The next election will be Nigel Farage’s eighth attempt to enter the House of Commons. Regardless of what happens in Clacton, it could be his most influential Westminster campaign yet.

For more than a year, opinion polls have shown support for the Conservatives squeezed on the left by Labour and on the right by Reform, who have been polling at around 11 per cent since the start of the general election campaign. What would a Farage boost do to the Tory vote?

Tom Calver www.thetimes.co.uk

Most polls taken this year generally agree that a Farage-run Reform could boost the party by several points. But to properly understand how that will translate into seats, we have to know where that vote comes from. Will Reform take votes away from both main parties?

The bad news for Rishi Sunak is that May’s local elections suggest any Reform bounce will hurt the Tories more than Labour.

Thanks to figures obtained by the election expert Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, we can compare wards where Reform candidates stood with wards where they did not.

In areas where Reform didn’t stand, the typical Tory vote share was down 1.7 percentage points compared with 2023. But where Reform did put up candidates this year — and didn’t last year — the Tory vote dropped by a far bigger margin of 5.3 points. The Labour vote share, by contrast, barely fell at all.

This suggests a significant chunk of Reform’s support is coming at the expense of would-be Conservative voters. And it makes sense when we look at who Reform’s potential voters are.

In Britain, support for Reform — just like support for Brexit during the referendum — tends to increase with age, just as support for the Conservatives does. There is far less overlap with Labour’s younger support base.

Since 2016, the Conservative Party won support by swallowing the anti-EU base, which worked to the party’s advantage in 2019. Now, though, a resurgent Farage threatens to split those voters again. “The current Labour coalition is much more Reform-proof than the Conservative coalition,” says Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester.

Another way of framing the problem for Sunak is how much more popular Farage is than him. Among 2019 Tory voters, 50 per cent have a favourable view of Nigel Farage, while just 41 per cent have a positive view of Sunak himself.

What, then, would a Reform bounce do to parliament?

The latest YouGov MRP poll of 50,000 voters, published on Monday, puts Reform in second place in 27 constituencies. Eleven of these seats are in Yorkshire, including Barnsley South and Doncaster North. With Labour so far ahead, it is not close to winning in any of them.

However, the distribution of votes suggests even a slight swing to Reform could have a big impact on the scale of Tory losses. If we assume that Reform takes two votes from the Conservatives to every one vote from Labour, then a modest five-point Farage bounce reduces the Conservatives from 140 seats to 118. Labour, despite losing voters, would actually gain eight seats, putting it on 430.

Yet things could get worse. If we assume that Reform takes virtually all its support from people who currently say they would vote Tory, then a four point Reform bounce would reduce the Tories to 95 seats and a five point boost to Reform would leave the Tories with just 78 seats. Indeed, a seven-point increase in Reform’s vote, at the expense of the Conservatives, would knock the Tories back to being the third-largest party in parliament.

When support is low, and your voter base is split, first past the post can be a cruel system. And for all of the damage they inflict on the Conservative Party, it would still take a massive national swing for Reform to actually pick up any seats in parliament at all.

Of course, even megapolls are not very good at predicting local winners. People in different areas behave differently; separate polling of the constituency of Clacton done earlier this year suggests Farage would probably win the seat if he contested it.

But one party is set to do exceptionally well from any potential Farage bounce: the Liberal Democrats.

The party may be running at about 10 per cent of the national vote share, even less than Nigel Farage’s party and below what it achieved in 2019. Yet because it is now a close second in several seats in the south of England, a modest swing to Reform could result in up to a dozen extra seats.