By far the most significant development in our manor over the past few days has been the FT’s scoop that Nigel Farage reportedly told a meeting of his donors that he expects Reform UK to do some sort of pre-election deal with the Conservatives.

(Probably the more objectively significant is the Guardian’s story revealing Labour’s behind-the-scenes plotting over the Leadbeater Bill, about which both Sir Keir Starmer and Stephen Kinnock, the care minister, have repeatedly insisted the Government is neutral and thus about which both would seem to have lied to the House of Commons. But we’re a Tory site.)

That this admission was made in a conversation with donors is not surprising. As I noted on UnHerd this morning, serious donors – and Reform is attracting serious donors – are exactly the sort of people who’ll want to know what the Plan B is if, as seems likely on the basis of current polling, Farage falls short of the numbers required to form a majority government.

But it is interesting that the talk was of a pre-election pact. After all, there would be nothing to prevent Reform and the Tories simply coming to some sort of arrangement in the event of a hung parliament (well, nothing formal to prevent it, anyway). A pre-election pact is a quite different proposition, suggestive of such deals as the Coalition in Australia or the now-defunct Alliansen in Sweden.

Those examples show that such arrangements, with allied parties maximising their appeal to distinct but compatible electorates whilst offering voters a clear programme for government on polling day, can work – and arguably offer voters greater transparency and clarity than thrashing a coalition agreement out behind closed doors once the election is over. But would the Tories and Reform actually be able, before the next election at least, to negotiate any such pact?

There would be two broad categories of problem. The first, as Stephen Bush notes, would be the practical ones:

“Reform is the stronger party – not only in the polls but consistently in elections throughout this parliament. But the Conservatives are the larger when it comes to MPs. Any deal would have to involve a lot of losers on the Tory side, with Conservative MPs being shunted out of plum seats in favour of Reform.

“Negotiations in 1983 between the Liberals and the Social Democratic party were fraught, nearly splitting the alliance between the two. And that involved two parties that essentially had all the electoral map to divvy up among themselves. The Conservatives, with 119 seats to Reform’s five, would have to accept that they were unlikely to have first dibs on any seat they do not currently hold.”

To anyone who wonders just how vicious the divvying up of seats could get, I heartily recommend Ivor Crewe and Anthony King’s book SDP. They and the Liberals had not only the whole electoral map to share but also agreed on nearly everything, and it still became a protracted, vicious farce – and Conservative and Reform activists have nothing like the cordial inter-party relations enjoyed then by the SDP and the Liberals.

In theory, the parties do have basically different electoral maps, with Reform doing much better in the sort of places that flipped to the Conservatives for the first time in 2019 as well as areas, such as London and perhaps Liverpool, where the Tories have either been in retreat for at least a decade or extinct for several. The Conservatives, meanwhile, remain the party the British people trust most with the economy, and could in theory be the Right’s pitch to their more traditional, prosperous, and Southern electorate.

But that only works if they are performing well enough for Farage (and crucially, Farage’s activists) to think they’re bringing something to the table, and to date they haven’t.

Yes, it is true that going off the 2024 election result, 89 of Reform’s 98 second-place finishes were in Labour-held seats. But May’s local elections saw the Tories all but wiped out, at Reform’s expense, across several southern county councils in councils which still boast a clutch of Conservative MPs. Unless Kemi Badenoch can deliver a sustained improvement in Tory polling in those areas, Reform strategists have every reason to think of those seats as realistic targets at the next election.

Next would be the presentational problems. Reform has a brand which can reach voters who are open to a right-wing pitch but, for historical reasons, not to the Conservative Party – and as mentioned, all but nine of its most obvious electoral prospects are held by Labour. There is thus a significant downside risk for Nigel Farage of being formally allied to the Tories: it would allow the Left to paint Reform merely as the Conservative Party 2.0.

Meanwhile the Tories have a smaller but similar problem. As we noted in our recent article on the trajectory of the Conservatives’ polling, the most dramatic unwind was in April, and Reform were the direct beneficiaries; having overtaken the Tories and maintained that for a couple of months, the newer party had surmounted the classic ‘Why waste your vote?’ credibility threshold. Of the 17 per cent still sticking with the Party, we don’t know what share would be alienated by a deal with Farage. It wouldn’t be all, it might not even be most, but it would be some.

Finally, there’s the question of what the content of a deal would be. It would hardly make sense for the Conservatives and Reform to start divvying up seats without having an agreement on forming a government afterwards. But what would the basis of such a deal be?

The Tories’ reputation for economic credibility is, frankly, a bit sparsely-earned at this point (unsustainable bungs for pensioners are still sacrosanct), but would Reform be prepared to sign up to any vaguely credible programme of major spending cuts? On the other side, would Conservative MPs who found the prospect of Robert Jenrick leading the party unacceptable be prepared to endorse a Reform immigration policy package?

In theory, as in other countries, a pact would allow the Right to maximise its appeal by drawing on the strengths of the different parties in it: the Conservatives bringing their credibility with the voters on the economy, and Reform theirs on immigration. In this case, a deal could instead end up neutering these strengths, tying the Tories to an utterly unrealistic economic prospectus and Reform to a party which has deservedly lost the public’s confidence on controlling our borders.

It isn’t that some sort of deal is just unworkable in Britain. No, the problem is that neither party really seems psychologically ready for one. There’s a reason that it took the Canadian Right a long, divided decade of Liberal dominance before the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party got round to uniting into the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

Unless both parties are really ready to make such a deal work, then the worst outcome for the Right could actually be one where they could form a government after the next election, because the failure of such a government would discredit both of them at the same time – and leave right-leaning voters with nowhere to go.

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