I’m not saying I told you so, but…

I’d invite anyone to go back over the last two years and pick any editorial I’ve written on the subject at any point in that last two years and find where I hadn’t described what has happened some time before it did.

Now the stopped clock challenge is to be expected when claiming accurate prediction, and it was almost fair exactly a decade ago when I declared Donald Trump would become President, which anyone tempted by hindsight to claim now was inevitable, is wrong.

This though is no stopped clock.

You see, I spoke at my very first ConservativeHome event as Editor this time two years ago. The Conservative party was in a really bad state, the threat of existential oblivion very high, the risk of near bankruptcy and structural collapse stalked the last days of Sunak as leader and I said I did “not believe in inevitability.”

The best efforts of the ‘boys who hate Kemi’ club – some who still do – the very small ‘what if’ club who still wish Rob Jenrick was a Tory and had won, and the massed choir of the self-appointed Reform fan club – who love to belt out their old, but greatest hits – all failed to derail the leader of the party.

My esteemed colleague Oliver Dean said yesterday ‘the Tories are back.‘

Sort of.

I’d say back …from the near dead. There is no reason for a single Tory to be jubilant or complacent with that YouGov MRP poll. It says nothing that is a cause for major celebration in Torydom. However it does signal the very clear end of a chapter.

The Tories are very much alive, in the game, and Reform’s project to destroy them has failed. In 2025 – and even a few today – people urged the Tories to ‘find a better leader’. As uber-Blairite journalist and longtime political watcher John Rentoul pointed out yesterday:

“…the Tories have found a better leader. She’s called Kemi Badenoch”

About nine months ago I wrote about the political peloton – and if you hate cycling think marathon running – and how all the Tories needed to do was stay close to or within the leading pack.

Well they have. I actually have no idea at this point if they are actually second, or third or first, but the point is neither do you.

All three of the main challenger parties are effectively neck and neck and totally within the margin of error zone. The trend for the polls – which are now apparently less important to Reform outriders now they aren’t dominating them – is Reform trending down, the Conservatives glacially but consistently tending up, and Labour out in front with that marginal Burnham bounce. Starmer had been tanking them. Up until a veery few weeks ago the Reform line was the Tories were ‘stuck’ on 18 per cent and highly unlikely to get higher.

Now let’s be clear. Reform are by no means ‘beaten’. Far from it. Reform are still a major force. Nigel Farage hasn’t signalled any serious move to quit. Raheem Kassam is back by Farage’s side after Dan Jukes ‘departed’ and has signalled his arrival with a snipe at Kemi Badenoch’s ‘Nigerian accent’, a sign of what I think may be to come. But as I have never underestimated them as a force or a movement any Conservative who thinks two polls where Reform are marginally third means they they are going away or close to collapsing is in cloud cuckoo land.

The next phase of Conservative/Reform relations could be very ugly indeed.

Not that it’s been much fun for the last two years.

Pick any article on this site from November 2024 to today that mentions Reform and look at the comments you will find robust if rather samey pushback from ardent Reformers, who now Tim Montgomerie has resigned from the party still don’t have a site of their own. They are no less passionate now than they were two years ago, and they still believe, with all the force they had when their party was at 30%, and lining up to be a majority government.

That’s gone, for the moment. And suddenly the question I said would dominate 2026 on the right is popping up once again:

Does the right unite?

That MRP poll suggests people like the Greens and Lib Dems if they wanted to band together with a bruised and battered Labour but still the largest party could prop up another five years of a left wing government.

This deal question in my mind has become further away than ever. Two years of aggressive anti Tory rhetoric from Reform HQ, has in a very human way made Tories want to bite the hand that’s been smacking them in the face. I have kept the receipts, two years’ worth, so I’m not about to take very seriously any talk of Establishment smears and stich ups.

Do the do, and get caught out, that’s nobody’s fault but your own. That applies to everyone.

But Iain Dale and Andrew Marr were discussing on LBC the ‘uniting’ question much in the terms I’ve done before. The decider is never really and individual even those as strong minded as Farage and Badenoch but maths.

To paraphrase Iain, essentially the next election will be won either by the right of centre or left of centre and probably either needing a deal of some kind; ‘arrangement’ has become the ‘mot de jour’.

However, neither Farage nor Badenoch need to entertain it just yet. It was notable how many formally dismissive Reform outriders wanted to talk about a deal yesterday, obviously one that they would and should dominate, and started to blame Badenoch as the obstacle. The old ‘’ shtick.

It’s an irony that anyone would blame the leader of a party its rival on the right publicly declared was its mission and purpose to destroy, for not wanting to reach out across the divide to enter a partnership that is fraught with problems, not least how much they clearly hate the Conservatives.

However in the coming days something else will come into play. Labour’s conference.

Over the course of this left-fest, we may get a clearer idea of what Burnham is after beyond ‘likes’ and where he may be headed. The value to him of an early election is already receding and the budget is going to be a really tough one, not least as it is reported plans for it are further behind than at any stage in the last decade, because Burham and Healey are not sure what exactly they want to do.

The beginning has ended. Not least as because one of its key players has quite the field altogether. What everyone is asking inside Labour, Reform and the Tories is whether, for them, the next chapter is the beginning of the end.

I predict, right now, that’s not a scenario (though entirely possible) that the Conservatives, under Kemi Badenoch feel applies to them.