It seems Rishi Sunak tried to do an election-winning deal with Reform UK, but wasn’t able to clinch it. Did this lead to his defeat?

Remember 2019? The Brexit Party – as it was then known – didn’t stand any candidates in constituencies where the Conservatives had won in 2017, and campaigned most strongly in the so-called “Red Wall” constituencies that, while traditionally Labour, were also strongly in favour of Brexit.

The result was that Labour lost votes in those constituencies contested by the Brexit Party and the “Red Wall” fell to the Conservatives as part of a landslide election victory.

Now let’s think about 2024, when Labour won with 33.7 per cent of the national vote – but the Conservatives and Reform UK (the former Brexit Party) had 38 per cent of the vote between them.

In many constituencies, Labour only won because Reform took votes away from the Conservatives.

It isn’t hard, then, to envision a situation where the Tories could have engineered another election win for themselves, courtesy of a dodgy backroom deal with Nigel Farage’s fascists Brexiteers.

Instead, according to the Telegraph, this happened:

Rishi Sunak held secret talks about striking a deal with Nigel Farage that would have seen Red Wall election candidates running on a joint Tory-Reform UK ticket.

Under the suggested plan, Tory and Reform candidates would not have been fielded against each other in designated seats.

In the weeks before the election was called, the then prime minister had a phone call and a face-to-face meeting with Dame Andrea Jenkyns to discuss the proposals.

They were followed by a number of more detailed meetings between Craig Williams, an aide of Mr Sunak, and Andy Wigmore, one of the so-called “bad boys of Brexit”, in an attempt to hammer out a solution.

Mr Wigmore said he was told Mr Sunak had at one point been keen to speak to Mr Farage directly, and he went so far as to pass on Mr Farage’s phone number – but a conversation did not take place.

In the end, he believes, they simply ran out of time to reach a solution. By calling the election early, Tory strategists believed they had neutralised the threat of Reform by ensuring that Mr Farage stayed out of things.

Mr Farage had already committed to spending time in the US to help his friend Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but confounded expectations by making a return to frontline politics. He went on to become MP for Clacton, with his party gaining a further four MPs.

Is this the reason Sunak called the election earlier than had been expected?

If so, this makes the Tory strategy much clearer.

But they had not considered all the possible consequences.

It seems that, at last, we have a good reason to be grateful for Rishi Sunak’s lousy negotiation skills.

Source: Sunak held secret talks about Farage Red Wall deal

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