Has Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch blundered by doing what Margaret Thatcher never dared to do – telling Tory moderates to toe the line or leave the party? She set out her hardline position as more than 60 former ministers launched a new group to oppose her plans to move the party further to the right, and when polling suggests she is wrong.
Prosper UK has been set up by Andy Street, the former mayor of the West Midlands, and Ruth Davison, former Leader of the Scottish Conservatives. Calling for “a practical not ideological approach”, its supporters include Tory ‘Big Beasts’ Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke.
Badenoch said that centrist views were no longer welcome in the Tory party and One Nation Tories promoting them should “get out of the way”, adding they needed to “recognise the agenda which I am setting and was elected on”.
It was a brutal rejection of Prosper UK, its philosophy and its supporters.
Badenoch under pressure from left and right
The Tory party has been here before. In 1975, moderates set up the Tory Reform Group (TRG) to oppose Thatcherism. This led to some lively skirmishes with Thatcher’s supporters through the 1970s. Unlike Badenoch, however, Thatcher never told moderates to pack their bags and clear off. She accommodated them.
Of course, Badenoch’s Conservative Party, in contrast to the Iron Lady, has Nigel Farage and a rampant Reform to contend with. Similarly, they are under pressure from the left, from the Liberal Democrats.
In these circumstances – under siege from right and left – a Tory leader needs to be very nimble-footed. Badenoch could have made a major misstep by seemingly positioning the party to the left of Reform but to the right of the LibDems, forfeiting the centre.
Is Badenoch setting up the conditions for an alliance between the Tories and Reform, even though she has consistently and strenuously rejected the idea?
Could a Tory-Reform alliance be viable?
Polling shows the right’s combined vote share to be in the mid-40s – enough to oust Labour and install a Tory-Reform administration with a comfortable majority if the two sets of supporters could be brought together.
However, Lord Ashcroft, a Tory pollster, says that even if the personalities could agree and the internal politics be navigated, it is unlikely this hypothetical alliance would be as big as the sum of its parts.
He says that 81% of current Reform voters would be expected to back a Tory-Reform alliance, but only 53% of current Conservative voters would be likely to do so.
Elections have been won with a vote share in the mid-30s – could Reform also be elected with a share in this range? To answer this, Ashcroft has asked people how likely they were to vote for each party separately, and if the Tories and Reform formed an alliance.
Ashcroft found that in September 2025, a Tory-Reform alliance would shed about 10 points, from their combined vote share of 47.6% to 34% with a ceiling of 38.2%.
The reality of uniting the right
For the alliance to equal the sum of its parts, it would have to retain current Tories at the top and centre who are closer to the Labour and LibDem voter bases than they are to Reform’s. At the same time, it would have to hold on to current Reform supporters. In other words, says Ashcroft, it would have to bring together voters who have almost diametrically opposed views on many economic and social issues.
This is not impossible, as Boris Johnson proved in 2019. But he was helped not only by the unique confluence of Jeremy Corbyn and the Brexit deadlock, but also by the Brexit Party standing down in hundreds of seats to clear the way for the Conservatives.
While uniting the left has its own challenges, Labour and Lib Dem supporters occupy essentially the same space on the political map, making it much more likely they will be willing to switch between the two.
According to Ashcroft, “uniting the right” is not as simple as taking the Conservative and Reform columns in current polls and adding them together. An alliance or pact between the two parties would, on current evidence, perform much worse than the sum of its parts. This would be to the disproportionate detriment of the Tories, who could potentially be destroyed as a party in the process.
The dangers of allying with Reform for Badenoch and the Tories
Following the defections by former Tory ministers, many inside and outside the party have argued that it should not try to emulate Reform. The case has been forcefully put by Street and Davidson, who say that millions of potential Tory voters currently feel politically closer to the LibDems or Labour.
This problem would be exacerbated if the Tories became a watered-down version of Reform since the insurgent party can always take the rhetoric one stage further.
Voters attracted by Farage would not be tempted back, and embracing Reform and its agenda would hurt the Conservative party rather than consolidate overall support for the right. Many Tories are instinctively suspicious of Farage and his motives or doubt that his party could form a serious government.
The fact that in 2024 the Tories lost 60 seats to the Lib Dems should also warn against a Reform-lite strategy.
The centre ground offers no easier option
Ashcroft says it is not the solution for the Conservatives simply to tack towards the centre ground. Some long to recreate the party of the early Cameron era – the pre-Brexit days of the Big Society. But while the Tories cannot win without votes from centrist, liberal-minded voters, they cannot win with these votes alone.
If the party moved further towards the centre, Ashcroft finds, it would lose ground to Reform while being very unlikely to gain many compensating votes in Labour and Lib Dem territory on the left. This would be especially damaging as it would leave Reform as the only party occupying the right of the political map, which was once the Tories’ centre of gravity. In the battle for the right, this would amount to a Conservative retreat.
In a veiled warning to Prosper, Ashcroft says that Cameron’s modernisation programme was a response to the politics of the time and an understanding of how the Conservatives were seen after their long years in office. His electoral coalition of 2015, built on the “long-term economic plan” to restore the public finances, embraced wavering centrist voters sceptical of Labour, traditional Tories, and right-leaning Eurosceptics who were kept on board with the promise of an EU referendum.
What are the options for Badenoch now?
Ashcroft suggests the Conservatives should pursue their focus on the economy, controlling public spending, and offering strength and stable leadership in contrast to a weak government with no sense of direction and no ability to get anything done.
There are further clues, says Ashcroft, about which kinds of voters are most likely to prioritise which issues. Along with the economy, whose position close to the centre of the political map shows it is important across the board, the Conservatives have already started to talk about the things their target voters are most concerned about.
In essence, Ashcroft advises Badenoch to “hold the centre, unite the right”. She is doing neither.
She may yet rebuild bridges with Tory moderates. If she does, she is likely to find that she has shut the stable door too late. Similarly, if she moves any further right wards, she will lose more votes to the Lib Dems and Labour without winning compensating votes from the right. According to Davison, Prosper’s own analysis of the seats lost by the Tories at the 2024 election showed that the vast majority were lost because moderate Conservatives moved leftwards or stayed at home. “The answer cannot be to narrow our appeal,” she argued.
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