I want a Tory victory not a monstrous coalition with Reform, says Kemi
Kemi Badenoch has ruled out forming a coalition with Reform UK after the next general election, branding the prospect "monstrous" and saying she would rather trigger another election than share power with Nigel Farage's party. Speaking at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Conservative leader accused defectors who had switched from the Tories to Reform of being among the most dishonest people she had ever met, while warning that the country would be in "a pretty bad place" if her party failed to form the next government.
Badenoch made the comments in an interview with LBC's Iain Dale, naming Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Danny Kruger among those who had left the Conservatives for Reform. Pressed on whether refusing to work with Reform could instead pave the way for a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition in a hung Parliament, she said voters should simply go to the polls again. She also criticised Farage personally, accusing him of changing policy positions erratically and of having fallen out with colleagues in every party he has led, insisting she wants to "win on my own terms" rather than form a "hybrid" government.
- Badenoch rejects any Tory-Reform coalition, calls the idea "monstrous"
- She'd prefer another election over sharing power with Farage
- Accuses Reform defectors and Farage of dishonesty and inconsistency
New here? Start with this
Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative Party, one of the UK's traditional main political forces. Reform UK is a smaller, right-leaning party led by Nigel Farage that has been gaining support, in some cases by attracting former Conservative politicians and voters. With the next general election approaching, there has been growing speculation about whether the two parties might work together, especially if neither wins enough seats to govern alone.
A coalition happens when no single party wins a majority in Parliament, forcing two or more parties to share power to form a government, as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats did between 2010 and 2015. Some commentators have suggested a Tory-Reform link-up could be one way to keep Labour out of power after the next vote, given the two parties compete for similar voters.
This matters because it goes to the heart of how the Conservative Party is trying to position itself against both Labour and Reform, and whether it sees Reform as a partner or a rival to be defeated outright. Several senior figures who once served as Conservative MPs or ministers have defected to Reform in recent years, adding a personal dimension to the rivalry between the parties' leaderships.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Supporters of Badenoch's position argue that a party's first duty is to stand for something distinct, and that a formal pact with Reform would blur the Conservatives into an ill-defined populist bloc rather than a credible party of government. They point to Nigel Farage's history of splits and rebranded vehicles as evidence that he is an unreliable partner, and to the defectors' shifting allegiances as proof that ideological consistency, not short-term arithmetic, should guide strategy. On this view, seeking a clean mandate to govern "on my own terms" respects voters by offering them a coherent choice rather than a post-election horse-trade they never explicitly endorsed.
The case against
Critics counter that in a fragmented electorate, refusing outright to work with the party splitting the right-of-centre vote is a recipe for handing power to Labour and the Liberal Democrats by default, which serves neither Conservative nor Reform voters' underlying aims. They argue that mature democratic politics often requires pragmatic accommodation rather than purity, and that dismissing millions of voters' choice of party, and branding former colleagues "dishonest", risks looking more like personal pique than principled strategy. From this perspective, ruling out cooperation before the votes are even cast forecloses options that a responsible leader might later need to keep populism-adjacent voters engaged with mainstream governance rather than pushing them further to the fringe.