A year ago, the UK's Reform Party was more of a nuisance than a threat. It was a right-wing populist outfit that Labour appeared content to see severely damage the Conservatives' hopes of retaining power.
That is not quite the ruling party's point of view today. A force has been unleashed in British politics that is growing in power, with the potential to dominate the agenda in Westminster.
Its sails are billowing from the populist gale blowing across Europe and America as well as the plunging faith of the British electorate in traditional parties.
The party is also led by arguably the country’s most eye-catching politician, Nigel Farage. His popularity among young and old has yet to sink substantially since it increased by 20 points following his appearance on UK reality TV show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, where he spent three weeks in the Australian jungle.
That was, Reform insiders told The National, a “calculated risk” with Farage having to contend with suffering forfeits or “Bushtucker Trials” of eating bugs and spiders, but it also revealed a robust streak that saw him finish third.
Third place is also where Reform finished in the general election, winning an astonishing 4.1 million votes (14.3 per cent) but, due to the quirks of Britain’s first-past-the-post system in which the winner takes all, only won five seats. That electoral oddity was further demonstrated by the Liberal Democrats receiving 600,000 fewer votes than Reform yet winning 72 seats.
Yet if Reform were to increase its current polling (around 22 per cent) by eight points it would become the first party outside the Conservatives and Labour to rule Britain in more than a century, with Mr Farage as prime minister.
Chummy Nigel
That the slug-eating, chummy ex-metals broker and architect of Brexit could take power is viewed by some with incredulity. Others are less disbelieving.
“There are those who naively think that Reform could affect the Tory vote more than Labour,” said one of Labour’s major thinkers, Jon Cruddas, a former MP and party historian. “A more reasoned analysis is that Reform has passed the tipping point when it becomes hugely dangerous for Labour, bleeding away voters in the north, Midlands and other more marginal seats.”
The current fragmentation of the British electorate and its voting system now means that a small shift in the many floating voters' views could have a dramatic impact.
That is why Reform is taking preparation for government seriously, opening 400 political branches across Britain in readiness for May’s local elections.
More than any other party it is also spending considerable time and money on vetting the hundreds of local and national candidates. With a string of former Reform contenders having been found on social media expressing Islamophobic or anti-Semitic views, the party is anxious to avoid repeat embarrassments.
The Tories
While Mr Cruddas highlights a “split” in Labour thinking on how to handle Reform, there is a fissure among Conservatives.
The question for the Tories is do they move substantially more to the right, particularly on immigration, to steal Reform’s ground or become more centrist to get back the voters who defected either to the Lib Dems, Greens or Labour?
In the first instance they should not panic, said Tobias Ellwood, the former Conservative defence and foreign minister who lost his Bournemouth seat to Labour in the last election.
“There's an awful lot of settling that needs to take place, with so much that can happen over the next four years with Trump,” he added. “By then American isolationism and populism could have run its course and either succeeded or taken us into a very dangerous and more volatile world.”
He suggested that “jumping into bed with Farage” would alienate too many moderate voters “at a time when the moderate vote is up for grabs”. He also argued that he lost his seat “not because I was not right-wing enough” but because people were fed up with 14 years of Conservative rule.
However, David Jones, a former cabinet minister and Brexiteer on the right wing of the party, argued that the Tories had been “hovering around the centre for far too long” and that’s why so many had deserted.
Reform was significantly helped by Mr Farage who, like Boris Johnson, “injected that element of colour into politics” rather than the “more vanilla” technocrat Prime Minister Keir Starmer and current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.
“You mustn't understate the importance of Nigel Farage’s electoral appeal,” Mr Jones added. But Mr Ellwood countered that the Tories “drifting to the right means that you're not answering hard policy questions” and would not “create the solutions in difficult times that Britain wants to hear now”.
The Conservatives needed to for now have “measured heads”, evolve strong economic policies and let Reform demonstrate whether they can govern.
Election test
And that opportunity might come as soon as May with local elections in which Reform – if it is to become a serious political force – will hope to pick up several hundred, if not thousands, of council seats (Britain has more than 18,000) from its current total of 50.
But once in power, Mr Ellwood believes Reform’s inexperienced or incompetent politicians will fail. “These Reform individuals are not the business gurus with experience to run local government and governing is tough, as Labour has just discovered,” he said.
The next test will be the 2026 election for the 60 seats of the Welsh Senedd assembly, which, for the first time, will be entirely proportional representation, providing Reform with the greatest opportunity to demonstrate its electoral prowess.
“If Reform do well in the Welsh elections, they will have every cause to believe that they'll do extremely well in the next general election,” said Mr Jones.
It would also be a “crunch moment” for the Conservatives to decide whether it’s “steady as she goes or that right is the right approach,” he added.
Members growing
Meanwhile, at Reform headquarters, they are chipper at the political pain and panic inflicted on their rivals and the prospect of power.
“It has been an extraordinary six months,” a senior party insider told The National. Party membership, costing £25 per person, has leapt from 30,000 before the election to 136,000.
While the budget is not huge, more than £3 million from membership alone, they are still able to set up offices and vet candidates and are not relying on Elon Musk’s apparent promise of a $100 million donation.
The once blossoming relationship with Mr Musk has also somewhat degraded after Mr Farage did not applaud the billionaire’s support for jailed far-right rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson.
Indeed, Mr Farage’s refusal to kowtow and delicate handling of the X owner’s suggestion that he should no longer lead Reform has won him plaudits from Conservatives and others.
He also has a formidable campaigning ability, able to rub shoulders with all types, including a thumbs-up relationship with Donald Trump.
“He goes out and engages with real people and is a phenomenal campaigner in a very old-fashioned sense,” said the Reform insider.
“He's a brilliant communicator,” admits the former Labour MP, Mr Cruddas. “He looks to be an antidote to the age of machine or technocratic politicians.”
Reform is, unlike the Conservatives, also very much appealing to the younger generation mainly through clever use of TikTok reels and other social media campaigns.
It believes that Brexit is behind the country, arguing that an 18-year-old at the next election would have been five when the 2016 referendum was held.
The party will also continue to reap the rewards of the huge net migration that the Tories allowed with a surplus of one million entering the country last year alone, something that has caused anger across communities.
“Reform has the ability to get the seats that Boris reached, Labour appears to be in a death spiral over the economy and the Tories have a real problem about whether people will trust them ever again,” the insider said.
Big inroads
All of that makes Mr Cruddas “fervent in the view” it will make “significant inroads” come the 2029 election.
“There’s far too much orthodox thinking that Reform is manageable with the limits to what they can achieve,” he said.
“But if you look at the economic prospects over the next few years, the effects of Trump, the brittleness of the Labour landslide and that we now have huge numbers of marginal seats that create a highly volatile political environment within which Reform could thrive.”
The party may well implode in the coming year – perhaps the British, unlike their European neighbours, will prove that they cannot stomach the populist right wing.
But for now, Reform is preparing for a massive political breakthrough that, with Germany and France seeing far-right surges, could herald a significant shift in the Western European political landscape.
