If there was any doubt that the idea of a Tory-Reform pact is dead, then last week’s report from Lord Ashcroft Polls has driven a stake through its heart.

A significant — and growing — share of the Conservative base is hostile to a deal with Farage. Furthermore, other pollsters are picking-up similar trends (as I explain here).

And yet none of this changes the fact that the split on the Right of British politics works to the advantage of Labour and the other Left-of-centre parties — whose supporters are much more open to idea of tactical voting than the Right-of-centre electorate.

So while a pact is clearly not the solution, we still need to address the problem.

Ideally, enough ex-Conservative Reform voters would return home for the problem to solve itself. But how exactly is that to be achieved?

It’s increasingly obvious that the real divide between the Conservatives and Reform isn’t ideological but socioeconomic. While the voter base of both parties is concentrated among the older age groups (unsustainably so), ours tend have higher levels of income and formal education than theirs.

In terms of promised tax cuts, the two parties are leaning into this class divide.

The big reveal at this year’s Reform conference was a ludicrously unaffordable pledge to raise the income tax threshold to £15,000 — which would make the most noticeable difference to people on lower incomes. That contrasts with Kemi Badenoch’s big announcement last year, which was to abolish Stamp Duty — which is most obviously advantageous to propertied pensioners. As for our conference this year, the big announcement could be the abolition of Inheritance Tax — which, again, is of particular interest to older, wealthier voters.

I strongly suspect that Tory strategists aren’t just pursuing this course to consolidate and motivate the Conservative base, but also to target well-healed centrist voters. Specifically, I think they’ve spotted a key vulnerability in the Lib Dems’ position.

Lib Dem seats — especially those that they gained at our expense in 2024 — are now concentrated in Remain-voting parts of southern England. That really matters in the context of what appears to be a determination on the part of Andy Burnham and John Healey to squeeze the South until the pips squeak. For instance, the Government has just nuked the finances of Wandsworth Council — forcing it to raise Council Tax by 94 per cent. And that could be just start of an anti-southern, property-based tax raid.

Currently, ministers are trailing plans to lower the Mansion Tax threshold to £1.5 million. In the overheated property markets of the commuter belt, that would penalise some very un-mansion-like houses. And having established the principle of dragging more homes into the net, there’s no guarantee that further extensions of the tax won’t feature in future Labour budgets.

If you want to see why the property-based taxation issue is so politically potent, take a look at a chart produced by the tax policy expert Dan Neidle. It shows the constituencies that are most exposed to Inheritance Tax. Lib Dem constituencies take four of the top five positions and account for 17 of the top 50 (another 20 of them are Labour and just 11 Conservative).

If Kemi Badenoch and Andrew Griffith do go ahead with the abolition announcement then we’ll know where they hope to make gains at the next election.

It looks as if the truth is dawning on Ed Davey too — hence his sudden enthusiasm for tax cuts, which sits awkwardly with his party’s centre-Left posturing on other issues. At the same time we’ve seen him get awfully coy about the prospect of forming a coalition government with Labour — as well he might, because the Lib Dems could lose dozens of seats if they’re seen as the shield maidens of Andy Burnham’s war on the South.

Yet this is another reason why a Tory-Reform pact is so completely off the table. If Davey can’t be seen as enabling Labour, then Badenoch can’t be seen as enabling Reform — which has taken over from Labour as Britain’s most unpopular party. It’s no wonder that Davey is trying to sell his party as “a firewall against Nigel Farage“.

So, all of that being the case, wouldn’t it make sense for the Conservatives to reposition themselves back towards the centre?

Well, no, it wouldn’t — and that’s for much the same reason that we shouldn’t cosy-up to Reform: a substantial proportion of the Conservatives wouldn’t like it. Again, take a good look at the Lord Ashcroft polling.

Furthermore, Labour’s war on the South isn’t just about tax.

They’ve also made a point of housing illegal immigrants in leafy communities like Piddington in Oxfordshire. (see Joy Morrissey’s article today -Ed) Lib Dem friendly parts of the country are waking up to what an open borders policy really means, which is why this is no time for Conservatives to go wobbly on immigration. Just because Farage is unpopular it doesn’t mean that all of his policies are. As things stand, the optimum Tory strategy is to be seen as the party that offers reform, but not Reform.

And yet while this might help compensate for the split-vote problem, it doesn’t directly solve it. For that — and rightly assuming that a pact, alliance or merger is out of the question — we need an alternative way forward.

One possibility does present itself: mutually beneficial targeting. Just because both parties are likely to stand a candidate in each constituency, it doesn’t mean that they’ll always make an equal effort there. Indeed, the challenge of allocating finite resources guarantees that they won’t.

In that respect we could learn a thing or two from the Lib Dems and the Greens, among whom I’ve long suspected cooperation over targeting. Take, for instance, the neighbouring Kentish seats of Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells. At the last election it was obvious that the Greens were targeting the former and the Yellows the latter. The Lib Dem candidate in Tonbridge was of retirement age and he came fifth with 4,234 votes. But in Tunbridge Wells they chose one of the party’s rising stars, Mike Martin, and he flipped the seat with 23,661 votes. Meanwhile, the disparity in the Green results was the other way round: 7,596 versus 2,344 votes.

There are some socio-economic differences between the two towns — Tunbridge Wells has a Gail’s and Tonbridge doesn’t. But the poshness-gap isn’t nearly wide enough to explain the dramatically different outcomes. Targeting, especially when pursued over the long-term, really does make a difference. And yet this mutually beneficial allocation of resources was achieved without a public yellow-green pact. In fact, it might not have taken much, if any, behind-the-scenes negotiation. Most of what was required was some local knowledge and a cool-headed assessment as to which seat might best suit each party.

That common sense approach is also available to the Conservatives and Reform if they’re sane enough to take it. Reform is clearly the strongest of the two parties across most of the Red Wall, while the opposite applies in the Remain-haunted South. As for seats with sitting MPs of either party, the Conservatives shouldn’t waste resources on Reform-held constituencies, while Reform should only put up a serious fight in Conservative-held seats where there’s no chance of letting in a centre-Left party. That would still leave a lot of seats where the two parties can duke it out, but beyond those local contests the national campaigns should focus on attacking the Labour Party and its potential coalition partners.

Admittedly, I’m making a big assumption here which is that Reform is interested in mutual benefit. It’s equally possible that they haven’t given up on their ambition to kill us off — or that their primary objective at the next election is not to gain power, but to replace us as the official opposition. In which case, they need to know this: that if they want all-out-war then we will give it to them.

If they run spoiler operations in Con/LD or Con/Lab marginals then we can respond in kind. Furthermore, we can turn the dial up to 11 in Reform-held seats which the Conservatives are best-placed to challenge for. Above all, we can base our national campaign on maximising the potential Conservative advantage from anti-Reform tactical voting.

Would this be a good outcome for Britain? Not remotely.

But if Reformers seriously want their Conservative rivals to put party before country, they must do likewise. Or else.