In a hail mary attempt to save the Conservative Party from electoral devastation, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has called on Rishi Sunak to offer Nigel Farage and top Reform UK figures the chance to become Tory MPs and potentially members of the government in an election pact.
Rees-Mogg, the former Business Secretary and Brexit campaigner pitched a rerun of 2019, in which Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (now Reform UK) partnered with Boris Johnson’s Conservatives to “Get Brexit Done” by stepping aside in key constituencies to ensure a large majority against the Labour Party.
Yet to sweeten the pot this time around, Sir Jacob has argued that Reform UK leader Richard Tice, his deputy Ben Habib, and honorary president Nigel Farage should be allowed to stand for the Conservatives and for Farage to be given assurances of a cabinet post.
“With the help of Nigel Farage in a Conservative government, as a Conservative minister, with Boris Johnson probably returning as foreign secretary and welcoming the likes of Ben Habib and Richard Tice into our party, as well as pursuing genuinely conservative policies, winning the next election suddenly becomes within reach,” Rees-Mogg said on Tuesday.
In a mock negotiation held on GB News, Mr Farage and Sir Jacob largely agreed on the changes needed within the Tory party, namely getting control of mass migration. The two agreed to such an extent that Farage said that they should be in the same party.
However, the Brexit boss told the former Business Minister that he underestimates “the level of contempt that is felt for the Conservative Party” in the country, with many people who previously voted Tory feeling betrayed by the record waves of immigration allowed into the country following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
“The Conservative party allowed more people to settle in this country in 2022 and 2023 than came from 1066 to 2010,” Farage exclaimed while arguing that the scale of the betrayal could not be undone by an election pact with Reform.
More fundamentally, Farage said that while there was much alignment between himself and Rees-Mogg, this could not be said for much of the misleadingly titled Conservative Party, many of whom are closer to Clinton-style Democrats rather than small-c conservatives of the mould of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.
“You are Jacob… not amongst the members, not amongst the voters, but within the Parliamentary party, you are outnumbered three or four to one. You do
not represent the centre of gravity of the current Conservative Parliamentary party,” he explained.
Arguing back from a realpolitik perspective, Sir Jacob argued that most Tory MPs are not deeply ideological and are more concerned with saving their seat in Parliament and therefore could be swayed to adopt a Faragist platform, provided it was backed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
“I think the majority of conservative members are there, the majority of conservative voters are there, and we just this coalition together and we can get there,” he argued.
The proposal does not have much support from others within the Tory party, however, with the Daily Telegraph — the newspaper most closely aligned with the Conservatives — reporting that soures within the party “unequivocally” ruled out any deal in which Reform figures were given a chance to stand as Conservatives in the general election.
Although Mr Farage did not explicitly shut down the idea, Reform UK leader Richard Tice reiterated his pledge to not make an election pact, telling the broadsheet: “There will be no deals with the Tories. They are using our policy platform as a sort of crib sheet for what they think they should support on gender ID, solar farms, immigration and so on.
“But we know it’s just electioneering. Fourteen years of failure, of zero delivery, shows they cannot be believed. We are not that stupid nor are voters. Nobody is listening to the untrustworthy Tories who say one thing and do another.”
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