It was a week in which speculation that Nigel Farage would make a long-awaited return to frontline British politics reached a new level, before Reform UK’s 2024 policy launch. In the event, dozens of journalists who trooped to a central London hotel on the off chance that the former Ukip leaderwould appear were disappointed. Farage, Reform’s honorary president and its dominant shareholder, was not among the guests alongside the party’s leader, Richard Tice, who mounted an attack on Labour and the Conservatives and dialled up his own anti-immigration rhetoric. It raised awkward questions for Tice, and led to further speculation about Farage’s reluctance to fully commit to Reform. But polling before the event nonetheless confirmed that the populist party now presents a greater threat to the Conservatives than the Brexit party and Ukip in its heyday, according to experts. “They harm the Conservatives more now than Ukip did in 2015 because the post-Brexit Tories have a lot more ‘Ukippy’ voters – who they picked up in 2017 and 2019,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester who is one of Britain’s foremost experts on the behaviour of British voters. Labour and the Liberal Democrats were less threatened by Reform for the same reason, he added. They have far fewer of those voters – inclined towards Brexit and often hostile to immigration – than they did in 2010-15. Reform now poses an even bigger threat in Tory seats because its predecessor, the Brexit party, did not stand candidates against sitting Conservative MPs in 2019 in return for commitments made by the then Conservative leader, Boris Johnson. “New Reform UK candidates will therefore offer an option to voters in those seats that wasn’t there in 2019,” said Ford. As a new political year dawns, Reform’s growing presence is adding to Conservative MPs’ anxiety, as their party continues to languish behind Labour, despite Rishi Sunak’s efforts on Thursday to revive Tory fortunes by emphasising his commitment to tax cuts, immigration controls and management of the economy during a visit to the bellwether seat of Mansfield. YouGov polling released on 1 December put Labour on 45% (+1), the Conservatives on 22% of the vote (-3) and Reform UK on 10% (+1). While few, if any, commentators expect Reform to win any seats – the party’s confirmation on Thursday that Farage would not stand in any constituency was taken as a hint that it shared this view – the party’s polling of as much as 11% in recent surveys would be enough to decimate dozens of Conservative majorities and enhance the scale of a Labour general election win. Even before that point, it may play a key role in giving Sunak yet another byelection bloody nose in the upcoming contest in Wellingborough, where splits on the right could help Labour overturn an 18,540 majority. The Northamptonshire seat – up for grabs on the back of a recall petition triggered by the suspension of Peter Bone – is one where significant levels of deprivation and past support for Brexit may prove fertile ground for Reform. The party’s Wellingborough candidate, Ben Habib, who is also the Reform deputy leader, said: “The key for us is to ensure that the Tory voters aren’t so irritated and upset with the whole electoral landscape that they stay at home, and we can encourage them to recognise that what we stand for is actually what they voted for in the 2016 referendum.” But the contest will also be a particular test for a party that has consistently underperformed in byelections, relative to its poll showing, and which is without the alternative springboard that European parliamentary elections provided for Ukip and the Brexit party. More broadly, however, those who are less convinced about Reform’s potency include Michael Crick, author of the 2022 Farage biography One Party After Another, who cites the presence of an insurgent force on the right that stretches all the way back to James Goldsmith’s Referendum party of the 1990s. Crick said: “In every general election, there’s a sort of expectation that maybe Ukip, the Brexit party or whatever it is at that time is going to cause havoc for the Tories. They do cause problems, undoubtedly in each case, but it’s never quite as bad as everybody says.” But it would cause damage in other ways, he suggested, adding: “They will win over and attract money that might have gone to the Conservatives, from really rightwing donors, and you may well also find that quite a lot of Tory activists and officials end up voting or even working for Reform.” The latter is already happening, with those on the Tory right complaining about the difficulties of stemming a steady stream of members defecting to Reform. “Conservative voters are on strike basically, and the last four byelections have seen 20,000 Conservative voters missing in each one,” said David Campbell Bannerman, a former deputy leader of Ukip who defected back to the Tories in 2011 and later launched the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) as a rightwing group lobbying for members’ rights. That said, he also views the Reform vote as “soft”, arguing that many Conservative voters who are considering the insurgent party would return if Sunak was ousted. But another former Ukip MEP, Patrick O’Flynn, argues that there is an anti-establishment mood that Reform could tap into in a different way. Like some other veterans of the populist tide which preceded Brexit, he also views the language used by Reform – railing against the supposed “socialism” of the Conservatives and Labour – as off the mark in terms of connecting with the public mood. Another key ingredient is also missing, of course. “Richard Tice really deserves credit for resilience, leading the party through some infertile periods to a point where the Sunak tilt back towards Cameron-style liberal conservatism has opened up a big chunk of the electorate to Reform,” he said. “But on the right, I don’t think there’s a communicator as good or as seasoned as Nigel Farage.”