Farage rising

The leader of Reform UK is an extraordinarily protean politician and more pragmatic than is generally understood.

On a warm day in June last year, I accompanied Nigel Farage as he campaigned for the general election in Clacton, Frinton and Jaywick on the Essex coast. That morning as I drove to Clacton – we had agreed to meet in rooms occupied by Reform UK above an arcade on the seafront – I listened to an interview with Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, in which he described Farage as “morally repugnant”, the standard line of ad hominem abuse that is directed at him by opponents, with ever-diminishing effect.

Farage had only recently replaced Richard Tice as leader of Reform UK, but he sensed momentum was with his anti-system outfit, which was then less a party than a chaotic cult of personality centred on Farage, who was now also presenting a show on GB News. “If I’d had six months of this, this would be very different… [but] we’re making a good start,” he told me. In the event, that good start translated into four million votes but only five MPs at the general election. Yet the foundations were being laid: Reform came second in 97 constituencies (89 won by Labour), and the arrival of Zia Yusuf, a former investment banker, as chairman has since strengthened the party’s organisation and infrastructure.

That day by the sea in Essex, Farage kept saying to me: “Something is going on out there.” What he meant was that the mood in the country was fractious and volatile; this was a month before sustained rioting erupted in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings. He accepted that Labour would win the election comfortably but was equally convinced that many of its traditional supporters felt ignored by the progressive nomenklatura that controlled the party and its proxies. At his victory speech in Clacton, Farage delivered a stark message: “We are coming for Labour voters.” A small trumpet warning for Lucy Powell and co if ever there was one.

Farage has been true to his word. Labour MPs who campaigned in Runcorn in the days before the by-election defeat to Reform were shocked by the contempt voters had for the government. “After a good kicking at elections, the usual and heavily anticipated response from the ruling party is that we are listening. But this isn’t going to wash. Labour needs a reset,” said Jo White, chair of the Red Wall group of Labour MPs, as the recriminations began.

Farage is an extraordinarily protean politician and more pragmatic than is generally understood. The standard view on the left is that Reform profits from despair and it’s true that Farage speaks of “societal decline” but always energetically and jauntily. Consider a typical picture of him: he will be laughing. And there’s nothing gloomy about Reform rallies: an event I recently reported on had the raucous atmosphere of a night at the darts at Ally Pally, with Lee Anderson in the role of in-house stand-up comedian, delivering barbed one-liners about Huw Edwards, Prince Andrew and Ed Miliband.

Having moderated his rhetoric, Farage has closely observed the style and approach of Giorgia Meloni, the post-fascist prime minister of Italy. “She’s disappointed some of her more radical supporters, but you know what she’s done? By becoming a stable prime minister, she’s actually moved the needle on a variety of issues in Italy and made them respectable.”

Farage’s approach is similarly to “make respectable” issues such as Brexit that were once marginal or considered irredeemable. In 2004, ten new countries joined the EU, eight of which were post-communist states, the so-called European A8 (accession eight). The New Labour government – unlike all other EU members apart from Sweden and Ireland – chose not to impose seven-year “transitional controls” restricting freedom of movement from the A8. For Farage, this was the moment to reopen the debate on immigration, which he claimed had been shut down ever since Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 Rivers of Blood speech. Farage is invariably likened to Powell, but he is uncomfortable about the comparison. “Enoch was a brilliant man but somehow the words he used, the analogy he chose, destroyed the debate on immigration for a quarter of a century,” he told me in 2017. “It made it impossible even to talk about it.”

Nowadays, the success of Farage’s campaigning and the abject failure of the Conservatives to reduce mass immigration and control the borders in the years since Brexit have created the conditions for Reform to talk about little else. The needle has been moved.

Comparisons are being made between Reform and the Social Democratic Party, which also threatened to “break the mould” of two-party politics in the early 1980s. Back then, the left was split and Margaret Thatcher ultimately benefited as the Conservatives won landslide victories in 1983 and 1988. This time, both left and right are split. But unlike the SDP, Reform is not entirely new, but merely the latest organised mobilisation of what Farage calls his people’s army.

Farageism is a long-established force in British politics. In different guises he has been organising, agitating, enraging and disrupting for two decades. But these are disturbing new times, and his instincts align with them. And so great is the contempt in which the governing class is held by millions of voters – as Labour MPs discovered in Runcorn – Farage is, preposterous as it may seem, being considered as a serious candidate to be prime minister, not least by himself. “The only thing I’ve been really good at in my life… is my ability to see change,” he told me. “And massive change is coming.”

Keir Starmer also believes change is coming. The question, then, is for whom and what kind. Farage thinks he knows. Quite soon, he said, “the old order ain’t going to be there”.

This appears in the 9-15 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine

[See also: The war to end all peace]