Nigel Farage seems to be everywhere again: striding into rallies to the beat of Eminem, popping up at Maga parties in Washington, hosting a champagne-soaked fundraiser in Mayfair and grinning on the ITV breakfast sofa taunted by a Chinese dragon.
Since July, Reform UK has soared in the polls, threatening the Conservatives and Labour and leaving many backers daring to dream that one day Farage could enter government.
“This is a 1789 or 1917 moment,” says a new Reform donor who claims to be one of many former Tories now battering down Farage’s door to give money. “The ancien régime is going to be swept away and the UK is going to have a political revolution.”
Farage may be the ubiquitous face of Reform, but inside the party he is surrounded by a coterie of men – and they are nearly all men – working to make its hard-right leanings appeal to the British public in the way Americans were drawn to Donald Trump’s politics.
At the helm is Zia Yusuf, the entrepreneur and party chair, while Nick Candy, the billionaire property developer, is in charge of raising funds. George Cottrell, a wealthy friend of Farage and former fraudster, has no official role but is nevertheless “always around”, according to insiders.
Alongside them, a band of digitally savvy gen Z advisers are behind Farage’s phenomenal success on social media, mixing polemic against immigration, net zero and diversity policies with jokey clips of their leader downing pints.
Their collective goal is “professionalisation” while at the same time keeping Farage “fun”. In other words, pushing to make a once shambolic party into a credible electoral force.
Zia the gatekeeper
Reform has moved into Millbank Tower, on the banks of the Thames and minutes from Westminster. Fittingly for a party aspiring to govern, this block was once home to David Cameron’s Tories, and it was where Tony Blair’s Labour plotted its 1997 victory. Yusuf, Reform’s 38-year-old chair, is said to be there “all the time” and Farage also has a desk.
Insiders say that after the 2024 election, Farage delegated almost all operational control of the party to Yusuf, who had emerged as a donor months before. They quickly shut Reform’s HQ in the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch and left a serviced office in London’s Victoria that was considered to be “little more than a meeting room”.
Yusuf, who has known Farage for more than a decade, is said by staffers to have got in touch last spring out of the blue and offered to donate a six-figure sum. Insiders say he appeared ready for the next thing after selling his concierge company, Velocity Black, and making a reported £32m.
Staffers say the former Goldman Sachs executive caused surprise within HQ when he suggested introducing key performance indicators (KPIs) to spur on Reform’s army of canvassers. “It took some of the old guard who’ve been around to point out we were basically talking about older volunteers in the country who were doing this for free,” a source said. But Yusuf appears to have been persuasive about the targets: Reform officials are now subject to KPIs.
Yusuf has helped the party grow from zero official constituency branches to more than 400 across Britain, and he told the Guardian that Reform was building its own tech that he believed would be “decisive” in the next election.
Recalling the first time he met Farage, Yusuf said: “It was very clear that mine and Nigel’s views of the world and our philosophies aligned very, very well.”
Last year Yusuf replaced the Ukip veteran Paul Oakden as Reform chair and set about removing old hands, including Gawain Towler, the party’s communications chief who had been removed and reinstated at least twice before.
Yusuf is now gatekeeper to Farage and at his side for crucial conversations, such as those with defecting politicians. Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative minister and Reform candidate, said: “I tend to feed my thoughts in via Zia, who is very sharp. Nigel is leading the party and has his constituency [too].”
The tribe
Aside from Yusuf, Reform’s engine room features a crew of young male advisers who are instrumental in building Farage’s social media image. He now has more than 1 million TikTok followers and 2.2 million on X – more than Keir Starmer’s 1.8 million and far outstripping Kemi Badenoch’s 300,000.
These staffers are responsible for Farage’s packed rallies from Essex to the north-east of England, which are unlike anything Labour or the Conservatives are doing.
The events typically kick off with high-energy warm-up speeches before Farage, flanked by bodyguards, makes a passage through fans to the sound of Eminem’s Without Me. With the lyrics “Guess who’s back?”, the song was deployed in last year’s election. Insiders say the party “picked it up and ran with it” after supporters used it in online memes.
