How Nigel Farage's Reform seeks power

[This text is part of a series that Observador is publishing on the political earthquakes caused by radical right-wing anti-establishment parties in different Western European countries]

It wasn't Nigel's fault, it was the Conservatives who failed on Brexit. Nigel gave us Brexit and now he's come out of retirement to get us out of this mess.”

Lynn Tuckwell is a retired beautician from Clacton-on-Sea who voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. As the last general election (July 2024) approaches, almost a decade after Brexit, she is feeling disillusioned, she told the New York Times . She felt the Conservative Party had not done enough in recent years and that Labour, led by Keir Starmer, was not up to par. The alternative was a new party with a veteran leader: Nigel Farage’s Reform.

It was in that same 2024 election, and in the constituency where Lynn Tuckwell votes, that Farage achieved something he had tried seven times before and had always failed to do : to be elected to the House of Commons. Nigel Farage campaigned for leaving the European Union when he was leader of UKIP, and then founded the Brexit Party, influencing the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party and earning the title of “spiritual father” of the movement to leave the EU . When he announced his withdrawal from politics in 2021, it seemed that this would be the legacy he would leave for history.

But three years later, Farage changed his mind: he returned to Reform (the new name for the Brexit Party), focused the party on combating immigration, adopted parts of the left's discourse to consolidate the working-class electorate, professionalized the new party and now wants to replace the Conservatives as the greatest force on the right and main opposition to Labour.

This may seem like an overly ambitious goal – after all, UKIP and the Brexit Party have achieved historic results in European elections, but have never gone beyond that. But the signs given by opinion polls and the last elections (legislative and local) are that Reform may have the strength to contest one of the top two places in the next general election , which would represent the end of the “two-party system” in the United Kingdom and the obliteration of the Tories . Reasons why Labour and Conservatives are beginning to see Nigel Farage as a serious challenge.

Social media, dark money and the “normal guy from the pub” vibe: the secrets of Nigel Farage’s explosive comeback

It is no coincidence that Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has recently toughened his stance against immigration and made promises to reduce the number of people entering the country. But the real crossroads are for Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, whose leading members are divided on how to position themselves to combat Farage — and some are even considering an alliance with the anti-establishment party.

What has changed so that, this time, Nigel Farage's third party is achieving a success that the previous ones did not?

One of the reasons lies in the structure itself. The leader himself admits this, having decreed that Reform should “professionalise” itself: “We were not big enough, rich enough, professional enough to properly vet candidates in elections. And that failed us, that amateurism failed us ”, Farage acknowledged about the early days of Reform.

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Reform was initially, like UKIP and the Brexit Party, a homegrown operation, run largely out of the home of Gaiwan Towler, one of Farage’s right-hand men, as Politico reports . At some point, the politician decided to bring in a former investment banker, the Muslim son of Sri Lankan immigrants Zia Yusuf , to both dispel its reputation as a racist and anti-Islamic party and help shape its political force. Yusuf was given the official title of party chairman, but in practice his work is mostly behind the scenes, while Farage takes the stage at rallies — often to the tune of Eminem, with “Guess who’s back?”

Yusuf spends his days at the party headquarters, which is now in Millbank Tower, a skyscraper in the heart of London, on the banks of the Thames, which was once the headquarters of the Conservatives under David Cameron and the Labour Party under Tony Blair, as The Guardian recalls .

Thanks largely to generous donations, the team has grown to include many social media staff. The focus is mainly on TikTok , which is popular with younger voters, and Farage currently dominates the platform: his account has more followers than all the other MPs combined . And the leader is attentive, engaged and receives all the data on every post he makes. “TikTok wants the real deal. It wants factual stuff,” Farage told The Telegraph . But that doesn’t mean he disdains other social networks: “Instagram likes a funny photo, a giggle. Facebook is massive, a lot of Telegraph readers are on there,” he noted.

For Farage, the “professionalization” of Reform involves another key point: the party’s partial moderation, leaving more radical figures like those who once swarmed UKIP and the Brexit Party on the sidelines. “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think like that, because we represent the silent decent majority of this great country,” the leader said.

It is a conscious tactical choice, of which Tommy Robinson is the most glaring example. The far-right activist – who once belonged to the fascist British National Party and is currently serving a prison sentence for contempt of court – was once a member of UKIP. Farage has never liked this association with the hard right, and now, at Reform, he has made it clear that the party must steer clear of Robinson.

The decision even earned him criticism from his former political friend Elon Musk , who called for Farage to be fired as leader over the decision, saying he “doesn’t have what it takes” to succeed politically. Despite his past closeness not only to Musk but also to Trump’s entire MAGA movement, Farage believes it is more advantageous to keep Reform away from assets seen as more toxic. “I have to get rid of a few idiots who were too easy to join,” he told reporters . “We are going to be a non-racist, non-sectarian party.”

