Reform thinks the Tories are bound to lose the next election

Embed from Getty Images

Richard Tice announced yesterday that his Reform party would put up a candidate in every constituency at the nest general election. 

There will, he said, be no deals with the Conservatives, even where a sitting Tory MP holds similar views to Reform.

From which we can conclude that Tice thinks the Tories will lose that election, with or without intervention from Reform. 

So his best bet of being relevant afterwards is if disappointed Tory members decide they lost because of Reform and then demand that their party moves further to the right to attract Reform voters.

But it's far from clear that, without the issue of Brexit, Reform will be able to attract enough voters for that strategy to work.

And there's another problem. The voters Reform could attract will probably be looking for some protection from the market, whereas the party's leadership wants to give them more market and give it to them good and hard.

If Labour thinks it worth exposing this contradiction, the electorate may be more willing to listen than they were in the Ukip days, even though that party was similarly broken backed.