James Price: Avengers assemble! As Farage discards people, the Tories should pick them up | Conservative Home

James Price served as Chief of Staff and as a senior special adviser to Nadhim Zahawi.

The sky had grown dark in upstate New York.

Captain America stood alone against overwhelming odds and the situation looked desperate. Nevertheless, he tightened the straps of his shattered shield to his arm and prepared to meet his end. Until…the Avengers, in all their might, assembled around him, and saved the day.

It was a trick repeated again last year, fireworks blazing through a perfectly choreographed handshake (the campest since Arnie and Carl Weathers created the epic meme clasp in Predator) between Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr cemented another powerful alliance. Adding former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, real-life Iron Man Elon Musk, Hillbilly memoir-writer JD Vance, and hard work enthusiast Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump assembled his own team. Each of them appealed to different bits of a mighty electoral coalition, and brought skills and perspectives that Trump convinced the American people would compensate for weaknesses they saw in him.

Compare and contrast that to Nigel Farage’s own Famous Five.

The five Reform MPs looked like they, too, had complementary skills and personalities from which an exciting new Party could mature and take on the blob. But sharing the limelight has never been one of Farage’s admittedly broad skillsets. Madeline Grant has even coined “Markle’s Law” for the unfortunate wake of discarded politicos to have tried to barrage the Farage: “If you spend your whole life falling out with people then the common problematic factor, on balance of probability, is not going to be everybody you happen to meet, but you.”

Readers will know by now of the ins and outs of the latest Reform split with their standout new MP, former businessman Rupert Lowe. Unlike some Conservatives, I don’t feel an immediate sense of gloating or relief at this. Reform were making legitimate, incisive, if extremely painful, criticisms of the last 14 years of so-called Conservative rule. If the Tory Party was to survive, it would be only by Reform being a worthy foe, supported by huge numbers of decent, patriotic Brits who are better informed about the parlous state of the country than the average person.

Indeed, if you were a talented, successful person in Britain in 2025, and you were keen to get involved in politics to stop the horrendous slide we are suffering, you might well look at Reform. I have found it hard to disagree with anything Mr Lowe has been saying, whether on crime, immigration, welfare, business and more.

But given they have proven unable to work cohesively with one star performer, other talented people looking to save Britain should probably now start to look elsewhere. Whoever is to defeat Labour in 2029 will need hundreds of new people, and if they are to be of the calibre needed, parties must embrace talent, not throw it under the bus.

This is at least as true for the Conservatives, whose low-quality intake in 2019 was, in my humble opinion, the number one cause of our catastrophic defeat. Selfish, lazy, and downright unpleasant characters (“bloody loyal to the northeast” Chairmen running to Essex, for example?) had no place in the Party, and many should be prevented from standing again.

From all this, an elegant way to cut this Gordian knot begins to emerge.

The Conservative Party should seek to form its own Avengers out of the fracturing Right.

This means making as big and bold an offer as David Cameron made to Nick Clegg 15 years ago, and inviting Rupert Lowe to join, even giving him a shadow cabinet position.

It means inviting great patriots, thinkers, and doers like Ben Habib (who has written persuasively on this site about Reform’s inability to grow), Howard Cox, Suzanne Evans, Lance Forman, Annunziata Rees-Mogg and many others (back) into the Party, and giving many of them roles in policy formation. This will ensure no backsliding on the very-encouraging steps being developed by the likes of Rob Jenrick, Chris Philp, and Andrew Griffith.

I know some will say that we should continue to slowly develop policies in good time; but former Reformers like Lowe have shown that the problems and solutions are not that complicated: lock up criminals (& deport them if they are foreign); leave business alone; stop taxpayer funding of woke tosh; return power to elected ministers not useless blog quangos etc.

Fascinating research by Gavin Rice at Onward has shown here on Con Home that most voters agree on the most important topics (even Lib Dems think immigration is dreadfully high). So the Tories can integrate great swathes of smart, passionate Reform voters without affecting their planning; indeed they will be a reassuring bulwark.

But it shouldn’t end there.

The Party should formally invite Jeremy Clarkson in as the voice of rural England. It should openly court the Looking For Growth campaigning tech bros like Lawrence Newport, and Anglofuturists like Calum Drysdale and Tom Ough. It should beg disaffected entrepreneurs to leave their walled gardens and fishponds and lend their skills, even if only for one term.

And yes, it should even make bold overtures to Dominic Cummings. He is too right about too many things to be allowed to become a Cassandra. His diagnoses and prescriptions are the right ones, and ignoring them because of prior spats will only hurt the country further.

This promise of economic soundness, cultural restoration and immigration restrictionism (without Reform’s leftward economic shift or relative silence on certain assimilation issues that seem to be Reform’s direction under their new chairman) are THE way to unite the right.

This plan, like all other truths, will pass through three stages, just as Schopenhauer attested:

First, it will be ridiculed. Second, it will be violently opposed. Third, it will be accepted as being self-evident.

Because unless something breaks the stalemate, the only winners are the disgusting socialists in power. They are desperate to destroy all we hold dear, and prevent Britain from ever getting its pride back. This could be the moment a Reformed Conservative Party, bristling with the best of Britain, comes roaring back.

Not just save the country, but to avenge it.