The “professionalisation” strategy seems to be paying off, judging by the election results: in the 2024 general elections, Reform won 14% of the vote and elected five MPs (including Farage); this year, it stole an MP from Labour in the Runcorn and Helsby constituency by-election, elected two mayors (Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire) and won more than 650 seats in municipal and parish councils across the country.

“This time is quantitatively and qualitatively different ,” political scientist Tim Bale told the Guardian . “Reform seems to be able to turn its poll numbers into seats. Despite UKIP’s victory in the 2014 European elections, Farage’s parties have not been great in local elections, partly because they don’t have boots on the ground.” Now, with a more professional structure in place, a focus on social media and a firm strategy of removing controversial members, Nigel Farage is achieving unprecedented results.

Nigel Farage has been a part of the British landscape for so many years that for many he had become background noise. But with his election and that of four other colleagues in the last parliamentary elections, that perception has begun to change, as one Labour MP told Politico , recalling the reaction from his party when Farage first entered the House of Commons last July: “It was like Voldemort had walked in.”

There is reason for concern in the Labour ranks, as Reform seems to disprove the old adage that the working class tends to vote left. This was the case in the UK until a tsunami called Brexit appeared, which confused all the electoral trends that had been taken for granted until then. Because of its desire to leave the European Union, in 2019 Labour lost its strongholds in the north of England , the old industrial areas full of workers that formed the so-called “Red Wall”. This was conquered by the Conservatives, at the time led by Boris Johnson, in a historic victory. But there is a very relevant detail about this election: Nigel Farage, focused on the objective of Brexit, decided to stay in the shadows and withdraw his party’s candidates to make life easier for the Tories .

With the definitive break from Brussels complete, the north of England has realigned itself. Many of those who voted for Boris have returned to trusting Labour, contributing to Keir Starmer’s victory. But not all: a portion have decided to back Reform. Now, in the recent local elections on 1 May, the party has won over many of them.

“There is no magical new Reform voter and no new problem for politicians to figure out how to solve. These are the same people who ‘surprised’ us on Brexit, ‘surprised’ us in 2019 and are ‘surprising’ us now,” says former Conservative Party adviser Rachel Wolf. UKIP’s first MEP (and now Reform supporter) Douglas Carswell adds that this is the result of working-class discontent with “the system”: “ These are traditional blue-collar voters, many of whom have historically voted Labour, saying they’re fed up and want to vote for something different,” he told Politico . “It’s a completely justified revolt against the concept of people who have ‘Politics, Philosophy and Economics’ degrees from Oxbridge,” he adds, using the term that combines the prestigious universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The distrust is glaring: 45% of voters say they “almost never” believe that governments put the country’s interests first. According to opinion polls, there are two issues that worry British voters more than any other at the moment: the economy and immigration . And Reform has cleverly abandoned the topic of Brexit and adapted its discourse to respond to these two concerns.

Immigration is no surprise, as it has long been a hot topic for Nigel Farage. In a country that welcomed more than 700,000 migrants last year, many voters see Britons and immigrants competing for access to housing, jobs and healthcare. Farage’s proposal is to ensure that fewer people enter the country than emigrate , and to withdraw the UK from the Convention on Human Rights so that he can carry out mass deportations .

Labour has previously criticised Farage’s proposals on the issue, repeatedly accusing him of xenophobia. But now Starmer is promising reforms : “Every area of ​​the immigration system – work, family, education – will be tightened so that we have more control,” the prime minister promised on 12 May, in a speech criticised by the left for including the phrase “we risk becoming an island of strangers” . Some Labour MPs felt that the Labour leader was evoking the famous “Rivers of Blood” speech by the hardline Conservative Enoch Powell, in which he said that white Britons would become “strangers in their own country” because of immigration.

Starmer does not give up and continues with the strategy that his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, defines as “Blue Labour” — an attempt to pull the Labour Party as far to the centre as possible, perhaps to the right in some points, in order to combat the loss of votes to Reform.

But it is not only on the issue of immigration that Farage's party has overshadowed Starmer. Over the past few months, Reform has advocated more left-wing economic measures, focusing on the need to "reindustrialize" the country. Its leader has even advocated the total nationalization of British Steel , a steel industry company, and the partial nationalization of Thames Water, responsible for water supply and treatment.

The message resonates with the working classes and the unions are beginning to signal discomfort . And Nigel Farage clearly admits his intention: “Reform is parking the tanks on the lawns of the ‘Red Wall’”, he declared in the local election campaign. “We are going to get Labour, make no mistake about it”, he had already warned in the 2024 general elections.

