An institutional intifada is coming to crush a Reform government

Telegraph

11 hours ago

In England's fractured five-party system – featuring Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Reform and the Green/Islamist/far-Left movement – a hung Parliament is certain sooner or later, in any event. Especially once Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are factored in, with their nationalists and unionists.
This explains why Labour is likely to form a new government after the next election – even if it exhausts its stupendous parliamentary majority, the second largest since World War Two, in much the same way that it is exhausting the nation's finances.
For in a hung Parliament, one must have allies. And Labour has more potential partners than anyone else: the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Northern Ireland nationalists, Greens and Islamists.
None of these may want to join a coalition government with Labour if one is offered. But they will surely be even more unwilling to form one with parties of the Right.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives and Reform would have only – a few Ulster unionists apart – each other as potential partners, if one assumes that the Liberal Democrats won't work with either. Which would be bigger?
Perhaps by the next election the party of which I'm a member, the Conservatives, will once again be the main party of the Right – especially in the event of a crash in the markets that leaves other parties, with their promises of higher spending and lower taxes, over-promised and under-prepared. But as I write, it looks unlikely. It is no longer absurd to imagine Reform as the larger of the two Right-wing parties in parliament. What would happen next?
Perhaps Nigel Farage would offer the disorientated Tories a coalition, and so swallow up whatever was left of them. For what it's worth, I would prefer a confidence and supply arrangement – partly because I'm a convinced Conservative, even in these unpromising circumstances, and partly because I'm not convinced by Reform.
But regardless of our party political preferences, we should want a future Reform administration to succeed: all of us, because it is in our interest for government to work, and Conservatives in particular, because – as conservatives with a small C as well as a large one – a legitimate Right-wing party should be preferable to a legitimate Left-wing one.
But if parties with experience, like the Conservatives and Labour, find it hard to govern, one without it, like Reform, would find it next to impossible. Here are three illustrations.
On day one, the new Reform administration instructs the Royal Navy to return small boats containing illegal migrants to France as they cross the Channel. Naval officers refuse, asserting that the French will refuse to accept the returns, that there is a risk that migrants will scupper their boats, and that in these circumstances refusing to take them to Britain would breach international law.
On day five, Reform's new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a businessman with no political experience, is accused of bullying civil servants. Downing Street's Propriety and Ethics unit steps in. Staffed by civil servants and based in the Cabinet Office, the unit has a formidable reputation. It helped to investigate Nadhim Zahawi, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Pincher under the last government. All were forced out, rightly or wrongly.
On day 10, the new Reform home secretary, like Suella Braverman, demands that the Progress flag, which represents the LGBTQ+ cause, no longer be flown above the Home Office. He has no more luck than Braverman, who said later: 'I couldn't even get the flag of a horrible political campaign I disagreed with taken down from the roof of the government department I was supposed to be in charge of.'
There is a fashion on the Right for blaming a 'blob' of unaccountable quangocrats, activist judges, politicised civil servants and outdated international agreements for intensifying Britain's problems. Some Labour MPs, since their party took office, have overlapping complaints. Both underplay the main source of the problem: a House of Commons that is no longer providing enough effective, coherent legislation and efficient, commanding ministers.
But regardless of one's view of the matter, there can be no doubt that a Reform government would be seen, in some corners of Westminster and Whitehall, as illegitimate. And would be met from day one by an institutional intifada.
My impression is that those at the top of Reform think of themselves as Big Men with Strong Views. They certainly have the latter – hence the falling out of Farage and Rupert Lowe. And maybe, in government, they would prove themselves the former. Perhaps a Reform government would beat establishment resistance to a pulp (metaphorically, not literally).
But as matters stand, it looks like Reform that's cruising for a bruising – if it ever makes government at all. Getting the system to work takes time even if it likes the look of you. Tony Blair complained of 'scars on my back' after trying to reform the public sector. The Civil Service came to terms with Margaret Thatcher only in her second term.
Before she won her first election, John Hoskyns, a businessman, devised a plan for government to tackle the problems of the day: inflation, trade union militancy, decline. It was called Stepping Stones.
If Farage is to follow in her footsteps, he needs a modern equivalent: a strategic plan for getting his most radical measures – leaving the ECHR, abandoning the net zero targets, scrapping the Equality Act – through Parliament (where they would meet particular resistance in the Lords) in order to ensure that they gain the democratic legitimacy to which the courts would bow.
During the 1980s, the key question was what a new Right-wing government should do. Today, it's how to do it. Are the Big Men thinking big enough?