The Tory elite class is in CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

They need to wake up and smell the coffee before it's TOO LATE

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Ever since their historic defeat at the general election, more than a few members of the Tory elite class have decided to leave reality for Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Despite Nigel Farage and Reform having just fired a bazooka at the Conservative Party’s electorate, winning over millions of disillusioned conservatives, one member of the Tory elite class after another has since lined up to warn their party that any association with Faragism would be the final kiss of death.

Writing in The Times, former Conservative Party leader William Hague, who never won an election himself, warns his party against “appeasing populist rhetoric”, “simplistic and nationalistic solutions”, and brands Faragism “a dead end”.

Andy Street, who just lost the West Midlands mayoralty to Labour, likewise warns the Conservative Party it would be “very, very foolish” to adopt a “Reform-light agenda”, which would only push them “down an electoral cul-de-sac”.

And then there’s former leader Theresa May who, after squandering the biggest electoral opportunity in modern times, in 2017, has proclaimed Nigel Farage “is not a Conservative” and should never have any role in the Tory party.

Are these people for real? Are they serious? Do they not realise what just happened to their party?

Or are they simply more interested in signalling their elite values to other members of the Tory elite rather speaking to their wider party and the country?

I say all this because I think they need a reality check. So here it is. Nigel Farage and Reform just completely blew apart the only electoral coalition the Tories have managed to assemble since Thatcher that was capable of delivering a big majority.

And Farage did this —as I warned for years he would— by reaching out to all those disillusioned and disgruntled 2019 Tories who took a punt on the Conservatives five years ago but now wish they never had. Just look at the data.

Farage and Reform, according to Lord Ashcroft’s post-election polling, poached nearly twice as many 2019 Conservative voters as Keir Starmer and Labour. He cannibalised close to one-quarter of the entire Conservative Party electorate.

YouGov’s polling is even more striking. Fully one-quarter of the Conservative Party’s 2019 electorate defected to Reform while just one-tenth switched to Labour.

Put another way, while one in ten 2019 Tories switched to Labour, one in four went to Reform.

The blunt reality is that more 2019 Conservatives switched to Reform than the number who switched to Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined.

Yet if you read recent commentary by the Tory elite class —endorsed by pro-Labour analysts who rather like the idea of the Tories becoming indistinguishable from the Labour Party—then you’d think that the very opposite is true.

You'd think the Tories must do all they can to avoid Faragism and focus instead on winning back all those Labour and Liberal Democrat voters in the big cities and leafy shires who, we are led to believe, might actually consider voting Tory in 2029. Are these people out of their minds?

It is Nigel Farage, nobody else, who presents the greatest threat to the survival of the Conservative Party. And, as we learned last week, he is now also hitting the Tories in other ways, too.

By tearing off the biggest chunk of the Tory vote, Farage just indirectly cost the Conservatives 150 seats while leapfrogging ahead of them to become the main opposition in nearly 100 seats.

He not only displaced the Tories across northern England, which really matters given Labour has re-emerged as the dominant force in Scotland, but has done so while becoming far more competitive in Wales, picking up seven in ten former Brexit Party voters, one in three Tory Leavers, nearly three in ten of all Brexit voters, one-fifth of the working-class, and nearly as many middle-aged men as the Tories.

Farage, in other words, is very quickly building …