Had you been wandering around the village of Rocester, Staffordshire, on 10 April, you might have noticed a crowd gathering at the JCB factory. Nigel Farage, draped with the obligatory hi-vis vest, was there to whip up support for Reform UK, which is fielding candidates in all 62 seats on Staffordshire County Council on 1 May. “Reform will fix it,” Farage told the crowd, repeating the party’s slogan for these local elections.
The location was no coincidence. Earlier in April, at a mega-rally in Birmingham, Farage had arrived on stage riding a JCB digger, which he said had been lent to him by the company’s chairman, Lord Bamford. That’s the same Lord Bamford who hosted the wedding of Boris Johnson at his Gloucestershire estate in 2022 and was until very recently a “super donor” of the Conservative Party.
“If I were the Tory treasurer, I’d be shitting myself,” Gawain Towler, former head of press for Reform, told me. Bamford’s new-found support for the party vying to supplant the Tories, just months after the dramatic defection of another Conservative donor, Nick Candy, is cause for worry for anyone with an eye on CCHQ’s depleting funding streams.
If, following the campaign event in Rocester, you had driven (presumably not in a JCB) an hour and a half north to Longdendale, you would have caught the result of the Tameside Borough Council by-election: Allan Hopwood became Reform’s first elected politician in Greater Manchester, winning the seat from Labour in a landslide. The New Statesman’s senior data journalist Ben Walker, co-founder of Britain Elects, said the win was a “real eye-opener. Labour under-performed my model by ten points, Reform over-performed by ten.” The result demonstrates that the party is “doing better in the more built-up bits of England than the polls might suggest”. Walker added: “Astonishing level of apathy among the Labour base is giving Reform its wins on easy mode.”
This is the backdrop for May’s local elections. Reform, once dismissed as a protest party, then seen primarily as a threat to the Conservatives, is positioning itself to take votes off Labour and the Tories alike. It has capitalised on both disappointment with the Labour government and continued fury at the Conservatives. Reform is tied with Labour in the polls, with the Tories a few points behind; all three hover around 20 to 25 per cent. The local elections will be the party’s first big test of how solid these numbers are.
Labour and Tory strategists are watching carefully to see how worried they should be about their parties’ futures. Conservatives are whispering about a pact, or even a merger. Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, is looking at ways to neutralise Reform’s populist appeal – at the expense, some Labour MPs feel, of their party’s traditional voter base. Everyone is trying to work out how serious a force Reform really is. The locals will also test the extent recent scandals – from dodgy candidates to Farage’s ties to Trump – have damaged the party’s prospects. The question at the heart of it all: can Reform grow up?
When Nigel Farage founded the Brexit Party in January 2019, Britain’s electoral landscape looked very different. Theresa May was prime minister and the Tories were tearing themselves apart over Brexit. Farage’s new party raced to victory in the European elections that May, winning 29 MEPs; the Conservatives won four. The next day, May announced her resignation, clearing the way for Boris Johnson. The Brexit Party, later renamed Reform UK, stood aside in Tory-held seats in that year’s general election, and Johnson went on to win a huge majority. “We did it on the basis that the Tories could do Brexit properly and run the country properly,” Richard Tice, then Reform’s leader, now deputy leader and MP for Boston and Skegness, told me in 2023.
After a few years of disappointing performances in local elections, last year Reform shot to the top of the news agenda as the Conservatives began to implode. First, the Telegraph ran an explosive poll suggesting imminent electoral wipeout for the Tories, with Reform potentially pivotal in 96 losses. Then, the outspoken MP Lee Anderson was suspended from the Tories and defected to Reform, becoming the party’s first ever MP. But the decisive moment in the Reform ascendancy came when Farage, who had supposedly retired from politics three years earlier, announced he was returning to lead Reform’s general election campaign and stand as an MP. His party ended up with just five MPs, but came second in 98 seats, and won 14.3 per cent of the vote share. Joe Twyman, director of Deltapoll, estimates that, without Reform, the Conservatives would have won at least 50 more MPs.
Since then, Reform has taken every opportunity to present itself as the de facto opposition. In December, the party’s membership numbers overtook that of the Tories. It has lured over several Conservative defectors, most notably the former Tory minister Andrea Jenkyns, who is running to be mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. (A win would send a powerful message to disillusioned Tories that there is a future for them with Reform.) Labour estimates that more than 60 Reform council candidates were previously Conservatives. Reform’s candidate for the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, Sarah Pochin, is also a Tory defector.
“It is a party that really wants to change the country,” I was told by one Reform insider, explaining their decision to switch allegiances from the Conservatives. This, they argued, was the “profound difference” between Reform and the Tory party, which “lacks authenticity” and is so focused on triangulating to win votes that it stands for little else. “It’s become a vote-winning machine, but because it only thinks about vote-winning it can’t win votes.”
The failure of the Tories to regain ground since the election, despite the travails of the Labour government, has reignited calls inside the party to “unite the right” and do some kind of deal with Reform, as it did with its precursor in 2019. Having once said this was “for the birds”, Kemi Badenoch has warmed to the idea, suggesting there could be “various coalitions” within councils after 1 May. Tory MP Esther McVey went further in leaked comments, proposing a “pact” whereby the parties agree not to stand against one another in certain seats. Others have privately mooted a more official merger, under a different leader to Badenoch.
