Moderate Tories Worry The Party Is Too Preoccupied With Aping Reform

The threat posed by Nigel Farage's Reform UK was at the forefront of many minds at the Conservative Party conference, with the dozens of seats lost by the party to Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the last election getting less attention.

One of the major themes of Tory conference was how the party can win over voters who backed Reform on 4 July.

It was discussed at countless fringe events in Birmingham. Some Tories like former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees Mogg suggested that the Conservatives should strike a pact with the right-wing party to avert more electoral pain in the future.

While Reform won just five seats at the General Election in July, the four million votes it received compounded the heavy Tory defeat by helping Keir Starmer's Labour unseat Conservatives in swathes of constituencies across the country.

Farage, Reform leader and now the MP for Clacton, put attacking the Tory government record on immigration front and centre of his party's election campaign — and to significant effect.

The bookies' favourite to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader, Robert Jenrick, has built his pitch to MPs and party members primarily around appealing to voters to backed Reform in July. 

In his conference speech on Wednesday, Jenrick warned the Conservative Party would "die" if it wasn't willing to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to tackle illegal immigration. 

There are plenty of Tories who agree with the former Home Office minister.

Veteran Tory back bencher Bill Cash, for example, told a conference fringe event hosted by the party's European Research Group (ERG) of avidly pro-Brexit MPs that Reform "has to come, as it were, into our fold" in order to win the next general election.

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