Are the Conservatives now the official opposition to Nigel Farage’s Reform?

The prime minister has been keen to suggest that the next general election will be a contest between Labour and Reform. In so doing, he is hoping to persuade those who might otherwise support the Liberal Democrats and the Greens (and maybe some Tories, too), to back Labour as the party best placed to stop Nigel Farage from becoming prime minister.

However, recent opinion polls have begun to challenge the credibility of this argument. For it is no longer clear that Labour are the principal challengers nationally to Reform; rather, that position is now beginning to be enjoyed by the Conservatives.

Of the five companies that have polled voting intentions since the beginning of December, four have put the Conservatives ahead of Labour in their most recent poll. The latest YouGov poll – published on Tuesday – is the latest to paint this picture.

It put Labour on 17 per cent, in third place behind Reform – with the Tories up slightly to 19 per cent, in second place. Or to put it another way, Keir Starmer’s party is now only two points ahead of the Greens.

On average, these five sources currently put the Conservatives on 19 per cent, narrowly ahead of Labour on 18 per cent.

Not that the Conservatives’ tally is any way impressive. It still represents a five-point fall in the party’s support compared with the record low of 24 per cent it secured in the 2024 election. However, it does represent a modest turnaround of two points in the party’s standing since the autumn party conference season.

In contrast, Labour’s average poll rating has continued to slide and has now fallen to a new low.

Moreover, much of the Conservatives’ modest recovery has occurred at the expense of Reform – to whom the Tories lost ground heavily in 2024, and to whom they have hitherto been bleeding support ever since. At the time of the party conferences, on average, 34 per cent of 2024 Tories were saying they had switched to Reform. Now the figure has fallen back to 27 per cent.

That is still very high. But a notable improvement in Kemi Badenoch’s popularity in the wake of a widely well-regarded party conference speech and response to the Budget has seemingly helped her pull back some of the support her party had lost to Nigel Farage’s ranks.

This is a key reason why the average level of support for Reform itself has slipped below the 30 per cent mark, for the first time since the party’s success in gaining control of 20 county councils last May.

Meanwhile, Labour have made no progress in reclaiming support lost to Reform, while the party’s grip on the “progressive” vote has been further undermined by the rise in support enjoyed by the Greens since Zack Polanski became their leader.

On average, just over one in 10 Labour voters from 2024 now say they would support Reform. That proportion has not significantly changed in recent months. Meanwhile, support for the Greens among voters as a whole is now running at 13 per cent, up four points on the party’s standing before the result of the leadership ballot in September.

And although the figure varies from poll to poll, on average, they suggest around 16 per cent of those who voted Labour in 2024 have now switched to the Greens, up six points since the autumn. Meanwhile, the proportion of 2024 Labour voters switching to the Liberal Democrats remains steady at 10 per cent.

These trends present Keir Starmer with an uncomfortable picture. The most effective way of stopping Nigel Farage from becoming prime minister is to reduce support for Reform. And it appears that the Conservatives – from whom Reform gained most of their support in the first place – are beginning to enjoy some success in that endeavour. In contrast, Labour’s ability to challenge Reform has come to look even weaker than ever.

Professor Sir John Curtice is professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, and a senior fellow at the National Centre for Social Research and UK in a Changing Europe