Whatever form a deal might take, the prospect is hard to stomach for many Tories, given the damage Reform has inflicted on them and Farage’s open desire to destroy – or, at the very least, fundamentally reshape – their party. The suggestion is also being robustly shunned by Reform. Jenkyns told me that while she’d supported the idea as a Conservative, “now I’m on the inside, and we see all this polling, I don’t think we need to”. Towler agreed a merger was “a non-starter – the Tories have had their chance”, while Tice called it “nonsense… only being peddled by desperate Tories who fear losing their seats”.
It’s necessary to treat such rejections with scepticism. It is not in Reform’s interests to look too open to a deal until one is actually on the table. Several Tory strategists I spoke to expected Farage to be “opportunistic” were the offer of an actual merger to arise.
Yet those desperate to simply combine Reform and Tory votes to unite the fractured right might themselves be misguided. Reform’s appeal is not that it is a more radical, right-wing version of the Tories; it is that the Conservative Party is unsalvageable. Just as uniting with Reform risks repelling moderate voters from the Tories, so uniting with the Tories risks diluting Reform’s anti-establishment message.
And the Conservatives are only half the Reform story. It is true that these local elections are the Tories’ to lose: in 2021, when the council seats up for election were last contested, the party was enjoying the height of Boris Johnson’s popularity and won 66 per cent of all seats. Whatever happens on 1 May, the outcome will be worse for Badenoch than Starmer. But, as evidenced by the Longdendale by-election, Reform is a threat to Labour, too.
Of the 15 council seats Reform has won since the general election, seven have been from Labour. One Labour strategist suggested Reform are not trying to win over Labour voters outright, but consolidate their support from former Tories in Labour areas, solidifying the message that they are the default opposition. But there is no denying that the swift fall in the government’s popularity has galvanised Reform. The party hopes to make gains in the Labour strongholds of Durham (where Farage recently told an audience at a working man’s club, “We are the party of working people”) and Doncaster (Ed Miliband’s constituency). Victory there would turbocharge Reform’s anti-net-zero message. As Towler put it to me, “What was a pox on the Tory house has become a pox on both their houses.”
While the Tories have the most to lose in terms of councillors, one contest that has Labour worried is the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. Labour’s Mike Amesbury, who was forced to resign as an MP after being convicted for assaulting a constituent, won the seat in July with 52.9 per cent of the vote. Reform came a distant second with 18.1 per cent. On paper, it is Labour’s 49th safest seat, yet according the bookies, Reform is the favourite. As in the council and mayoral contests, Reform is running a national-focused campaign; Farage looms large on the leaflets. “The Conservatives have failed us, the Labour administration is failing us,” was Sarah Pochin’s message at a recent campaign event. She was joined by Farage himself, who flagged his credentials as the party leader who “best represents working people”.
“Even if we don’t pull it off,” Towler said, “we can point to it as: ‘Vote Tory, get Labour.’ It’s a win-win for us.”
Even if Reform wins big on 1 May, there remain doubts over its ability to govern. There have once again been alarming failures in candidate selection ahead of the locals. On social media, one candidate said Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance “want stringing up” and praised a golliwog toy she owned. One called Elizabeth II a “scrounger”; another hailed the child sex abuser Jimmy Savile as “a working-class hero”.
Equally embarrassing is the scandal over Rupert Lowe, who criticised Farage’s leadership and soon found himself suspended, accused of bullying staff. Legal proceedings are under way, and Reform’s parliamentary cohort is down by 20 per cent. Lowe and Farage’s fallout deepened a schism within the Reform movement between the leader’s supporters and those – like former deputy leader Ben Habib – who think the party risks becoming “the Nigel dog-and-pony show”. But if mainstream Westminster was hoping this bust-up would prove Reform is too busy fighting itself to be a serious force in politics, the damage seems limited. “It hasn’t had the impact I was expecting,” Towler said, describing the mood in the party post-Lowe as “sullen determination”.
Suspending Lowe had the serendipitous bonus of distancing Reform from Elon Musk, who had reportedly been mulling a mega donation to the party before falling out with Farage over the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson and suggesting Lowe might make an effective alternative leader.
Farage’s hardline stance that Robinson is not welcome in Reform might split the party membership, but it is crucial, I was told by a source close to the leadership, to prevent the party from becoming toxic. Farage, they said, has learned from his time leading Ukip and is keeping a tight grip on membership, knowing “democratising the party runs the risk of letting the loonies and the fruitcakes take over”.
Farage’s closeness with Donald Trump and admiration for Vladimir Putin remain a liability: his popularity slipped following the explosive meeting between Trump and Zelensky. Both Labour and the Tories have tried to use this to their advantage, with Priti Patel (once filmed at a Conservative Party conference dancing to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” with Farage) calling her former friend’s stance on Ukraine “morally wrong”.
As far as one Tory-Reform switcher is concerned, the party’s teething troubles do not amount to insurmountable weaknesses. “There’s a lot of personal rivalry, there’s a lot of ego, there’s a lot of naivety, there’s not as much political professionalism as there needs to be,” they admitted. “But they are fundamentally driven by what people should come into politics for, which is to improve the country.”
Others will look at the rhetoric coming from various Reform figures – conspiracy theories, attacks on mainstream politicians, dog whistles about diversity, a relentless focus on immigration both legal and illegal – and come to a different conclusion. But there is no guarantee that Reform will implode under the weight of its own contradictions as Ukip did. Farage has learned from past mistakes. He is no longer drawing votes exclusively from the right-wing fringes – and the local elections are step one to taking Reform mainstream.
[See also: Pope Francis’s divided house]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer