Farage is outgunning the Tories. They’re running out of time to get their act together

Nigel Farage holds up a placard saying "100,000 members"
Nigel Farage holds up a placard saying "100,000 members"

The crashing incompetence of Keir Starmer and his Cabinet, like the Conservatives before them, is starting to make Nigel Farage look like a much more serious politician. As with most of the so-called Westminster “elite”, I never used to take my fellow GB News presenter all that seriously, largely because he didn’t seem to either.

With his “Bad Boys of Brexit” schtick, which famously saw him compare then EU president Herman Van Rompuy to a “wet rag”, Farage presented himself as an anti-establishment disruptor, rather than someone actually capable of running the country.

While the jury very much remains out on his boast to me, on Thursday’s Daily T podcast, that he could “possibly” be PM come 2029, his rivals underestimate him at their peril.

They have yet to fully catch on to the threat posed by Farage and his increasingly professionalised Reform Party – but Prof Sir John Curtice, a man who knows a thing or two about Westminster politics, already sees it clearly. As the political scientist wrote this week in the Telegraph, reflecting on how 42 per cent of the electorate voted for someone other than Labour and the Tories on July 4: “The grip of Britain’s two largest parties on the affections of the electorate has never looked weaker.”

At the last general election, one in four Conservative voters backed Reform, fed up with broken Tory promises on tax and immigration, not to mention the party’s obsession with net zero. Their lockdown zealotry hardly helped, nor did the perception that Boris Johnson and his successors failed to capitalise on Brexit.

And now Labour are doing even worse. After four months in which we have witnessed Donorgate, endless broken promises on tax, the Chagos Islands giveaway, the closure of Vauxhall’s Luton plant and the resignation of Cabinet “fraudster”, Louise Haigh, it is Reform, not the Tories, who are on the rise.

The latest compendium of council by-election polling by Britain Elects makes for fascinating reading. Since the general election, Labour has haemorrhaged nearly 10 per cent of its support. But intriguingly, it hasn’t gone to the Tories, who are down 0.3 per cent. Some support has shifted to the Liberal Democrats, up 1.2 per cent (although that may have come from the Greens, down 1.8 per cent), but most appears to have gone to Reform, up 11 per cent.

Farage shrewdly plans to capitalise on this by emulating the late Paddy Ashdown in establishing Reform as a serious local political force to be reckoned with, with well over 300 branches now open across the country. National polling suggests Reform has grown its vote share from 14 to 18 per cent since the general election, with the party now the main opposition to Labour in Wales.

All of which should frighten Starmer, a man whose inability to connect with the common man (and woman) was once summarised to me by a former Red Wall Labour MP, who said his working-class Yorkshire constituents regarded the former Director of Prosecutions as resembling a “Brylcreemed spiv”.

As Andi Peters kindly pointed out to the Prime Minister on ITV’s This Morning on Monday, he is now less popular than Farage, whose approval rating currently stands at 28 per cent to Starmer’s 23 per cent according to Ipsos. (Badenoch is currently tied with Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey on 21 per cent and therefore needs to make rapid progress in the popularity stakes, but we’ll get on to the Tories shortly.)

So it isn’t just a threat to Starmer that Farage is better liked by the public. It’s also problematic that he has a far more extensive social media reach. A little like Trump, but on a much smaller scale, Farage is the only party leader in Britain with an established fan base. He’s just surpassed the one million followers mark on TikTok, half of whom are under 25, and thanks to regular appearances online and on television, he is instantly recognisable.

Whether he’s credible as a prospect for PM remains to be seen, but consider this: of the 34 per cent of a 60 per cent turnout who voted for Labour, the vast majority did so simply because they weren’t the Tories. They wanted the Tories out. Starmer is already alienating Labour voters, right, left and centre. If his bungling continues, which in all likelihood it will, then come 2029 the main motivation for voting will be ABL (Anyone But Labour).

And if the Tories are still seen as damaged goods (and Sir Ed reprises his clown act), who will they support? Many voters said in 2024, “how much worse can Labour be?” We now have our answer.

The scale of incompetence we have witnessed with successive governments since 2010 makes Farage, Tice et al seem a far less risky prospect by contrast. At least some of them have run businesses, unlike most of the Labour front bench. This week Tice, to his credit, questioned why on earth the Ministry of Defence is importing steel from adversaries like China rather than buying British, with steelworks in places such as Port Talbot closing down as production continues to soar in Asia. Reform can credibly attack Labour because it has never been in power (a point that is also the party’s Achilles heel), but the Conservatives’ attacks are awkward.

Badenoch tried to undermine Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions by blaming Labour’s obsession with zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) for the closure of Vauxhall’s Luton plant. But everyone knows it was the Tories who originally came up with many of these economically illiterate targets, in the same way they know the Tories built on Blair and Brown’s open border policy, resulting in net migration soaring to nearly a million in 2022-23.

Just as Starmer should be deeply concerned about the rise of Reform, so too should Badenoch. Her party’s membership could soon be overtaken by the Right-wing challengers. Reform passed the 100,000 member mark around the time Conservative minister Dame Andrea Jenkyns defected to the party, in what feels like the confluence of two symbolic events.

The new Tory leader was right to this week announce a review of “every policy, treaty and part of our legal framework – including the ECHR and the Human Rights Act”. It will take work to persuade the public that they will indeed introduce “a strict numerical cap”, given the failure to deliver on such promises in office.

The one advantage Badenoch has over Farage is that some still regard Reform as David Cameron did Ukip: “Fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. But that tag may only work when ascribed to an amateur outfit.

We are witnessing the reform of Reform – and next May’s local election results will reveal whether Farage really is in a position to mount the biggest political revolution since Brexit.