This is not a gloat. It’s a warning about looking like you are gloating.
It’s not a ‘told you so’ because though I did, there are ways to reset, and regroup, but I can’t see any sign of it, yet.
This weekend hours before the full ITV Exposure “A Year In Reform” programme was broadcast a number of well-known Reform supporters were simultaneously (as so often the case) pushing out the same line:
‘The Tories are having a bounce sure, but I’m shocked’ (one was ‘gobsmacked’) ‘that anyone is thinking of voting Conservative ever again’
What followed was a litany of charges, some justified, about the record of Conservatives in government of 2010-2014. The same language, the same words, the same attacks that have been repeated endlessly since the electorate, the ones who matter, gave the hardest lesson to the Tories at the last general election.
My warning to Reform (there’s one for the Tories too, later) is that this “shock” that the Conservatives are going up in the polls and Reform dropping down is saying more about your Party than it is the Conservatives. Anyone with the ability to step back from the tribal front lines has been able to see it for months.
A second warning, to both at this juncture is important: At this stage the Tories aren’t winning, and Reform aren’t losing. Nobody has cause to celebrate and nobody should panic. What really won’t work is an orgy of fighting talk, and retreat into now stale fighting lines. Things have changed whether either side likes it or not.
Farage used to talk of “f” and it was, but now it’s clear something is happening and how either side decides to deal with is going to define the last part of this year. I predicted on January 2nd, 2026, that it would be the year the Tories and Reform settled something, Either together or irredeemably apart. The latter now seems settled.
Two years of co-ordinated attacks, sustained at first by a huge poll lead, defections, Farage firing on all cylinders, a publicly declared mission to destroy the Conservatives, moments when it felt like they might, and two good local election showings are going to make any new insurgent party feel pretty confident.
The temptation is to ignore and dismiss the Conservative counters, because you think your rival is down and out for the count. But what shocks me is not that Reform outriders cannot believe that Tory fortunes have slowly changed, it’s that they could’ve seen it coming, seen Badenoch bouncing back, and simply doubled down because they refused to accept it was real.
The days of Reform on 30 per cent and Professor John Curtice saying it’s likely Nigel Farage will be the next Prime Minister have gone, for now. It didn’t happen overnight. Nor can we rule out them still contending vigorously into the future. They have the heart to want to, I just don’t currently see the strategic nous to make it happen.
Never completely dismiss you rivals.
You certainly won’t find where I have dismissed their voters or their ability to fight their corner. LOTO and CCHQ haven’t dismissed Reform behind the scenes, and god knows I’d be down like a ton of bricks on a Conservative Party that made the same mistake. If the Tories start polling towards, or beyond where Labour are now thanks to Burnham, there must be no crowing.
Hubris is like hypocrisy in politics, it’s toxic to anyone who touches it. This weekend I ran through over a hundred tweets posted by senior Reform voices in 2025, and early 2026 and there is a lesson in the tone of most of them for everyone:
When you are winning, be quietly confidant and keep talking about your vision, your values, your policies. You don’t need to trash other opposition parties, either angrily or aggressively or worst sneer dismissively, but focus relentlessly on your job – attacking the government of the day, whilst describing the alternative. This has not been the road Reform have travelled.
They won’t want my advice but Reform stop any further slide.
The first rule is to stop blaming everybody else. Own your own messes.
No there some cabal of ‘deep state’, ‘establishment’ shadows that supposedly get together to discuss how to beat Reform. Most of their problems throughout the last few months, are theirs. As a party that looked like reaching power they should have expected the scrutiny they’ve got. They should own mistakes to move forward, after all that’s what they spent two years demanding the Tories do, and they repeatedly. Not that any Reformers admit that.
The donations a problem, and defensive attacks on how they were revealed, by whom, and ‘it’s nobodies’ business what they were for’ doesn’t wash. Don’t take my word for it, you can see it in polling and focus groups. Find better ways to resolve it, than “boring, boring, boring”.
Certain individuals who have found themselves asked difficult questions need to have an answer, give it, and spare us the whataboutery, not least its a far left borrow mixed with Trump playbook – oh and there are very few UK votes to be had now by being aligned to the Donald.
Nigel needs to be present again, and he’s not. The rumour he’s about to chuck it all in, seems a bit far fetched, and yet it absolutely won’t go away.
