adjust the policy, but to attack the referee. Courts, prosecutors, journalists, civil servants, even the electoral system itself. The accountability doesn’t produce learning. It produces rage, denial, and an escalating attempt to discredit the mechanisms that hold power to account in the first place.
And that’s the point. Farage doesn’t need Number 10 to win. His paymasters don’t need him to win either. He can win simply by shifting what counts as “common sense” and “realistic”. That’s textbook agenda-setting power. Drag the Overton window rightwards so everyone else has to chase him on tax, regulation, immigration, protest, “British values”, the BBC, the courts, you name it. The mainstream parties start triangulating and tightening and copying the framing, and Farage gets to claim victory even if he never runs a department in his life.
But there’s a problem for him, and it’s a delicious one. Accepting ex-Conservatives in bulk annoys a good chunk of his own base, and it certainly spooks the waverers. Reform’s brand is “we’re not the Tories”. If he keeps filling his benches with the people who broke the country, he starts looking like Conservative Party 2.0 with a new paint job. The waverers aren’t signing up for a Tory reunion tour in turquoise. They want a wrecking ball, not a committee of failed ministers.
So Farage has to perform this ridiculous balancing act. He needs the defectors for credibility, but he needs to pretend he doesn’t need them. That’s why he makes them grovel. That’s why they have to say the Conservatives “broke the country” out loud. It’s not contrition. It’s branding. It’s a ritual that signals to the base that these aren’t colleagues, they’re trophies.
This is also where anti-pluralism comes in. A defining feature of populism is the claim to exclusive moral authority: “we represent the real people”. Once you accept that, opponents aren’t just wrong, they are illegitimate. Courts become obstacles, the media becomes hostile, civil servants become saboteurs, and compromise becomes betrayal. Permanent outrage isn’t an accident. It’s the mechanism that keeps legitimacy alive without delivery.
Now here’s the irony. As the Boris-era Conservatives drift over to Reform, the Conservative Party might actually have a route back. A real one. Not by chasing Farage harder, but by finally letting that wing go and regrouping as something closer to One Nation Conservatism. A smaller party, perhaps, but one that is serious, competent, and capable of governing without setting fire to the furniture.
The Conservatives could stop trying to out-Farage Farage, and go back to being the boring, pragmatic centre-right party that at least believed in institutions, compromise, and the idea that you don’t run a country like a pub argument.
But if they want that, Badenoch would have to go.
You can’t rebuild as One Nation while led by someone still operating in the culture-war lane. Badenoch’s pitch is built for the membership, not the country. It’s all sharp lines, factional positioning, and grievance politics. It narrows the gap between the Conservatives and Reform instead of widening it. It keeps the party trapped in the same doom loop: chase Farage, lose to Farage, then blame the electorate for not appreciating your “common sense”.
Frankly, it would be better for everyone if Badenoch herself defected. She’d be with her natural political tribe, Reform would get another headline, and the Conservatives might finally be forced to decide whether they want to be a serious centre-right party again or just a smaller, sulkier version of Farage.
A One Nation recovery would mean accepting that the Johnson years were a disaster, that Brexit has left the country weaker, that public services need rebuilding, and that competence is not “woke”. It would mean choosing stability over slogans, and governing over performance. That requires a different temperament, a different tone, and frankly a different leader. Rory Stewart.
So yes, Reform is growing. But it’s growing in the way mould grows. Fast, loud, and in all the wrong places. The defectors are ambitious, Farage is tactical, and the people paying for it are the ones still waiting for a GP appointment while Westminster plays musical chairs with rosettes.
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