Nigel Farage and his supporters celebrated in the east London borough of Havering this morning, not just delighted, but also with a sense of relief that any worries they had these last few days they might under-perform in these elections had been totally misplaced.
They’ve not only taken control of Havering, but also Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, other councils are likely to follow later, and an influx of well over 1,000 new Reform councillors.
Some critics and experts thought Reform might not match last year’s local election results. They’ve done just as well as May 2025 in fact, with their national share of the vote projected at around 30 per cent, way above the other four main parties – Labour, Conservative, Greens and Lib Dems, battling it out between around 15 to 20 per cent.
On those figures, Nigel Farage would probably become prime minister in 2028 or 2029 with an outright majority.
Yet in the last few days Reform seemed to suffer a wobble over serious controversy surrounding a personal donation of £5m which Farage received just before the general election in 2024 from the crypto currency billionaire Christopher Harborne. It emerged that Farage had failed to declare on the Commons register of interests when he became an MP a few weeks later.
Farage said the donation was for his personal security, having suffered several threats on his life over the years, yet £5m seemed a huge sum just for security. It’s more than most will earn in a lifetime. And it looked especially fishy that Farage has since announced a new policy to relax rules on crypto currency and promote it as an industry.
Reform seemed so worried about this late controversy that, last Sunday, Farage pulled out of a substantial BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg.
Today it’s clear Farage and Reform need not have worried. Voters don’t seem to judge Farage and his party by the same standards of other political figures. He’s what’s known as a Teflon politician – the term coined by former US Democrat senator Pat Schroeder about scandals in the Ronald Reagan White House in the 1980s. Like the famous non-stick frying pan, the dirt never seems to stick.
Farage joins Reagan, Donald Trump and of course Boris Johnson in the Teflon category. Voters judge them by different standards, arguing that these figures are “authentic”, entertaining, and if they have flaws, that shows how they’re “just like us”.
Remarkably, Reform has been top of every national opinion poll since April of last year – almost 300 polls in all. And voters didn’t seem to care that last December one of Teflon Nigel’s closest allies over many years, Nathan Gill – leader of Ukip in Wales, and briefly of Reform there – was jailed for 10 and a half years for accepting bribes to make pro-Russia statements in the European Parliament and in the media favouring Russia’s position on Ukraine. Farage said Gill was one “bad apple”; Reform called Gill’s actions “reprehensible, treasonous and unforgivable”.
Voters seemed unconcerned when The Guardian and Channel 4 reported that when Farage was a schoolboy at Dulwich College in south London he was a racist and antisemitic bully who taunted Jewish boys and sang a horrific song called “Gas ‘Em All”. Farage responded to the allegations that he “never directly racially abused anybody” at Dulwich and said there is a “strong political element” to the allegations emerging now.
And it seems to have made no difference to Reform’s polling figures that Nigel Farage is a long-term friend and admirer of Donald Trump, even though Trump is deeply unpopular in Britain, especially now his war in Iran is causing huge damage to the British economy.
Last May, Reform took control of 11 councils, where their performance has ranged from mediocre to disastrous. None of the 11 Reform councils kept their promises to cut council tax. Instead they all raised it – in Worcestershire by a whopping nine per cent.
And in these councils, Reform made very little progress in making big spending cuts as they’dpromised voters last year. They found substantial cuts weren’t possible as councils had already cut budgets to the bone. More than 60 Reform councillors quit their posts or left the party. In Staffordshire – where Reform just took over Newcastle-under-Lyme Council – the party’s county council leader stepped down over accusations of past racism only to be replaced by another leader who then had to step down because he too was accused of past racist remarks.
Now, with several more councils being run by Reform, the country has more evidence on how Farage’sparty performs in power, and how they might operate if they achieved a majority in the Commons.But again, further personal failings, past racism, broken promises, and alleged corruption may not erode Reform’s core support of around 25-30 per cent of the electorate.
These voters will argue Reform is no worse than other parties in these respects, and yet only Farage has the toughness and strength to make the change Britain needs, and which Labour promised yet failed to deliver.
But I still think it unlikely Nigel Farage will become PM. There was a strong element of protest about this week’s polls – there always is in mid-term local elections.
At the next general election two factors will combine to stop Farage reaching Number 10. First, amid his threadbare and fluctuating economic policies, voters will come to doubt if he’s the right man to handle the economic crisis. Second, can he, the ultimate Brexiteer, bring Europe together amid the threats from Putin and Trump?
And, unlike this week, there will be much more tactical voting at the next election. As we saw in the Caerphilly and Gorton and Denton by-elections, voters will gang up on Farage’s party – as he’s often suffered personally in the past. Constituency by constituency, voters will gather round the candidate best placed to beat the Farage nominee.
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