When he briefly present he’s firing on far less than full cylinders and his traditional iron grip at the top has looked either weak or laissez-faire at best in recent months.
Zia Yusuf should have his phone removed.
He doesn’t help anybody other than people who are already voting Reform. And sorry Nigel, but he want your job, as does I suspect Rob Jenrick (it’s in his DNA to want to lead, and in his wife’s to urge him to try). Zia isn’t listening to Nigel anymore. He can’t be ordered to do anything. Tim Montgomerie, still loyal despite having left Reform, has been saying this for weeks. I checked in with him, and he’s not a plant, he is with the Conservatives.
He’s right about one thing though, Zia, the self-appointed “lethal electoral threat” who has never stood for election is the living embodiment of the right.
On that note, don’t shoot the messenger all the time.
People who highlight real problems and strategic blunders are not “Tory Plants” – you look a bit paranoid or conspiracy nuts when you do – but in most cases people who can see the actual problems are just staggered Reform can’t – which is why they don’t respond strategically but instead lash out at anyone and everyone claiming they’re out to get them.
It smacks of something Yes Minister’s Jim Hacker once said: “You’d be paranoid….if everyone was out to get you”.
Not all of Reform’s key people have missed the sea change, and again I state clearly; the Tories haven’t ‘beaten Reform’ it’s just that right now they are doing better, when a year ago when they were well behind and teetering on an edge that many Reformers wanted to, tried to, push them over. It hasn’t worked.
Despite Kemi Badenoch slamming the door hard in Birmingham on any talk of a deal or an understanding between the two parties a number of well-known Reform advocates are still suggesting it’s madness that they won’t. they are saying that?!
Sure I’m probably biased but I have had an endless front row seat for the last two years and I think any ‘madness’ has been an astonishing overdose of hubris.
One way to ensure that any understanding to turn all fire on the Labour Government never happens – and can happen – will be doubling down on the same old attacks, and amplifying the new completely transparent ethno-nationalist ones employed recently towards Kemi Badenoch.
The Tories, I know, are all in training to stoke a fire, and hold Labour’s feet to it with an iron grip over the upcoming Budget. They knew some time ago that despite immigration being a vital issue to many voters that the battle, the real electoral battle, is still the economy. It just is.
This has been true ever since the election. It is the one thing that hasn’t changed even though the Conservative party has. I’m beyond arguing whether that’s the case or not, refusing to recognise it and adapt to that is another miss by rival parties.
Tackle Badenoch’s team on what they are planning to do, not on what they may or may not have done. Claiming they can’t change, won’t change, and reaching for ever sillier ‘examples’ that ‘prove’ it – the list of MPs who didn’t vote on an ECHR amendment was so flawed a sixth form politics student could have spotted the problem. Nobody gets far by shouting about what their opponents are doing but getting coy and defensive about their own issues.
The biggest irony of the ITV investigation is that for a party who insists the Tories won’t do any of the things they claim publicly they want to do, or Badenoch will be blocked by her own MPs from doing so if in power, those filmed secretly by ITVs undercover reporters found Reform activists and councillors who wanted to say what they’d do in government, but try to appeal to as many people as possible, and then, if elected, just start doing things they’d never announced or put before the electorate.
Badenoch is serious about trying to persuade Reform voters to take a look at her offer and her party again. She knows they feel let down, some, so much so I doubt they’ll move, but it’s not a gimmick – she does want them back if she can persuade them she will do exactly what she says she’ll do.
It’s no good saying (again for months) ‘she won’t find any voters on the right to persuade, Reform have got them sown up’ when that is both clearly no longer true, and denying it seems a sheer stubbornness not to look facts in the face.
For the first time since 2024 I’m not sure what happens next.
I knew Reform would not reduce the Tories to the ‘dying a slow death’ one social media account suggested – remember the days when Reform warned such language was putting them at risk – well yes, I suspect it does, so don’t use it, then.
If the plan is to ignore the trends of the last ten months and just carry on a fight that has been both bitter and counterproductive, then I am more sure who loses in the end.
It isn’t the Conservatives, who I know will go it alone if they must, and who now think they have the change in the wind that means they can imagine that, and shape it, and contemplate it, for the first time in years.
Hubris has a twin and he always turns up in the end.
My promise if the Conservatives ever get to leading the polls, is; if they once get hubristic about it, I’ll volunteer to be their nemesis.