Does Farage need to shift to the centre?

Reform UK are flying high in the polls. A recent Ipsos survey gave them 34 per cent of the vote, nine points ahead of Labour and more than enough to comfortably form the next Government. A YouGov MRP poll of 11,000 people, moreover, predicted a Reform UK victory, albeit one defanged by a hung parliament. The betting money is on Farage’s turquoise army, even if they are not yet a shoo-in for the kind of outright victory needed to take on the Westminster blob and radically transform the country.

Some would argue, however, that to become a ‘shoo-in’ and avoid a hung parliament, Farage needs to tack to the left and embrace a centrist programme. ‘Elections are won on the centre-ground,’ commentators tediously parrot, as if reciting a catechism for politicos written by the PPE department at Oxford. A month before last year’s General Election, Jeremy Hunt warned against a Tory lurch to the right, saying, ‘Elections are won from the centre ground.’ Theresa May said much the same thing in a Times comment piece after the election in September 2024, blaming the Conservative Party’s defeat on a tack to the right that, I must say, passed me by. She included the line (you guessed it), ‘Elections in the UK are won on the centre ground.’

Kamal Ahmed, the Daily Telegraph columnist, evinced the same banal, unimaginative thinking in an article dated 9th June 2024, less than a month before the election, in which he warned that ‘If the Tories move Right, they will be out for 20 years’. Well, they didn’t move Right, Kamal, and I suspect they’ll be out for forty. Just because your A-Level politics textbook said that elections are always won from the centre, doesn’t make it axiomatically true, especially when 2.5 million angry abstainers refused to vote at the last election, utterly sick of the centrist mush on offer from the two main parties.

Farage must resist the urge to listen. Apart from a few exceptions, elections are not won from, on, or anywhere near, the centre ground. These anachronistic voices are beguiling echoes from the New Labour years, not insightful nuggets of advice from an enlightened elite class uniquely in touch with reality, no matter what they claim. Yes, Tony Blair shifted Labour to the centre because they were unelectable in their previous, unashamedly socialist, incarnation. However, Cameron’s attempts to mimic Blair’s fabled centre-ground strategy had unconvincing results. A hung parliament in 2010, leading to a Coalition Government, was followed by a small Conservative majority in 2015, one that narrowly scraped over the line, only after offering to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU (not really a centrist policy that one).

And let us not forget the other Conservative centrists. Theresa May in 2017, John Major in 1997, and, of course, Rishi Sunak in 2024: all electorally unsuccessful yet determined to occupy the centre-ground of British politics. Tell me, Mrs May, if elections are won from the centre, why did you lose your majority in 2017? In contrast, why did Boris win the 2019 election so handsomely? You couldn’t exactly call promises to ‘get Brexit done’ and lower immigration centrist positions. And what about the most successful modern Conservative leader of all, Margaret Thatcher? She won three elections from the Right, not the centre.

It’s clear. The oft cited assertion that elections are invariably won from the centre is inaccurate. Furthermore, such claims are largely based upon the assumptions of a generation of starry-eyed Blair-gazers, beguiled by his electoral success, and unable to acknowledge the decline in voter turnout that his centrist strategy precipitated, as well as the constitutional and societal implications of his policies in office.

Farage must ignore them. People are sick to death of the so-called centrist parties - parties, remember, that gave us the moderate policies of mass immigration and Net Zero -, that’s why they are voting for Reform UK in such unprecedented and large numbers. It would indeed be a monumental mistake to listen to the Blair-gazers and copy a passé strategy that’s doomed to fail.