The British right is up for grabs. As May's local elections approach, the Conservatives face strong competition from Reform UK.

Join the Spectator's assistant editor, Isabel Hardman, for the spectator debate, the fight for the right, on Wednesday, the 29th of April in London.

We will pit the Conservatives represented by Matthew Saeed and Dominic Johnson against Reform UK, represented by Matt Goodwin and Danny Kruger.

To see which party truly represents the future of the right deputy political editor of the spectator, James Heald.

Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming tonight.

The title of our event tonight is The Tory Dilemma. Now, as we all know,

the Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most electorally successful forces in the Western

world, but in 2024, it suffered a devastating electoral defeat, and since then, it has suffered

from the rise of Reform UK. Tonight, we're going to be hearing from a range of different voices,

from those urging a merger or agreement of some kind, some kind of negotiation, to those who are

outright opposed arguing that we can't have an agreement of any kind and that actually the Conservative

Party and Reform are anathema to one another. We're going to hear from Daniel Hannan,

who's a Conservative peer in the House to hear from Daniel Hannan, who's a conservative

peer in the House of Lords, then David Davis, who's a member of the House Commons,

followed by Victoria Atkins, who's the Shadow Farming Minister, and then finally, Paul Goodman,

who's also a Conservative peer and former editor of Conservative Home. But please allow me for

now to introduce our four speakers. Welcome them up on stage. So first up, we'll let Lord Hannan speak. So Daniel, I'll give you about three or four minutes to set your case out and then we'll move. Well, James, thank you very much. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming. It's great that there is so much interest. There's, uh, I can see only one empty seat, which I assume was for Peter Mandelson before he was vetted.

So it's wonderful to see the rest of you here.

And it's great to have such an ekepoise, such a finely balanced audience.

I'm going to argue that the case for an electoral pact, a limited electoral pact where we concentrate only

on the seats that we can win and we don't field candidates in constituencies where we have no chance

is so obvious, is such a no-brainer that if it were not for the human emotions that get in the

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