Purple Pros?

Even BBC News at Ten thought that the murder of a health insurance CEO in New York was more important than Keir Starmer's umpteenth relaunch. But the flagship General Election promise to cut energy bills has been dropped. Starmer is not necessarily as boring as he sounds.

And the latest polling suggests that people have noticed. Feed Conservative 26 per cent, Reform UK 24, Labour 23, Liberal Democrat 11, and Green nine into the cruncher, and you get Conservative 221 (+100), Labour 175 (-236), Reform 121 (+116), Lib Dem 67 (-5), SNP 25 (+16), and Green six (+2). A hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party, and Labour, although remaining the Official Opposition, having had its worst result since 1935.

At this year's General Election, Labour was 10 points ahead of Reform. Five months later, it is one point behind. Here in the North East, Labour would retain only two seats, the Conservatives would hold one and gain five, and Reform would gain 19, 70 per cent of the total, including here at North Durham. Darlington's finest, my friend James Doran, coined the word "Pasokification". This would bring that home, even if Darlington itself would turn blue again rather than purple.

One poll, outlier, margin of error, four and a half years to go, and so on. But what if it happened? Reform has disowned Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and his supporters while welcoming with considerable fanfare the Johnsonites in exile. Ask yourself why old Boris Johnson supporters were defecting from the party of Kemi Badenoch, having stayed put under Rishi Sunak. Tim Montgomerie has vaguely distanced himself from aspects of Johnsonism, although in terms that would have made him more than happy with the present Conservative Leadership, but Andrea Jenkyns remains an undying fangirl who could appoint herself as a Reform mayoral candidate simply by joining the party.

I have never seen entryism like this. Those 116 new Reform MPs would very largely be people who had thought that things had gone wrong only at some point in the summer of 2022, and who might even have been Conservative MPs until that point. Reform's only Privy Counsellor, and quite likely first Peer, was super-loyal as a Minister under John Major and then as a member of the Shadow Cabinet of William Hague, whose Leadership she bookended by twice supporting the ambitions of Ken Clarke. While someone funds the likes of Continuity UKIP and the Heritage Party to make trouble for Reform, the thing itself is being turned into a more than serviceable one-term Coalition partner for the party that it used to say that it wanted to destroy and replace, before crashing and burning in 10 years' time. Those responsible will die on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords. Decades after Reform had ceased to exist.