On Skegness pier, the rain was coming down hard. Perfect Tory launch weather, someone joked, as three candidates assembled for the shivery second hustings of the day: the Conservatives’ Matt Warman, his LibDem opponent, Richard Lloyd, and the Reform chairman, Richard Tice, who hastily declared his candidacy here only after the election had been called. Though a curious tourist in a mobility scooter trundled up for a brief look, most barely glanced up from playing the seafront slot machines as the politicians traipsed past.
Earlier, at the BBC Radio Lincolnshire hustings, Tice had hammered home lines designed to jolt the apathetic into paying attention: that the Tories haven’t stopped the boats, that you can’t believe a word Westminster politicians say, that net zero kills jobs, and immigrants put too much pressure on public services (as opposed to, say, keeping them afloat by working in them). But if Reform is the party of horribly easy answers, then Warman, a remain-voting one nation Tory who has represented the normally safe (and heavily leave-voting) Boston and Skegness seat since 2015, is the candidate for “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that”.
After years of Conservatives pandering to Reform, it was almost disconcerting last week to hear one doggedly arguing against Reform’s preferred one-in, one-out model to a potentially hostile audience: how local farmers, plus the social care system on which ageing seaside towns depend, would struggle without foreign workers. “Constituents deserve better than these kinds of simplistic solutions,” said Warman at one point, wading in to defend the Lib Dem from Tice. (If you’re wondering where Labour or the Greens were in this fight, neither turned up.) When we sat on a windswept pier bench afterwards to discuss Boston, an insular small town, which recorded Britain’s highest leave vote in protest at eastern Europeans flocking to work in its surrounding farms and factories, Warman pointed out its maternity hospital would have closed without the new arrivals.
Fighting Reform is largely the Tories’ problem now. But it may be Labour’s soon enough, once they have morphed from insurgents into incumbents, and thus targets for the rage against conventional politics that saturates this campaign. I came to Boston and Skegness because it’s seen off similar threats before, and may hold lessons on doing so again.
Warman’s seems a risky strategy in a year when lifelong Tories are flatly refusing to turn out, and local tensions over asylum seekers being housed in Skegness hotels (something he opposed) have run uncomfortably high. But this is not his first rodeo, and its towns don’t tell the whole story of this sprawling rural Lincolnshire constituency any more than Reform tells the story of this country.
In 2015, centre-left constituents voting tactically through gritted teeth for the Tories helped keep out what they saw as an extreme Ukip party, both here and in South Thanet, the Kent seat where Nigel Farage was narrowly beaten. Warman is now trying to reassemble that anti-Reform coalition: “I’ve definitely had people here say to me: ‘I was going to vote Green, I’m going to vote for you to keep out various rightwing candidates’, and Labour [people] as well.” It’s a mirror of the mass tactical voting Labour would need to stand a chance of stopping Farage, down the coast in Clacton.
But it’s also, he emphasises, about not insulting voters’ intelligence. “The electorate is more sophisticated than people assume. If you say to people you’d just stop the boats, people think: ‘If it was that simple, wouldn’t somebody have given it a go by now?’” On the doorsteps, he accuses Tice of being a blow-in, picking this seat off a spreadsheet at the last minute and taking locals for granted. Warman is betting on people still valuing diligence, or the unglamorous slog – surgeries full of anxious people clutching carrier bags of correspondence, thankless evening meetings in empty church halls – that makes up much of an MP’s life, and which Farage presumably had in mind when he mused, back in February: “Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?”
It’s not yet clear that Clacton wants him either, of course. But if Farage wins, let’s at least be clear about how he did it.
What Fox News did for Donald Trump, GB News has arguably done for Farage, Tice and Lee Anderson by handing them their own TV shows, under the noses of a surprisingly acquiescent Ofcom. (GB News viewers are a staggering four times more likely than mainstream channel viewers to say they’re voting Reform.) Social media has played its part too: having mastered YouTube and Facebook, Farage is turning his TikTok account into something of a cult watch for teenage boys. Whatever they make of his politics, they find the mere idea of him being on TikTok funny, while the fact it annoys their parents doubtless helps. Support for Reform among 18- to 24-year-old men – the demographic currently fuelling the rise of the European far right – remains small, but YouGov finds it’s tripled since January.
It’s the utter collapse of the Tories that has removed the single biggest barrier to voting for Reform, which was that small parties don’t win. (Beware any progressive case for PR that doesn’t admit scrapping first past the post would be a godsend for Reform.) Once it’s no longer seen as a pointless wasted vote, the genie is properly out of the bottle.
How do mainstream parties fight this? Farage’s most obvious weakness is the risk of all this going to his head. Already he’s touting a madly grandiose plan to take over a shattered Conservative party and run for prime minister in 2029, though the idea that surviving Tories will simply welcome the old fox into the henhouse remains distinctly questionable. (And to think Neil Kinnock was once crucified for getting slightly overexcited at a rally.) Labour could argue that Reform isn’t really a party so much as an ego trip, which will chew its voters up and spit them out once they’re no longer useful; that Farage is another Boris Johnson, always destined to let you down, promising stuff he knows will never happen. If Reform MPs do get elected, they should be made to own the endless disappointments and general whiff of powerlessness that are the lot of minor party backbenchers, while Labour organises against Reform at grassroots level just as it once did in Barking against the BNP.
Nothing is guaranteed. But Warman is right about one thing: populists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
