THE Conservative Party needs to embrace Nigel Farage and Reform UK to prevent them from gaining mass support in future, according to former MP Craig Mackinlay.

He told GB News: “I’m rather disappointed that in 2019 when Nigel, under the Brexit Party, set aside his candidates against sitting Conservative MPs. That was a broad and very generous gesture.

“It helped us to get that 80-seat majority, that historic win. As far as I understand, nobody reached out to him to say ‘thanks very much, come into the camp, be part of the bigger tent’, because we’re a big tent.

“He wouldn’t have been where he is today. I don’t blame Reform for standing, they’ve got a right to exist. They’ve got a right to try and exploit a vacuum that we’ve created, we should never have allowed that vacuum to create. So, we’ve got to fill that vacuum.

“Now, to me, that doesn’t mean what many of our candidates or Conservative leadership candidates are saying, we’ve all got to be in this sort of centre to win elections. You’ve got plenty of centre, vote for Labour, go for the Lib Dems. There’s plenty of centre out there.

“There were more votes on the right at this General Election. If you add up the Conservative vote, which collapsed, plus Reform equals more than the Labour vote which was a very shallow vote, less votes than they got in 2020.”

He added: “I think the one thing that wasn’t discussed enough in the election was the effect of Covid and that lockdown.

“You can’t give out half a trillion pounds of stuff, whether that’s eat out to help out or support mechanisms for employees and businesses…this is the reason we got high taxes and why we’re in a situation.

“The Ukraine war caused the biggest inflation, nothing from what we did internally. These were external shocks, we didn’t really mention that enough.

“That put us off course, there’s no doubt about that. But if we want to be Conservatives, there’s a Conservative vote out there. It was there in 2019. It was a broad church that swept us to power.

“We should be going back to that and trying to achieve power on the back of, in my view, more of a right of centre than centre approach.”