Alongside party chair Zia Yusuf, Farage has been relentlessly trying to tighten up all areas of Reform’s operations, from candidate vetting to fundraising, communications to campaigning. The pair have succeeded: their party is a much more professional outfit than it was even at the time of last year’s general election, when it won 14 per cent of the vote.
Now, an interview with Reform’s candidate in one of the four key regional mayoral elections taking place this week has again raised questions about the party’s ability to actually hold power itself, rather than just criticise those who do.
It is the sort of jocular interview you might expect from a comic protest candidate – a Lord Buckethead or a Count Binface – rather than someone campaigning to represent one million people on behalf of what polls suggest is currently the UK’s currently most popular political party.
And yet the chances are high that this circus may soon be coming to a town near you. Despite its ongoing problems, Reform is on the march. None of the barbs being fired from opponents on the outside and critics within seem to be hitting their mark. Its support has continued to rise: one in four voters now say they would back it. If a general election were held tomorrow, Reform would have more MPs than Labour or the Conservatives. The prospects of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister have rapidly changed from outlandish to very real.
They might be in for a shock. Those who insist that Reform’s surge is nothing more than a mid-term protest vote, or is just a temporary outburst of anger about current levels of immigration, show how little they understand what is happening outside the confines of SW1.
For years, Westminster politicians have seemed hopelessly out of touch with what is happening. They boasted about their miniscule successes, ignored the much bigger failures, and squabbled over whether global events or domestic policies were more to blame for the countries’ woes. And as they did so, wages fell, housing costs soared, high streets shops were boarded up, communities fragmented, trains failed to turn up, bins weren’t emptied, many people’s jobs became ever more meaningless and insecure, young people saw their futures disappear and net migration hit record highs.
That national mood handed the Tories their worst ever defeat last July and gave Labour a historic majority, despite a widespread lack of enthusiasm about its offering. Sir Keir Starmer’s team grasped the loud clamour for change. They campaigned on it and were elected on it. Actually delivering it has proved to be far more difficult.
Voters see this and are rapidly losing hope that Labour has what it takes to stop the rot. It is not that there has been no improvement (although few currently feel it) – it is that the scale of what is being done is so vastly outweighed by the scale of what needs doing. The public is not in the mood for gradual improvement; after so many failures, and with so much seemingly broken, they want transformation rather than slow transition.
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Read MoreMillions of people have lost faith that the normal way of doing politics will deliver the change they want. In these febrile times, perhaps the chaos and controversy around Reform UK actually burnishes their anti-establishment credentials and makes clear the contrast with other parties. Brits love an underdog – even a scruffy, rather shambolic one.
It is possible that the Tory and Labour optimists will be proven right: Reform’s emergence may indeed be a fleeting moment in time, worthy of a mere footnote in the history books. But from all the evidence I see, it looks far more likely that we are currently witnessing the crumbling of a century-old, two-party Westminster order, and a permanent transformation of Britain’s political landscape.
Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is a former Westminster editor
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