UK reform had clear targets in the 2026 elections in England, Scotland and Wales. She wanted to show that her 15-month lead in national opinion polls could be translated into actual votes and wanted to finally bury the Tories, her main competitor on the right. With just eight MPs in Parliament, compared to the Conservatives’ 116 MPs, Reform had to build on its remarkable success in the 2025 local elections to realize its claim to be a national political force capable of winning a parliamentary majority on its own. The electoral battle is not directly between Labor and Reform, because Reform wins most of its votes mainly from the Conservatives rather than Labour. Reform takes seats to Labor when it can reduce the Tories’ share of the vote and when other parties on the left, especially now the Greens, reduce Labour’s share of the vote.
Reform leaders have made no secret of their desire to replace the conservatives. They don’t want an alliance; they want to absorb as many of their Tory members and voters as they can, and reduce the party to a small hole on the fringes of British politics. But the Conservatives will remain the official opposition until the next general election, with all the privileges and profile that gives them. Reform cannot do anything about it. What they can do is demonstrate that the Tory party is a Potemkin village, showing that it is Reform that now dominates so many of England’s Tory heartlands in council elections, and that it is Reform that has taken the mantle of Unionism from the Tories in Wales and Scotland.
The 2026 elections are a crucial stage in the realization of this strategy. As the official opposition, the Conservatives would normally expect to be the main beneficiary of the Labor Government’s unpopularity. The two main parties in the last 60 years have very often suffered heavy losses in local elections when they were in government. But in 2025 and now again in 2026, not only has the incumbent government lost heavily in local elections, but the official Opposition party has been unable to capitalize and has seen its position erode further as it loses vote share and loses hundreds of council seats. The Tories had some successes, such as winning back Westminster and stopping reform in Bexley. But they also underwent major and symbolic changes, including the loss of control of county councils such as Essex to the Reformation. Prominent Tories including Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Priti Patel all have seats in Essex. In Wales, the Conservatives were reduced to 7 seats in the Senedd, and in Scotland they were pushed to the margins.
The problem for Reform is that although they scored another big win against the Conservatives, they didn’t kill them. IN POLITICAL The pre-election opinion poll had Reform at 25 percent and the Conservatives at 18 percent. These vote shares were broadly reflected in the actual votes cast on May 7. In the last six months the Conservative vote share has stabilised, while the Reform vote share has fallen slightly from its average of 30 per cent at the end of 2025. If Reform could capture a large share of the remaining Conservative vote then it would be over 40 per cent, the kind of support enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and Tony in 1979, 1997 and 2001. But Reform remains a long way from that kind of electoral power. Past first, the postal system now works in his favor because he is polling ahead of his main rivals, but his share of the vote is far from convincing. This should not stop him from succeeding as long as there is a sufficient gap between him and the main challenger. After all, Labor won a landslide in 2024 with 34 per cent of the vote. But it is unlikely to be a springboard to the kind of political hegemony the Conservatives once enjoyed. Nigel Farage was quick to announce on May 8 that a historic shift was taking place, equivalent to the displacement of the Liberals from Labor after 1918. But for now the Reform still appears as a symptom of the fragmentation of British politics rather than a solution to it. It is hard to see any party or movement offering the kind of sustained political hegemony that the Conservatives once exercised.
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One of the main causes of the divisiveness of British politics is the long shadow cast by Brexit. She prompted a reshuffle that has destroyed the electoral coalitions of both Labor and the Conservatives. The loss of faith in politicians of all parties due to their continued failure to deliver on the alluring promise of Brexit – taking back control – has made how people voted in the referendum the best indicator of how they will vote in the next election. John Curtice has pointed out that in the 2026 election those voters who voted Leave were four times more likely to vote Reform than those who voted Remain. The problem for the Conservative party is that they have steadily lost that part of their coalition that voted Remain in 2016 to other parties, especially the Liberal Democrats. Under Kemi Badenoch, the party’s strategy has been to ignore these voters, putting all its energies into presenting itself as a more responsible and credible version of Reform. As these picks show, this is a holding position at best. It does not offer any clear path through which the Conservatives can once again become the dominant electoral force in British politics.
But it may still be enough to prevent Reform from uniting the Right on its own terms. Analysis by Michael Thrasher for Sky News shows that if the 2026 results were translated into a general election result, Reform would have 284 seats with 27 per cent of the vote while the Conservatives would win 96 seats with 20 per cent of the vote. Labor would have 110 seats and the Liberal Democrats 80. Reform would lack a majority and either have to govern as a minority government or do a deal with the Conservatives. If Reform cannot crush the conservatives, it may be forced to deal with them, and seven points in the opinion polls is not a very commanding lead. The general election is still three years away.
What Reform will be hoping is that its success in this election and its ability to project itself as a national party in Scotland and Wales, as well as in England, will give it new momentum to push its poll rating into the high 30s or even the low 40s. The Conservative Party will disappear as an effective force. For this to happen, Reform needs many defections from conservative MPs, as well as from many conservative MPs and advisers. It also needs clearer support from the right-wing media. She already has this from GB News, but support from traditional Tory papers – Times, Telegraph, COMMUNICATIONS AND wont – remains unclear. They have become increasingly reform-minded, but still have historical ties to the Conservatives. Reforma needs these documents and similar think tanks to turn its back on the conservatives and fully embrace Reforma as the hegemonic party of the right. But will they do it? Many doubts remain about Farage and the team around him among mainstream Tories, particularly over his stances on the economy and defense and security.
The reform position would be much stronger if there was a move towards electoral reform. The adoption of proportional representation would force the parties of the right to deal with each other. Left bloc or right bloc coalitions would become the norm, as they are in many other parts of Europe. Nigel Farage was once strongly in favor of electoral reform, although he is now considerably less open about the issue after he became such a strong beneficiary of the first-past-the-post system. Conservatives under Badenoch show no interest. But to dream of restoring political hegemony in the first post requires the elimination of opponents on the right. The Tories used to be very efficient at doing this, never allowing a party to develop on their side that could challenge them. The disaster of Brexit, the product of the long Conservative civil war over Europe, allowed the emergence of first Ukip, then Reform.
The Tories have long been at a loss as to how to put the Farage genie back in the bottle. The reform is not yet certain to deliver the final blow to the Conservatives. These elections have not fully achieved it. The battle for justice continues.
(Further reading: Keir Starmer has to go)
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