But don’t think that the centre-left is the only party affected by Reform’s rise. In fact, what the local election results have shown is that Nigel Farage’s party is even more lethal to the Conservatives , who have lost more than 670 local authority seats, including in the traditionally Tory south of England. In addition, the party is stealing staff, funders and politicians from the Conservatives – such as Andrea Jenkyns, a former member of Boris Johnson’s government and now a Reform mayor.

The disaster in the local elections, an almost unknown leader and the shadow of Farage. Are the Tories at risk of extinction?

“It’s significant that Reform is sucking in both parties. But they arguably pose a greater existential threat to the Tories ,” Andrew Defty, a political science professor, warned in the Washington Post .

Keir Starmer knows this and uses it as an attack: “The MP for Clacton [Farage] is doing what he always does: eating the Tory Party for breakfast,” the Prime Minister recently declared in the House of Commons. And Nigel Farage not only does not deny it, he goes even further: he says he wants to take the place of the Conservative Party , one of the oldest centre-right forces in Europe.

“What Trump has done is to take the conservative party of America hostage. I would love to try to do the same in this country,” declared the leader of Reform, who has not been shy about admitting that, more than the President of the United States, his model is that of the Canadian Reform Party , which in 1993 contributed to the end of the Progressive Conservatives and ended up dominating the political force that succeeded it, the Conservative Party.

Faced with this threat, British Conservatives are divided over how best to respond. Not surprising in a party that the Economist caricatured as follows : “If an electoral atomic bomb reduced the Conservative Party to two MPs, it would still be deeply divided.”

Officially, leader Kemi Badenoch (who has been in office for just six months) has maintained that the party should not be mixed up with Reform and needs time to forge its own path. But many conservative voices have suggested that the solution could lie in an alliance with Farage — such as Robert Jenrick, Badenoch’s former opponent in the party leadership race, who argues that “the right must be united”. This has already earned him the nickname “Nigel’s finance minister” among some party members .

But Jenrick is not alone in his support of this idea. Mayor Ben Houchen believes there should be “a coalition or some kind of pact” between the two parties; Jacob Rees-Mogg , a former minister under Boris Johnson, believes that without a united right “the door is open” for Labour to perpetuate itself in power; and former minister in Rishi Sunak’s government Suella Braverman says there is “not much difference” between the two parties’ programmes.

These are the ones who advocate an alliance in public. Many Conservatives discuss the idea, others advocate it, but without the audacity to go against the official line in public. “The Tories and Reform should become the CDU/CSU. Tories in the south, Reform in the north,” a former party adviser told The Times , referring to the political force of the German centre-right and its sister party in Bavaria.

Others strongly disagree with the idea. Former Chancellor George Osborne said that “chasing Nigel Farage’s coattails won’t work”; former cabinet minister Robert Goodwill said it would mean letting Farage destroy the party “from within”; and even Boris Johnson himself compared the idea to a “monkey gland transplant or fusion operation” that “doesn’t work”.

Kemi Badenoch’s team has already decided internally that, for now, a further shift to the right will not be the Conservatives’ path . One of the main obstacles is that Nigel Farage, who is currently on a rising trajectory, has no incentive to make a deal. “Our voters hate the Conservative Party. That’s the last thing they want me to do. And, frankly, when I make a deal with someone, I shake their hand, I look them in the eye and I trust them. And I don’t trust them,” said the Reform leader during the local election campaign.

In the short term, the next electoral challenge for Reform will be the elections for the regional parliament in Wales, where the party is already tied with the regional party Plaid Cymru, only behind Labour — the Conservatives appear in an unexciting fourth place in voting intentions.

It is another step in Farage's strategy to establish himself as the main opposition party to Labour and to supplant the Tories and move towards a position in which, in the next legislative elections, he would compete for first place with Labour.

Some within the Conservative Party are warning that a lot could still happen between now and 2029 – not least of which is Farage’s past internal problems with other members of his party. “We don’t want to sound complacent, but there’s still a long way to go until the election and it could be argued that Reform could be reaching its peak,” one MP told the Guardian . “How long until we see the mayor of Lincolnshire taking the party to court?” another party source asked the BBC .

No one can predict with certainty what will happen, but polls show that Britons no longer regard Nigel Farage as the pro-Brexit background noise that has been part of the political landscape for years: 39% think it is likely that the Reform leader will become prime minister. By comparison, just 25% think the same of the Conservative leader.

He himself has made no secret of his ambition. “Brexit was a cause. This is serious now, it’s about taking control of this, ” Nigel Farage told The Times . “I want to win. I want to prove everyone wrong.”