By Dominic Penna
Nigel Farage’s party stands to do well at county council elections after ex-Conservative candidates tear up membership cards
At least 60 of Reform UK’s council candidates at the local elections next month have defected from the Conservatives.
New analysis shows dozens of former Tory activists, councillors or candidates have torn up their membership cards and are now standing for Reform.
Reform has surged in popularity in the nine months since the general election and overtook the Conservatives in the opinion polls at the start of this year.
It stands to perform well at the county council elections, while Kemi Badenoch has admitted her party faces “extremely difficult” local elections as it defends seats won at the height of Boris Johnson’s post-pandemic popularity in 2021.
A dossier produced by Labour provided examples of 60 former Tories standing on a Reform ticket on May 1.
These include a dozen hopefuls in Kent who were previously Conservative candidates in the same county, as well as 10 defectors in Durham.
Sarah Pochin, Reform’s candidate at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on the same day as the local elections, is also a former Tory councillor.
Other high-profile defectors to the Conservatives since the general election include Marco Longhi and Dame Andrea Jenkyns, two former Tory MPs, and Tim Montgomerie, a conservative commentator.
A Labour spokesman said: “A snake might shed its skin, but at the end of the day, it’s still a snake. Is that why so many of Nigel Farage’s council candidates are slithering away from their years serving the Tory party?
“Farage claims to be a breath of political fresh air, but he just hoovered up 60 candidates who failed our country as card-carrying Conservatives.
“The truth is, we now know when you take the mask off a Reform candidate, you’ll often find a tired old Tory trying to breathe life into a failed political career.”
The party said a vote for Reform on May 1 “risks letting a Tory in by the back door”, claiming only Labour could “bring real change to Britain”.
Reform will field a total of 1,630 local election candidates next month, meaning it is contesting more than any other party and standing in all but 11 available council seats.
Labour will stand candidates in 1,540 seats, while there are 1,594 Tory candidates.
Mr Farage said next month’s ballots represent the first time in modern history that a party other than Labour or the Tories has fielded the most candidates.
Nineteen out of the 23 councils up for election at the start of next month are currently run by the Conservatives, who are expected to suffer heavy losses.
Reform would have been likely to have performed even better if not for the cancellation of local elections for 5.5 million people as part of a local authority shake-up by Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister.
In an updated preview of May 1’s elections on Friday, Lord Hayward, a polling expert and Conservative peer, said that Labour seemed “fatalistic” about whether it could increase its number of councillors.
“The two by-election losses this week in St Helens and Lincoln do not bode well,” he said.
“They ought to be increasing seat totals given the background to the last round of elections in 2021, but trends do not augur well.”
Lord Hayward noted that Labour, the Tories and Reform were all looking to be the “leader of the pack”, and said council by-election results in March had been “marginally favourable” for the Conservatives.
He noted it was one of the few months since the general election in which Reform had not gained a councillor through a by-election, saying it was “valid” to ask whether Mr Farage’s party had peaked but adding that it would remain a “formidable” opponent.
A Reform UK spokesman said: “This is less than 4 per cent of all our 1,630 candidates.
“Is this the same Labour Party that accepted the defections of then-Conservative MPs Christian Wakeford and Natalie Elphicke?”
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