Nigel Farage is in the party-smashing business. Having taken a wrecking ball to the Tories last year, he promptly declared on election night: “We’re coming for Labour, be in no doubt.”
It’s the culmination of a remarkable journey for the Reform UK leader. Twenty years ago, Ukip’s first big surge ended in turmoil when its celebrity recruit and would-be leader, Robert Kilroy Silk, horrified the rest of the party’s higher-ups by saying their mission should be to “kill the Conservative Party”.
Farage’s critique of his then leadership rival was that the former Labour MP not only wanted to smash the Tories, but was pursuing a “left-wing agenda”. As with every other Ukip spat, Farage won.
Obviously Reform UK’s leader has become more fond of orange-faced former television stars in the decades since Kilroy-Silk was defenestrated. But that isn’t all that has changed.
Fast-forward to 2025, and Farage is openly working to outflank a Labour Prime Minister from the left. Having said in 2013 that he was the only politician “keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive”, this year he supported nationalising the steel industry before the Government did.
For months, Reform UK has punched Starmer’s bruise over the winter fuel allowance cuts. No sooner did the Prime Minister tell his worried MPs last week that the Government will water down the policy in the coming months, then Farage went one further, pledging to restore the benefit in full.
Next is the two-child benefit cap, a totemic issue for Labour in opposition, and a sore point now that it is in power. While Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves reportedly wrangle about it behind the scenes, Farage is expected to pledge the cap’s abolition in a speech this week.
This is a story former premiers Theresa May and Lord Cameron will recognise. Government is a sluggish galleon, becalmed by collective responsibility, fiscal rules, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the difficulty of making the books add up – whereas Farage excels at the role of the nippy privateer, outmanoeuvring his opponents with panache. Fire a broadside, and to hell with the balance sheet, because that isn’t his problem.
It’s infuriating for ministers because it’s nigh-on unanswerable. Ignore the Reform leader, and the pain continues; do what he wants, and he will suggest voters may as well elect the real deal, not a half-hearted tribute act. This is a tried and tested approach for the most successful and experienced British political insurgent of the past hundred years.
What’s new is seeing Reform do to Labour from the Left what it and its predecessor parties previously did to the Conservatives from the right-way.
The policy pivot is both a well-researched electoral strategy and the outcome of a long trajectory in Farage’s thinking – if it comes as a surprise to the government and to various commentators, it shouldn’t.
As Gawain Towler, for many years Farage’s closest adviser, wrote (in a tribute to journalist and former Ukip MEP Patrick O’Flynn, who died last week), Reform’s leader has been on a journey when it comes to issues like the NHS where his previous positions might have limited his appeal in Labour heartlands.
Does Labour yet realise how much danger it is in? For many years, it thought of Farage as a useful enemy, stripping the Conservatives of voters whom Labour were less likely to ever win over.
Even now, Starmer’s strategy is said to promote Farage as his “real opponent” – presumably on the basis that doing so deepens Tory suffering while offering Labour someone to rally its voters against.
They are playing with fire. It isn’t just Reform’s rhetorical claim that it is “coming for Labour” – the general and local elections show that it has the ability to do so, and its developing policy platform is carefully targeted to drive the attack home. There is no safe way for Starmer to ensure that Reform appeals in Kent but not in County Durham.
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If you’re part of The Left (with capital letters and the full ideological matching kit), then it might seem baffling that a party of “The Right” could have mass appeal among Labour’s traditional, multi-generational core vote. The theory of intersectionality surely means that supporting higher benefits for those in poverty also means welcoming asylum seekers arriving on small boats and supporting trans self-ID.
Unfortunately for such dogmatists, voters continually refuse to follow the script. It has always been the case that much of what was the Labour core vote is relatively left-wing on economics but right-wing on issues like immigration and border control, law and order and defence.
This is no secret. Vote Leave intentionally chose red as its colour, spoke of controlling our borders and funding the NHS, and won over many millions of Labour voters. Corbynism was routed by Boris Johnson on similar territory, promising to fund new hospitals, hire more police officers and leave the EU.
For both Labour and the Conservatives, it has proved increasingly difficult to hold together electoral coalitions by asking an economically left and socially right electorate to compromise on one set of values or the other.
Farage intends to doom each of the main parties by simply offering the electorate a platform which gives them what they like on both fronts. Starmer wanted him as his “real opponent”; perhaps he should have been careful what he wished for.
Mark Wallace is chief executive of Total Politics Group
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