The Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland uses a bespoke application called ‘VoteSource’ as a way of tracking canvassing activity in a given constituency area.
When a young man of the blue jumper, let’s call him ‘James Simons’ in this article, knocks on a granny’s door, he inputs into ‘VoteSource’ whether or not said granny at said address is planning to vote Conservative at the next election. The purpose of this record is twofold.
The first is obvious; it allows the central party machine to know which addresses on a given street are planning to vote Conservative, which ones are wavering (in which case canvassers can be sent to it aggressively) and which ones are no-hopers - saving local activists the bother of knocking on hostile doors.
The second is purpose of ‘VoteSource’ - the reason our James Simons is so fastidious in his use of it - is that it serves as a record of activity that a given canvasser has undertaken. Not just on that day, but in their time as activist. I am told that when candidates go to ‘Parliamentary Assessement Board’ - the formal process by which the Tory party selects candidates - they are asked to produce their VoteSource App to show the bigwigs that they have put in the requisite hours pounding on the pavements as a test of loyalty. They are also expected to produce photographs of them canvassing which look like this:
The expectation is that a prospective candidate will have given up thousands of hours of their personal free time to harass pensioners about their voting intention. The Labour Party has an equivalent called ‘Contact Creator’.
I bring this up to help the reader understand of how much blood and treasure people like ‘James Simons’ have invested into becoming a Tory MP. They have worn shoes down to the stumps, Saturday morning after Saturday morning wasted in the company of fruitcake elderly people because they believed that they could win a safe seat if they played ‘the game’ well enough.
It is this sunk cost which explains the reasoning behind the sallies on ‘X’ against Farage and Reform by sub-Joxleyite blue-jumpered desperados. When somebody decides, usually in their early-mid 20s that they wish to become a Conservative MP it ends up consuming a significant proportion of their free time. Overgrown, precocious children - whose relatives told them “you’ll be Prime Minister one day!” to get them to shut up about Ayn Rand at Christmases past - they can only howl and howl as the future they were promised slips away.
I have entire articles drafted about the structures such people exist in; the Next Gen Tories, ‘Women2Win’, LetsEffingGo etc. But even as a purveyor of obscure filth I recognise that deep dives into the manoeuvrings of innumerable James and Jane Simons are a waste of the reader’s time. Reform’s unstoppable rise is a personal tragedy for these rather unsympathetic individuals. All of the callouses on their knuckles from knocking on doors - for naught.
To help these people close this unfortunate chapter in their life decisively it is worth bringing forth some home truths about the trajectory of the Conservative Party over the next four years.
When the history of British politics 2024-29 is being written, the first question to be settled will be ‘when did the cancer terminal’. Academics will likely settle on Rishi Sunak’s decision not to pay off Nigel Farage with a peerage, or even a Conservative seat, in the heady days of 2024. After it was clear that the Parliamentary Party would never support tearing up human rights legislation in it’s entirety to facilitate mass deportations, the case for tying your only viable political opponent to your failed project was unanswerable - at one point in May 2024 Sunak even rejected Farage’s call for an electoral pact between the Tories and Reform.
Boris Johnson also refused to give Farage a peerage in 2019. The whole point of the patronage system is to accommodate ‘populist’ outsiders into the British Establishment - if Farage had been paid off in this way Reform would still be polling around ten percent.
Another case will also be made that the Conservative Party missed it’s chance to save itself when Kemi Badenoch became leader of the party. Charlotte Ives’s recent interview/profile in the Times regarding Kemi has a useful nugget in it: Badenoch is in a mood until she is taken by her aides to meet Conservative activists, at which point she perks up, “These are very much her people”. Badenoch is, at heart, a Conservative with a capital C and little else - she also even said during the leadership campaign that she was not sure if she wanted to be Prime Minister. She just wanted to be leader of the Tory Party. Badenoch’s election as as a collective retreat into a comfort zone (no policies, vapid noise about Values) instead of the starker, national facing alternative offered by Robert Jenrick.
Whatever the memes about Bobby’s Videos, Jenrick had a clear vision for how the Tories could regain some trust on the immigration issue - making the ECHR a confidence issue for MPs alongside more extreme rhetoric which outflanks Farage - take this interview on the hooligan Chris Kaba as an example. This opportunity has now disappeared. Reform and Farage have moved with the Overton Window in the past six months. In July of 2024, Nigel Farage was calling for a referendum on the ECHR, in September of that year he told Steven Edgington that he had no ambition to push forward with mass deportations. Earlier this week he held a press conference where he pledged to tear up all human rights legislation to facilitate mass deportations alongside withdrawal from the ECHR. In 2013 Farage was making warm noises about Syrian refugees, he is now saying Afghan women and children will have to go home and suffer the Taliban.
You cannot outflank Farage to the right on the migration issue without calling for boats to be shot in the channel. Even the ‘British bill of rights’ will reportedly not feature any actual ‘rights’ but instead codify liberties such as freedom of speech. The path of outflanking Farage to the right has been shut for the Tories now forever. Single issue voters who only want immigration to be resolved will not defect to the Conservative Party over the coming four years. The underlying reputational damage with White voters - the migrant hotels, massive legal immigration - cannot be repaired during this Parliamentary term. The best Kemi can come up with is accusing Reform of copying their policies. The proportion of voters who will vote for who they perceive as to be the pro indigenous candidate will now stick with Farage until 2029. That is bolted on. Neither the Tories nor various nonsense parties like ‘Advance’ or ‘Homeland’ can do a thing about it.
On legal immigration, Reform has already adopted a ‘Net Zero’ policy. On every other policy area, including energy, Farage has already adopted the maximalist Conservative position. The only conceivable flank which has opened is fiscal - hence ‘Mel Stride’ calling Farage’s plans uncosted. This strategy is already failing to make headway and is duplicitous anyway as Kemi and her likely leadership challengers all supported maintaining the winter fuel allowance. Voters do not want to hear about entitlement cuts when the Hotels are costing billions of pounds a year, it does not even enter the discussion.