LONDON — Britain’s two warring right-wing parties will need a “coming together” to fight the center-left if they continue to divide support, one of the Conservative Party’s most high-profile politicians has told POLITICO.
Ben Houchen, the mayor of the Tees Valley, one of Labour’s old industrial heartlands, said a “very practical decision” will have to be made if the Tories fail to reverse Reform UK’s surge in the polls. He did not rule out the prospect of the two parties merging.
Labour’s 2024 election landslide was strengthened by a split in the right-wing vote between the Conservatives and Reform. Led by veteran populist Nigel Farage, Reform is now topping national polls on 25 percent to Labour’s 24 and the Tories’ 21, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
Houchen spoke after a recording was leaked to Sky News this week of Robert Jenrick, a former Tory leadership contender, saying “one way or another” he was determined to unite the right by the next election.
Jenrick’s team later insisted his comments had been about “voters and not parties,” while Tory leader Kemi Badenoch told ITV: “I’ve been very clear that there will be no pact.”
Houchen, however, said some form of “coming together” between the two parties may be the “best thing for the country.”
Asked about suggestions that the Tories should look at some kind of coalition, pact or tie-up with Reform by the next election, he told POLITICO: “I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know whether it’s a pact. I don’t know whether it’s a merger … [or] a pact of trust and confidence or whatever.
“But if we want to make sure that there is a sensible center-right party leading this country, then there is going to have to be a coming together of Reform and the Conservative Party in some way.
“What that looks like is slightly above my pay grade at the moment.”
‘No pact’
Asked to elaborate, he said: “Nobody can really predict, and I’m not going to predict, what that relationship should look like — whether it’s even a coalition, whether Reform merge with the Conservative Party, whether it’s a … supply and confidence agreement or whatever it might be.
“But there’s going to have to be a very practical decision made. Because, again, in my view, because I’m a Conservative, I think the next few years are going to be terrible for the country. I think things are going to get a lot worse.
“And so again, if you want grown-up politicians on the center right to work together, and things don’t change, and it looks like the right is split right down the middle — that if it was unified it would deliver a significant majority in the U.K. parliament — then, you know, at that time, over the next couple of years, there are going to be decisions to be made.
“Again, what that looks like I don’t know. But I think a coming together in some form of Conservative and Reform is the best thing for the country.”
Houchen, who was granted a peerage by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2023, stressed that he would remain a Conservative, unlike ex-colleagues — such as Greater Lincolnshire mayoral candidate Andrea Jenkyns — who have defected to Reform.
Reform is tipped to gain hundreds of council seats and a small number of elected mayors at local elections in England next week, while the Conservatives — fighting seats that were won on a high point during the Covid pandemic in 2021 — face hundreds of losses.
Labour strategists have also become preoccupied with the rise of Reform and are downplaying expectations next week, even though 2021 was a low point for the party.
A spokesperson for Badenoch said Wednesday that there would be “absolutely no electoral pact with Reform,” but added it was “demonstrably true” that right-wing voters were not united and agreements between parties do happen at a local government level.
The right needs a coalition of voters “in the same way you have a coalition of left-wing voters, you have the old mining voters and you have the north London liberals,” they added.
Farage told journalists Thursday: “We are not going to do a deal with a Conservative Party that gave us record tax levels since the war, mass migration — I could go on.”
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