2 July 2025

We must prepare for Prime Minister Farage

If something is beginning to look inevitable, let’s talk about it.

Sit in the press gallery of the House of Commons, sniff the must of leather and cologne, and let your eyes glaze over at Prime Minister’s Questions. Put aside the individuals, and what you see is one side, the Tories, jeering at the other: higher taxes, rubbish services, dishonesty, failure. And the other jabbing back: in your last 14 years in power – tax rises, rubbish services, dishonesty, failure.

An old two-party political establishment seems stuck, each camp at perpetual war with its too-familiar other, as the country crumbles. Squeezed at the back of the opposition benches sit Nigel Farage and a tiny cluster of Reform MPs. If Keir Starmer fails, something very different is coming.

Talk to informed pollsters, and they will tell you that the likely outcome of the next election is a Reform government. And this is Starmer’s challenge – nobody else’s. A recent pollster’s deep dive into the views of 870,000 tactical voters, plus 1.1 million who identify with the Tories but voted Reform, and then 1.68 million pro-Farage Reform-base voters, searched for a Tory route back to power and concluded… there wasn’t one. Even if Kemi Badenoch won 75 per cent of the solid “always-Reform” base (impossible), she would get a parliamentary majority of just two.

A very senior City figure said to one of Reform’s leaders last week: “You know it’s now yours to lose, don’t you?” Something profound has changed in the political landscape of Britain. But Westminster piously averts its eyes from the bleeding-likely.

Not the Prime Minister: Starmer has elevated Farage into the position of his main opponent. But that is still based on a gut assumption that in the end, “they” will never elect him. This may prove a huge mistake. Internal party polling confirms that the toxicity of Farage is overrated, and falling. Labour is losing voters to its right but at a steady pace, and far fewer than it’s losing to the left. For these reasons, normalising Farage and governing on his territory is not necessarily shrewd.

In Tory world, things are even more confusing. The party leaders don’t accept the reality of numbers showing them heading for a shattering defeat with MPs, at best in the handful of tens. They discover they can’t find candidates in local council seats and are losing heartland councils to Reform. But Tory donors are still shelling out in the desperate hope of that peerage or knighthood in due course, Old Corruption in its modern form; and the right-wing media, agonised and split, hasn’t fully accepted what is happening. Senior Tory writers, including in economics, are now privately advising Reform but are still too nervous to go public.

Is the country ready to take such a gamble? Reform’s leadership looks ahead to a general election taking place when the omni-crisis burns brighter: one senior figure tells me that in three years’ time “the fiscal situation of the nation will be significantly worse than it currently is”. Britain will be on the edge of bankruptcy. That would make “true radicalism” easier.

So it is high time to look reality in the face and think about Reform not as a boats-obsessed irritant, but as a plausible party of government. If something is beginning to look inevitable, let’s talk about it.

The conversation begins with Farage, still regarded by his competitors as a Toby Jug caricature of a populist, pint in one hand, cigarette in the other – entertaining and dangerous but not a serious threat to them. After all, we know him, and in Ukip and the Brexit Party he proved himself a difficult man to work alongside.

Do we know him, though? There was a fascinating moment of public self-reflection in early June after Zia Yusuf had resigned as Reform chairman. Challenged by Tamara Cohen of Sky News about whether the problem was him, Farage initially snapped back about the “media narrative”, talked of people “who thought they were bigger and better than me” and warned that he would never again speak to those who talked behind his back. This was the classic Farage, who was once described to me by a Tory right-winger as a beech tree “because if you look under a beech tree, nothing grows”.

Then he seemed suddenly to catch himself and sharply changed direction, insisting that he understood the question after all: “what I have to do is show that I can put together a broad-based team” and assured the press conference he was trying to do so.

One of those who work closely with him tells me: “Nigel is a different Nigel. He is more thoughtful, more reflective and more determined than ever. He is more serious about the direction of travel.” Another says: “I think he really believes he can be the prime minister in a way that he did not last year, frankly: he feels the weight of that.”

Certainly, the tone of the old Reform leadership, often to be found in a whirl of nicotine at the Marquis of Granby pub by Smith Square or indulging a long lunch at Boisdale in Victoria, has been sobering up.

Policy is central. A committee now reports directly to Reform’s board of directors, and, feeding into that, the party is mopping up private advice from across the centre right, from Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Prosperity Institute, to less familiar organisations such as the Centre for a Better Britain, led by Jonathan Brown, a former Reform CEO, which will focus on fiscal policy and security.

On economics, Reform insiders emphasise that it remains pro free market in its instincts, but it is also worried about social tensions caused by inequality and is committed to dealing with market failure, as with the water companies. “Where you have natural monopolies and the private sector is being bailed out by taxpayers while they pay dividends to the shareholders, clearly something has to be done,” says one.

Zia Yusuf is back, charged with making spending cuts credible and sellable; Richard Tice, focused on monetary issues, has successfully persuaded the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, to meet him to talk about what Reform regards as the Bank’s catastrophic policy failures. Polling of party supporters confirms that immigration is a high priority for them – but it still comes below both the cost of living and the health service.

Military, policing and economic experts are passing policy advice to the new Reform HQ at Millbank Tower – insiders complain there is almost too much of it to handle now. The former cabinet secretary Simon Case has suggested to Whitehall that Reform should be invited to pre-election briefings, and KCs have been brought in to draft legislation, including a Great Repeal Bill, part of the preparation for mass deportation and an effective blockade of the channel. “We are determined not to make the same mistakes – all campaigning and no preparation – that Labour did,” says one senior Reform figure.

On staffing, Aaron Lobo, a former GB News producer, has been appointed chief of operations – effectively, chief of staff – and there is a full press team, run by Ed Sumner and John Gill. This spring’s council elections campaign necessitated building 400 branches and accumulating information on the electoral rolls and absent-voter registrations that the party had never had before. That’s a big jump from last summer’s general election when, according to one insider, “our candidates were almost all paper candidates – it was a ragtag army, to be honest”.

But here it is worth injecting two notes of scepticism. First, any young party would be making similar moves to try to professionalise, and in the end what it says about immigration will define Reform more than economic or social policy. Second, the UK establishment, looking at the polling, would inevitably try to break bread with the upstart.

The next question is about Reform’s road to power. It begins at the ten councils it now controls and where it promises to expose waste and corruption. If Reform can persuade voters they have done a good job in Derbyshire, Durham, Lincolnshire, Kent and the others, then the next step is a Welsh political revolution at the May 2026 elections there. Local authorities, then the Senedd, are seen as the route to credibility for Westminster.

In policy terms, Farage is increasingly interested in the first word of the party slogan, “Family, Community, Country”, and is focusing on child-friendly policies. We should expect to hear much more on crime and community safety as well.

There will be fall-outs ahead. But meanwhile, the lessons for the other parties from the quiet, determined march of Reform UK are very different. To beat Reform, Labour will need much of the centre left to return to the fold, and to acknowledge an opponent targeting less well-off voters with tax cuts, and welfare protections. That is an unfamiliar kind of contest and will need a new tone.

The Tories are in a much worse position. Probably the only senior figure in the party who understands quite what a challenge Reform poses is Robert Jenrick. Any deal between the Conservatives and Reform would only be struck in the last weeks before a general election, very late in the day, by when both parties would have a stronger sense of their power or feebleness. There is a massive strategic problem for the Conservatives: the longer they leave it, if Reform continues its current momentum, the weaker their bargaining hand.

The parliamentary dramas of this summer have been hard to tear our eyes away from. But beyond Westminster, a far bigger story continues to grow.