Picture: This man could hurt the Tories badly

How can the Tories now simultaneously appeal to both the Blue Wall and the Red Wall?

The Sunday Times are reporting some interesting snippets about the Tories and Reform

[Sunak’s election chief Isaac] Levido’s team is anxiously watching Reform’s polling numbers and wondering whether Nigel Farage will return to lead the party. His former pollster, Chris Bruni-Lowe, has told him that if he comes back then Reform, currently polling in the mid-teens, would overtake the Tories, who are in the low twenties, “within 48 hours”.

Farage, already Reform’s honorary president, said he has still not decided what to do, balancing his desire to break the mould of politics against the difficulty of winning seats. He said Ukip’s performance in 2015, when it secured four million votes but just one seat, “haunts me”…

…The problem for Sunak is that while his right flank is exposed to Reform, new polling today by More in Common suggests that the policies Downing Street is using to woo the red-wall voters switching to Reform, such as deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, is alienating the once solid blue-wall Tory heartlands and reviving the Conservatives’ reputation as the “nasty party”.

More in Common polled 39 seats in the blue wall — seats where the Tories beat Labour by between 20 per cent and 51 per cent in 2019. With Labour now polling on average a point ahead of the Conservatives there, half those seats would fall to Sir Keir Starmer on a uniform swing. But the survey found that if one in four people there voted tactically, the Tories would lose 27 of them.

By large margins, voters regard Conservatives as more “uncaring” and “divided” than Labour. While 41 per cent of blue wall voters think the Tories “too right-wing”, only 32 per cent think Labour “too left-wing”.

I suspect there is no Tory who can currently straddle the Red/Blue Wall divide either before the election or after it. What appeals to one puts off the other wall, Sunak nor Mordaunt nor King Solomon have the wisdom to solve this paradox.

I cannot see how the Tories can unite the Red Wall and the Blue Wall over the next few years, getting Brexit done and stopping Jeremy Corbyn are no longer issues that concern voters and Sir Keir Starmer isn’t a bogeyman to frighten people into voting Tory unlike Corbyn. The only unity is that both walls want to ditch the Tories.

TSE