The Conservative leader’s focus on inheritance tax cuts and childcare for higher earners assumes Nigel Farage’s party is finished
Daily Telegraph 08/10/26
At their party conference in Birmingham, the Tories unveiled their “Southern Posh” strategy. This marks the biggest shift in political strategy in a decade and carries enormous risks. Given a general election in the spring remains a possibility, we’ll know soon whether it’s a success.
The conference carried an unambiguous message: “We’re here for the better off.” Allowing families to pass down homes and £1m without inheritance tax, and extending free childcare to higher earners, are top of the wish lists of middle-class, urban professionals.
The party also pledged to reverse Labour’s “mansion tax” and, in time, to tackle other taxes on higher earners. To be sure, these policies mostly poll well with other voters too (particularly cuts in IHT), but collectively they’ll especially please the posh.
While the party quietly pressed a harder line on immigration, Kemi Badenoch’s speech was focused on the middle-class economy, as were the party’s media briefings.
Naturally “small state” and low-tax voters – who are also pro-European and liberal on immigration – many southern professionals have become exasperated with the Left-wing drift in the country. Having moved away from the Tories under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, they showed interest in the party again under Rishi Sunak but have started to “come home” in earnest under Kemi Badenoch.
While the Tories got a kicking in working-class Essex and Suffolk at the most recent local elections, they were competitive again in the Home Counties, Surrey, and affluent outer London. But the Southern Posh strategy only makes sense if the Tories’ key political assumption comes to pass: that Reform is in permanent decline, and that the party is dying or dead.
Only if Reform is out of business permanently will the Southern Posh strategy be bolstered by the late arrival of vast numbers of working-class Right-wingers who might think the Tories were the best chance to cut immigration and get tough on crime. Only these Reform voters will get the Tories into a truly competitive place.
On the face of it, assuming Reform is finished isn’t stupid. Why? Because Reform is stupid. At the risk of regurgitating old news, I won’t dwell endlessly on their mistakes here, but there have been multiple appalling errors.
Absurd candidate choices; loose words over donations; poor policy announcements; party infighting; hysterical commentary; and so on. These help account for the party’s downward drift in the polls and it remains perfectly plausible that more mistakes will follow in coming weeks.
But there are many reasons to think Reform could fight back and blow the Tories’ strategy apart. The most obvious reason is their huge pledged donations. If Reform gets even most of the £72m pledged by wealthy backers, they’ll be able to create the most extensive campaign seen in recent times. In fact, even if it were poorly executed it could still make a positive difference.
Elsewhere, as I’ve written here recently, external events obviously keep putting Reform’s top issues – immigration and crime – at the top of the news agenda. For all shadow home secretary Chris Philp’s harder line on these policy areas, the Tories’ lamentable past record on the issues means working-class voters will always trust Reform more here.
The more stories there are of giant boats arriving, sometimes undetected, or of massive new accommodation facilities for asylum seekers opening in rural England, or of appalling crimes committed by those who have arrived illegally, the more voters will listen to Nigel Farage.
There’s more to it. While no ordinary voters use that term beloved of Right-wingers on the internet – the “uniparty” – there is a strong belief, particularly amongst working-class voters, that Labour and the Tories have failed in the same way on immigration and crime. In this way, Labour failure can be seen as Tory failure, and vice versa.
As Andy Burnham fails similarly to the Tories, the greater the chance the exasperated working class will decide to go in a completely different way. Certainly in the short-term, that means they’re likely to go to Reform.
There’s an important final reason: the Tories’ Southern Posh strategy itself. What will be the effect of the Tories coming out so openly for the better off? The party seems to assume only the posh will hear their policies and that there will be no movement elsewhere.
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