THE DIVIDED RIGHT CANNOT WIN.

Repeating the hard facts can be boring but sometimes essential! That’s why I want to repeat something that I have talked about previously as it is the key rule of politics!

You don’t get any prizes for coming second.

Now I realise that that may sound a tad obvious, but it is worth remembering as we discuss the fractured state of the British Right. I’ve seen so many instances of our side LOSING recent elections but then explaining away these defeats as pyrrhic victories that I thought that it’s time to weigh in on this one. A reality check is needed and here it comes.

You see we can argue all day about whether Reform UK or Restore Britain or the Conservatives represent the future. We can debate the personalities, their policies, the betrayals and who is entitled to call themselves the authentic voice of the Right.

But the ballot box doesn’t care.

That’s the brutal truth here. And some recent by-election results are beginning to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we face.

Let me show you just a few of these and why they should set the alarm bells ringing for those of us who want Labour removed from power.

Let me take you to Grays Town, in Essex.

Labour won the council by-election that took place last month with 673 votes. Reform UK came second with 491. The Conservatives managed another 224.

Do the maths on that.

Labour: 673
Reform + Conservative: 715

Labour won.

The combined Reform and Conservative vote was larger than Labour’s but that’s completely irrelevant under our electoral system. Labour gets the councillor whilst everyone else gets to complain about it.

If you think that was unusual, it really was not.

Consider neighbouring Grays, Riverside.

Labour won with just 389 votes. Reform was agonisingly close on 362. The Conservatives took another 182.

So:

Labour: 389
Reform + Conservative: 544

Again, Labour wins.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is First Past the Post. It’s so basic but the centre right seems oblivious to the electoral reality.

Labour doesn’t NEED 50% of the vote. It didn’t even need anything remotely approaching it. It STILL won Grays Riverside with around 30%.

Why was this? Well, because its opponents divided their votes. Now, before Conservative and Reform supporters start shouting at me, there is an important point to make.

You cannot simply add every Reform vote to every Conservative vote and declare that this is what would happen if one party stood aside.

It wouldn’t. Some Conservatives would never vote Reform. Some Reform voters would never return to the Conservatives. Some might just stay at home. Others might even vote for another party like Restore.

Politics doesn’t work like moving beans from one jar into another. But here’s the problem.

You don’t need all those votes to transfer for vote splitting to matter. Sometimes you only need a fraction of them.

In Grays Riverside, Reform lost to Labour by 27 votes while 182 people voted Conservative. That’s the bit that should concentrate minds.

Now scale this up from council wards to a General Election.

Imagine a constituency where the result looks like this:

Labour 35%.

Reform 32%.

Conservative 18%.

Others 15%.

Who wins?

Labour.

It doesn’t matter that Reform and the Conservatives between them attracted 50%. Labour takes the seat on 35%.

Try another one.

Liberal Democrats 36%.

Conservative 31%.

Reform 20%.

Others 13%.

Who wins?

The Lib Dems.

Again, a majority may have voted for parties broadly to the Right, but it makes absolutely no difference because we don’t use proportional representation.

The Westminster model is best understood as 650 individual winner-takes-all contests.

That’s is what makes division potentially lethal.

Here’s another concern.

It isn’t the same party dividing the vote everywhere.

In some parts of Britain Reform is now plainly the stronger force on the Right.

Look at Harraby South, where Reform won with 560 votes against Labour’s 469, despite another 236 votes going Conservative. Or Southey, where Reform took 1,133 votes against Labour’s 836 and the Conservatives were reduced to just 69.

In places like these, the idea that Reform should stand aside for the Conservatives is absurd. Why would the winning party stand aside for the party getting 69 votes?

The thing is that when you travel elsewhere, that picture changes dramatically.

In the Aberdeen South parliamentary by-election, the Conservatives polled 14,308 votes, while Reform managed only 2,478. There, it would be equally ridiculous for Conservatives to pretend Reform was the dominant force.

And that is what makes this problem so difficult.

Britain does not have one national Conservative-versus-Reform contest.

It has 650 local contests.

In some constituencies Reform will be the obvious challenger. In others the Conservatives will be. That’s just the way it is. Restore will not win any Westminster seats beyond Great Yarmouth from what I can see. But the division it can cause it considerable if not existential for Reform.

Dover provides perhaps the most spectacular warning yet. On Thursday past, the Greens captured the previously Conservative-held Guston, Kingsdown & St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe ward with just 767 votes. Reform polled 733 — losing by a miserable 34 votes — while the Conservatives took another 456 and Restore Britain 284. Reform and Conservative voters alone numbered 1,189 against the victorious Greens' 767. Throw Restore into the equation and parties broadly of the Right amassed 1,473 votes. Yet who gets the councillor? The Greens. Restore hailed their 10% share as a victory. Was it? For whom?

The Right can spend the next few years arguing about which faction is ideologically pure, but while it does so its opponents can walk through the middle and win seats on less than 30% of the vote.

Let’s return to the General Election battleground and let’s think about a particularly dangerous group of seats, in which no single right of centre party will establish sufficient dominance and both will remain large enough to ensure the other cannot win.

Those are the constituencies Andy Burnham must be looking at with delight.

He doesn’t necessarily need to persuade Reform voters to become Labour voters. He doesn’t necessarily need Conservative voters to become Liberal Democrats. He just needs Reform and Conservative voters to keep voting against each other. And they give every impression of doing just that,

That is the beauty — from Labour’s perspective — of First Past the Post.

A divided opposition can turn 33% into a massive parliamentary majority.

There is, of course, another possibility.

One party could destroy the other. If Reform completely replaces the Conservatives as the main party of the Right, the problem largely disappears. Similarly, if the Conservatives somehow recover sufficiently to squeeze Reform back into single figures, the traditional two-party dynamic could return.

Is that realistic? I don’t think so.

Reform is far too substantial simply to disappear. The Conservatives retain far too much support, organisation and geographical strength to just collapse entirely.

That leaves us with the most dangerous possible scenario.

Two substantial parties competing for overlapping groups of voters under an electoral system designed to punish precisely that situation.

So we are clear, I am not making an argument that Reform owes the Conservatives anything. Nor am I saying that Conservatives should surrender to Reform. Let’s be honest and admit there are profound differences between them, and voters have every right to make their own choices.

It is simply an observation about electoral mathematics.

If Reform was to receives 30% and the Conservatives 20%, while Labour wins a constituency on 35%, nobody at the count will announce that the Right really won 50%.

The Labour candidate will be elected. This is how reality works. If you repeat this maths across dozens — perhaps hundreds — of constituencies then something extraordinary becomes possible.

A government could be returned despite a substantial majority of voters in many of its seats having voted against it.

These tiny Council elections are little laboratories showing us how the bigger contest could work. The question facing the British Right is rapidly becoming bigger than which party wins its internal civil war. The question is whether either side can win the country while that war continues.

Under proportional representation, perhaps. Under First Past the Post?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

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