A pact with Reform would give its best people a chance to audition – for the Tories

Last week, Kemi Badenoch gave a nod to Conservative council leaders making local coalitions with Reform UK.

Asked about working with Reform, the Tory leader said it would be up to local party leaders to “make the choice about what is right for their councils” after the local elections on May 1.

Contrast that message with Nigel Farage’s insistence that Reform UK won’t form coalitions with the Tories at “any level”.

Nationally, he’s right to be wary of anything which allows Labour to paint his candidates as merely the teal Tories. Nearly all of Reform’s second-place finishes at the general election are in seats held by Labour meaning that Mr Farage’s best hope of a serious breakthrough is wooing those voters. A close association with the party most of them helped to boot out in 2024 wouldn’t be very helpful.

But when it comes to local government it’ll be harder to hold that line.

We have already seen plenty of tension inside Reform UK between the leadership and its activists over Farage’s command-and-control culture, with regional organisers and councillors resigning and whole constituency associations dissolving.

Indeed if it performs well at next month’s local elections, its councillors will have their own democratic mandates. If a local deal with the local Conservatives can put them in a position to deliver on their promises to the electorate, why shouldn’t they be able to do that?

Many might even prefer the chance to actually run the town hall as opposed to simply taking orders from Reform’s headquarters in City Road, London. After all, you don’t necessarily need to be part of a national party in local government: independent and localist groups are easy enough to set up.

This is good news for the Conservatives. Coalitions will give Tories a first-hand idea of the sort of people Mr Farage’s party is selecting as candidates and whether working with them is actually a good idea.

In the 2010s, Ukip failed to capitalise on early local breakthroughs because many of its councillors simply weren’t prepared to put in the work. This pattern may repeat itself, and if the reports of candidate difficulties following the expulsion of Rupert Lowe are any indication perhaps it already is.

Then there is the basic political hygiene. Mr Farage has never been the far-rightist that some of his progressive critics try to paint him as, but his parties do attract such people and have a patchy record of catching them before the media do. Given that Reform’s head of candidate vetting was reported as saying Hitler was “brilliant” that seems not to have changed.

All this means that the Conservative Party’s openness to town hall coalitions is the right move, not just democratically but perhaps tactically too. If the Tories offer the most effective and conscientious Reform councillors a shot at power, they might take it – and if that leads to Farage expelling them, his loss might just be Kemi’s gain.