The Makerfield by-election turned into a “Breakerfield” outcome for Sir Keir Starmer’s ebbing premiership. While Labour struggles to execute a bloodless coup to replace the PM however, another party is under growing pressure.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK had a poor result in the south Wigan seat: its ebullient leader admitted over the weekend that frustration with Starmer drove the “emphatic” victory of Andy Burnham. The local Reform candidate, Robert Kenyon, however, finished more than 9,000 votes behind him.
Kenyon was an inexperienced, uncharismatic choice and there was only so far to run on his reputation as a down-to-earth, local plumber. But this also revealed a problem which is exercising Reform strategists – why is candidate selection going wrong? It failed also in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, where the choice of the earnest, former academic Matthew Goodwin was a luckless fit.
One way or the other, Reform is not on a winning streak. It is also seeing a trickle of re-defections to the Tories, recently in the Medway – a prime target. The Farage army also lost votes to Restore Britain, whose entire existence is down to a breakdown in relations between two dominant characters – Farage and Rupert Lowe – over internal turf wars.
It is easy to explain away defeats, as Farage and deputy leader Richard Tice have done in the last few days, by citing the “wrong-seat-at-the-wrong-time” kind of defence. As Chris Waddle wryly observed when he missed a fatal shot during the 1990 World Cup, it was “10 metres away from being a perfect penalty”.
The excuses disguise deeper problems. To put it bluntly, the path to Farage winning power in No 10 looks strewn with obstacles.
A Burnham premiership presents a stiffer challenge to Farage’s plans to “break the mould” of British politics and sweep to No 10. One reason Starmer kept losing momentum against Reform, as the local elections in May revealed at scale, was that the PM could not articulate the contest between centrist Labour and Reform and its huge implications.
Now that Burnham has the patina of “Reform-slayer” in Makerfield, he can take that fight more aggressively to his foes on the right, pitching it as a choice between decency and extremism. The party’s anti-Reform strategy is to turn elections – local and, finally, nationally – into a race between Labour and Reform.
Besides a thin elections season, Reform has internal tensions smouldering. However dismissive liberal Britain has been on Farage, he has had an extraordinary record of breakthroughs – from forcing through the EU referendum 10 years ago to breaking the traditional two-party system and enthusing voters with energising rallies and his relentless persona.
This has largely rested on his maverick appeal – and ability to define himself as an outsider telling truth to establishment power. Be it on immigration, “woke” excesses or defence of Brexit against a tide of “Breget”, he makes Rejoiners scared of putting that to the test.
The absolute dominance of Farage in his party, however, can lead to blind spots. Explanations for the £5m donation of the crypto titan Christopher Harborne have been shifty – and that has caused more damage than the party readily admits.
Having first described the sizable amount as a “gift” with no strings attached, to pay for Farage’s personal security, the odd explanation shifted to a reward backing Brexit. Even if did not directly fund Farage’s property portfolio, as he has stated, it did enhance his personal finances – and has exposed him to a parliamentary standards probe.
From a peak of the high 20 percentage points, at the start of the year to around 24 in the latest YouGov poll just five points ahead of Labour, this year has seen a clear falling away of Reform support. Focus groups identify uncertainty about opaque dealings with mega-donors and cryptocurrency enthusiasm as an area of unease.
Strategically, there is division in the Millbank tower HQ as to how far the party can – and should – absorb disaffected Tories. The arrival of Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister floor-crosser from the Conservatives, given the role of “shadow” Reform Treasury spokesman as a reward for his transition, threw a sleek cat among scrappy Reform pigeons. Zia Yusuf, the Reform UK’s spokesperson for home affairs, has made clear that the party has enough Tory refugees for his taste.
Three weeks ago, Jenrick’s comments that Reform would not remove foreign nationals living in social housing on the grounds that their income did not mean they were reliant on some form of benefits assistance was slapped down by Yusuf as “not party policy”. He has insisted that a Reform government should deport immigrants who are living “at the taxpayers’ expense” from mainly council-owned properties.
Jenrick was right to suggest that he deems this excessive and impractical. But challenging Yusuf is a dangerous game. He resigned in summer 2025 and had to be wooed back to a senior job. Farage once said that his rebarbative Scottish colleague was “one to watch”, praising his planning skills and zest and describing him to me in glowing terms as “the future of our party”.
The blandishments, however, followed a massive bust-up over a new Reform MP (Sarah Pochin) calling for a burka ban that Yusuf, who grew up in a Muslim family, said was “dumb”. Testy dealings with his colleagues are notorious – as one puts it: “It is quite something to be called ‘intemperate’ by Nigel!”
On that occasion, Yusuf was on the more moderate side of a culture war argument and did not want to follow Restore on a burka edict. More often, he believes that the way to recapture votes from the even-righter party is to be less ambiguous on issues like alleged “two tier” policing and differential handling of white and other ethnicities by public authorities.
Many Reform-leaning voters go along with this, while some are simply disaffected Labour and Tory voters; wary of the racial politics card being too overtly played. It also highlights that Reform runs to a large degree on divisions and resentments. And that leaves a wider vagueness about its plans to run public services and revive UK growth.
For all its influence in the public debate, it is a force that needs to put on electoral weight to have a chance of entering No 10. Either that, or start to work towards some agreement with the Conservatives it disdains. And that would set off another massive “fight on the right”. One way or the other, the Farage army has hit a stalemate. Good news for a Labour successor – a headache for the Farage clan.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s and an executive editor at POLITICO
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