In the first half of this year Reform was truly insurgent. By winning the Runcorn by-election, ten councils and two mayoralties, the party confirmed its ascent to the political mainstream. Nigel Farage, who only became an MP on his eighth attempt, began to be viewed as the next prime minister.
But the question now being asked across Westminster is whether Reform has hit a ceiling. Its poll ratings have plateaued around 30 per cent and, in Hamilton and Caerphilly, it has fallen short in two by-elections. “People feared that Reform had the ability to do even better than the polls by attracting those who never vote in elections, so far they’ve shown no ability to do that,” concludes a Starmer aide.
Reform’s best hope of victory is to be seen as the natural choice for voters weary of squeezed living standards, overstretched public services and high immigration. But the party keeps doing things that cast it, rather than the status quo, as the biggest risk. It hosted a man who claimed that Covid vaccines cause cancer at its conference last month. One of its MPs, Sarah Pochin, denounced the number of black and Asian people in adverts (a near-majority of voters view Reform as racist). Another Conservative defector, Danny Kruger, yesterday bracketed support for LGBT rights with support for Hamas while criticising Your Party. The UK is not Trump’s America and politicians of left and right who forget this only marginalise themselves.
But Farage did not advance as far as he has without being aware of such dangers. Over the last month he has made a notable effort to neutralise Reform’s weaknesses. He has disowned the party’s manifesto pledge to cut taxes by £90bn and has declared that he would support shooting down Russian fighter jets that enter Nato airspace. The man who described Liz Truss’s mini-Budget as “the best Conservative budget since 1986” and spoke of his admiration for Vladimir Putin (as a political operator) wants voters to think he is having second thoughts on both counts.
And here’s why some in Labour believe there has been too much wishful thinking in the aftermath of last week’s by-election. “There’s a comforting lesson, which is that we should be tacking left, but Britain is not Caerpilly and the size of Reform’s vote in that seat [36 per cent] is far more significant than Plaid’s,” warns one government source.
In normal times it would be easy to dismiss Reform’s hopes of winning a general election. The party simply has too much baggage, too little experience and is not attracting enough support. But these are not normal times. As Reform plateaus, the Greens are surging, drawing ever closer to surpassing Labour in a poll for the first time.
Unless something changes, the risk for Labour remains of a right-leaning vote consolidated around Farage and a fragmented left-leaning one. The question Keir Starmer’s anxious MPs are asking is less whether Reform has a ceiling, but whether they have a floor.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Abolish the monarchy]
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