The Conservatives will not be able to build a broad coalition of voters if it focuses on “responding to and aping Nigel Farage”, a shadow cabinet minister has said.
Andrew Bowie, the shadow Scottish secretary, warned his party that “nobody can out-Farage Farage” in an interview with the Holyrood magazine.
He said the Conservatives must attempt to be “authentic and true to ourselves”, arguing that chasing Reform presents a trap for the party.
The comments come after Jamie Greene quit the Conservative Party last Thursday, claiming it had become “Trump-esque in both style and substance”.
In a statement, Greene claimed the Conservative were in a “grotesque dance with Nigel Farage” in an attempt to win over right-wing voters.
Greene, who has since joined to the Liberal Democrats, accused the party of adopting a “Reform-lite agenda that appeals to the worst of our society, and not the best”.
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In comments published after Greene’s defection, Bowie reflected on the challenged posed to his party by Reform UK, which is now consistently outperforming the Conservatives in the polls.
He said: “All the polls, even though we should just take them with a pinch of salt, demonstrate that right now there is disenchantment with politics as a whole, especially the established political parties in this country.
“That is probably why we’re seeing so many people voicing support for Reform at the minute, because it’s ‘a pox on all your houses’, you know, ‘anybody but the above’ really is what people are saying.
“And that’s what Nigel Farage is offering. Whether that will hold for them up until the next election, that remains to be seen.”
Further to this point, Bowie was asked how a centre-right party like the Conservatives should respond to a challenge from the right.
The West Aberdeenshire MP commented: “By being authentic and true to ourselves, by not trying to out-Reform Reform, by not trying to appeal to the common denominator in terms of chasing the voter.
“We need to stick true to who we are as Conservatives, offer a pragmatic, sensible, liberal, Conservative vision of what the future can be in Scotland, and indeed the UK.
“You need a broad coalition of support from across the country, from across age groups, demographics, and that is what we have to be focused on doing.
“And we’re not going to achieve that, we’re not going to get that broad voter base, if we are purely focused on countering, responding to and aping Nigel Farage at every available opportunity, because nobody can out-Farage Farage, so why bother?”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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Source: Politics
