The U.K. Tories need help. And they're turning to Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives for advice

OTTAWA — When Robert Colvile, the head of an influential right-leaning British think-tank, introduced Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre before a speech in London last month, he couldn’t help but draw a line between the fate of Canadian and British Conservative parties.

“We did not just ask Pierre to deliver this lecture purely because… everyone in Britain has started paying a lot more attention to Canadian politics recently, and in particular, to the way in which an insurgent populist right-wing party called ‘Reform’ rose up to challenge the establishment Conservative party in the wake of landslide election defeat,” Colvile told the crowd of roughly 100 attendees waiting to hear Poilievre deliver the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture in early March.

It turns out, ask any Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP who has met with their U.K. counterpart recently, and they’ll tell you about a barrage of questions about how Stephen Harper managed to “Unite the Right” over 20 years ago and pull Canadian conservatives out of over a decade of political wilderness.

“People kept trying to mention it” to Poilievre during his three-day trip to the U.K., Colvile told National Post in an interview in mid-March.

Poilievre, who met with various U.K. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and other members of her caucus during his trip, conceded as much in an interview to National Post towards the end of foray into Europe.

But as for solutions, he said that it’s up to British conservatives to figure out their own issues.

“We didn’t talk about it a lot. I wanted to make clear that the situation in Canada and the United Kingdom could be vastly different. So, I just don’t think I’m in the position to advise them on how they move forward in that,” he said.

But despite Poilievre’s reticence to give advice, U.K. Tories and conservatives writ large keep asking CPC members for advice when they meet, multiple caucus members confirmed to National Post.

That’s because, as Colvile half-joked in early March, of the uncanny resemblance between the right-wing split until 2003 of Canada’s Reform Party and the Progressive Conservatives and the current British political landscape.

In 2018, unhappy with the U.K. Conservative Party and wanting to push for Britain’s exit from the European Union, Nigel Farage co-founded Reform UK (originally the Brexit Party).

During and after Brexit, Reform outflanked the U.K. Tories on the right, fiercely criticizing the Conservative government for its COVID-19 lockdowns and then pushing for stronger limits of public spending, taxation and immigration.

By the 2024 general election, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government was deeply unpopular while Farage’s Reform party was on the upswing. Ultimately, the Tories got shellacked at the polls, suffering their worst ever defeat and dropping from 365 seats to 121 on July 4.

While Kier Starmer’s Labour Party formed government, Farage’s Reform won the third-highest vote percentage (14.3 per cent) and five seats, a record for the fledgling party.

Fast forward to early April and U.K. polls suggest Farage’s Reform is the most popular party in the country while the once-dominant Tories fight for second place with Labour and the Greens.

As Colvile said in early March, a populist Reform Party is challenging the establishment right-wing party after the latter suffered its worst ever electoral defeat.

If it sounds a lot like the 16-year-long schism between Canadian right-wing parties after Preston Manning founded the Reform party in 1987 that contributed heavily to Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives’ historic defeat in the 1993 federal election, that’s what U.K. Tories think too.

And they want to learn from Canadian conservatives’ experience over three decades ago.

“As it became increasingly clear that the (U.K.) Conservatives who were heading for an absolute thumping (in 2024), Canada did become the sort of touchstone,” said Colvile, director of the influential Centre for Policy Studies think-tank.

“In political circles, it had become the sort of the benchmark for the absolute humiliation of a traditional centre-right governing party.”

Farage has never hidden the fact that he is inspired by his Canadian predecessors’ experience. During Reform UK’s annual conference in October, he invited former (Canadian) Reform leader Preston Manning to speak and waxed poetic about his counterpart’s political legacy.

“Nigel, I carried the torch for Reform in Canada, I now hand that torch over to you and wish you and your people every success,” Manning replied to Farage, according to the Globe and Mail.

As British Tories lick their wounds from the electoral defeat while Reform continues to lead in the polls, Colvile says many of them are hoping to avoid their Canadian cousins’ decade of political desert wandering before they reunite.

“The Canadian example at the heart of it. I think everyone who be honestly depressed if it takes as long as it did for the Canadians for the centre-right to reunited in the U.K.,” he said.

According to Tim Bale, a politics professor and longtime British conservative watcher, the parallels between the split in British right-wing parties and Canadian ones in the 1990s is also geographical.

“A merger between two parties can make sense if each partner is electorally strong in parts of the country where the other is weak. That was very much the case in Canada, and is — albeit to a lesser extent — true in Britain right now,” Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said in an email.

But any serious talks between British Reform and Conservative members to reunite like the Canadian PC and Reform members did under Stephen Harper are likely hampered by Farage’s continuing polling success.

As Bale puts it, a key issue around a merger is “who absorbs who?”, something neither the upstart Reform or historic Conservative Party are likely to relent on.

“It would surprise me if it happens that soon,” said Bale. “Neither party wants to be the one that’s obviously taken on as a charity case by the latter. And, in the Tories’ case, there’s hundreds of years of history during which they were the most successful party in the democratic world: admitting that’s over is a tough call.”

That issue was front-and-centre in the response from one U.K. Conservative MP to National Post when asked if his party was entertaining the possibility of reuniting the right under one big tent.

“No, I don’t think we need to. I think that we are united in the right within the Conservative Party. If people want to stand behind a leader that will unite the right in the UK, they need to vote for Kemi Badenoch to be the next prime minister of the UK,” said Conservative MP and shadow secretary of state for Scotland Andrew Bowie.

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?,” National Post responded.

“I would say that!,” Bowie said, bursting into laughter.

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.