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Letters: The Tories and Reform have little to unite them
['The Spectator', 'Dimitri Burshtein', 'The Spectator Australia', 'Tom Switzer', 'Judith Sloan', 'Jacob Heilbrunn', 'Laurie Wastell']
The Spectator Australia
Class warSir: Your leading article, ‘More in common’ (24 January), laments the ‘civil war’ between Reform and the Conservatives.
That’s why (against his better instincts) Nigel Farage backs steel and water nationalisation and is soft on welfare and pensions.
Reform’s natural political bedfellows are not the Tories, but the SDP (left economically, right culturally).
Your leading article dreams of uniting these two parties behind a ‘coherent right-wing agenda’, but many Reform voters hated Margaret Thatcher and many suburban Tories can’t stand Farage.
My thanks for travelling to north Norfolk a couple of years ago to speak at a farmers’ dinner was a furious rant, full of personal abuse, from the senior National Farmers’ Union man.