Yes, the right will unite – when it starts to dislike losing more than disliking each other
Conservative Party of Canada logo (Torontonian357/Alamy)
4 min read
As Reform UK’s poll share continues to slide, and the Conservative Party’s very gentle rise brings it to level pegging (or even, in some polls, ahead), the question naturally arises again as to whether there will be some sort of deal to ‘unite the right’.
And the answer is yes – eventually.
In the short term, the barriers to such an arrangement are formidable. Not least of which is that large sections of each party cannot stand the other. History suggests that dividing up seats at an election can be a fraught process even for two parties that get along very well, as it was between the Liberals and the SDP in the 1980s, and it would be vastly more so between the Tories and Reform.
A deal would also have severe tactical drawbacks. For all that the ‘fight on the right’ presents a tidy narrative that appeals to journalists, in the short term it doesn’t really describe conditions on the ground. While there are parts of the country where Reform and the Conservatives have no choice but to go head-to-head at the next election, in others they face quite different battles.
Of the 98 seats where Reform placed second in 2024, for example, no fewer than 89 of these are presently held by a Labour MP; Reform’s voter coalition also skews much more heavily towards lower-income voters with less formal education than the traditional Conservative one. The Tories, on the other hand, have been pushed back into their pre-2019 map, and need to woo more prosperous southern voters away from the Liberal Democrats.
It would be a mistake, however, to over-index on these short-term difficulties. However much the Conservatives and Reform might dislike each other, most parties come in the end to dislike losing even more, and a Britain with two right-wing parties on similar vote shares which cannot co-operate is a Britain which cannot deliver a right-wing government.
As such, an eventual deal is almost inevitable unless the need for one is obviated, most obviously either by the total collapse of one party or the other or a fundamental change to the electoral system which removes the imperative, under first-past-the-post, to come to terms.
But what then, might such a deal look like? Handily, we have three international models, all in very similar parliamentary systems to ours, which might provide a template: New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
New Zealand has the least formal arrangement. The Nationals (equivalent to the Tories) are essentially permanently allied to the small, libertarian Alliance of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT), but the critical relationship here is with New Zealand First. The Nationals and the NZF do not have a formal deal at all, but NZF voters are of the right and generally expect their party to facilitate a right-wing government; when NZF unexpectedly installed Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party in 2017, they lost every seat they held at the subsequent contest.
The exact shape of a deal in Britain will depend on the relative strengths of the parties and the personalities leading them
Then we have the muddle that is Australia, where the right has until very recently been dominated by the coalition, an essentially permanent alliance of the Liberals (the Tory analogue) and the Nationals (the Reform comparator), as well as a couple of state-level fusions, the Country Liberals, and the Liberal National Party. Like New Zealand, this relatively fluid arrangement is facilitated by a more flexible voting system.
Canada, on the other hand, uses full-fat first-past-the-post, and for that reason is probably the most useful illustration of the logic of our electoral system. After a decade of slugging it out and letting the Liberals in time and again, the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance eventually merged into the Conservative Party of Canada, with Tory branding and CA leadership. They won the subsequent election.
The exact shape of a deal in Britain will depend on the relative strengths of the parties and the personalities leading them at the moment a deal is decided. But if both survive, a deal will be done.
Henry Hill is the political editor of The Critic