The team includes a slew of 20-somethings with rightwing media backgrounds, from Aaron Lobo, a former producer at GB News, to Jack Anderton, 24, whose own videos seek to present being anti-immigration as a gen Z priority (“the kids want deportations”).
A nephew of the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has recently been recruited to the communications team: Charles Carlson fields calls from reporters and is a frontline presence at press conferences.
Others now working with the party include Archie Manners, a YouTube creator and prankster whose stunts included arranging a “dick of the year” award for Suella Braverman, the Tory MP most tipped to defect to Reform. Despite many of its senior figures being men, Reform says it also has lots of female employees in its HQ and regional campaign teams.
Once a month many staffers, along with Reform supporters and even some politically adjacent Tories who forged friendships in the Brexit years – known by some as “the tribe” – gather in a Millbank pub to exchange ideas.
‘Professionalisation’
While Farage and Yusuf talk of professionalisation, there is also a sense within Reform that loyalty and common ideology are more important than spotless backgrounds. Yusuf has hired as his chief of staff another former Tory, Matthew MacKinnon, who in 2012 was banned from football grounds under a civil order after pleading guilty to disorder. The ban was lifted two years later, after he made an application to end it.
The party has also stood behind its MPs James McMurdock, after it emerged he was jailed as a teenager for kicking his girlfriend, and Lee Anderson, who was suspended from the Conservative party after suggesting the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, was controlled by Islamists.
Then there is Cottrell, known as “Posh George”, a 31-year-old financier and high-stakes gambler who reportedly lost £16m in a Montenegro casino last year and who served eight months in a US jail for wire fraud, ending in 2017.
No one is clear what Cottrell’s role is within Reform. One friend says he is “personally important to Nigel but not politically important”, describing him as “mercurial” but also “hugely generous”. He was at a swanky fundraiser in Mayfair last month, at Farage’s side when he was “milkshaked” in Clacton, on helicopter trips during the election campaign and on the sidelines of last week’s Reform press conference on the local elections.
Cottrell’s mother, Fiona, has donated £500,000 to Reform and Cottrell funded Farage’s £9,000 trip to a Brussels conference. Tatler reported earlier this year that Cottrell sometimes referred to Farage as “Daddy” and that the Reform leader was “often there, making coffee” at Cottrell’s west London house.
Splits
In contrast to Farage’s embrace of colourful characters within his circle, the party has taken a hard approach to activists deemed to have brought it into disrepute – and a red line appears to be support for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who founded the English Defence League “against the rise of radical Islam”.
This has upset many Reform members, often veterans of its Brexit party and Ukip heritage, who claim to have been purged and are organising what could eventually become a rival party.
Trouble is also brewing after Yusuf’s reorganisation included a message that branches could no longer engage with Ben Habib, the party’s former deputy leader who quit after pushing for members to have more power.
“You certainly can’t work with Ben Habib at all, that decision came directly from Zia,” one member was told by Graham Young, Reform’s national campaign manager, in messages seen by the Guardian. Richard Tice, the deputy leader, told another branch official who queried why Habib couldn’t be a speaker: “Please do what HQ says.” Reform says there was no specific edict against Habib but that non-members are not allowed to come to branch meetings which it says is “normal for all political parties”.
Some of those suspended over support for Robinson believe the real reason is their complaints about a lack of democracy in Reform, which remains a company majority-controlled by Farage. A new constitution voted on by members at last year’s conference was only recently submitted to the Electoral Commission.
The splits could yet cost votes for Reform in target areas. Last week, suspended Reform members from Wales, Sussex and elsewhere gathered in Derbyshire, where 10 councillors broke away from the party weeks earlier. If a rival party is formed, there is speculation it will be led by Habib. The former Brexit party MEP has joined forces with the Conservative peer Daniel Hannan to found GB PAC, which could back independent rivals to take on Reform.
The rebels suspended in Wales include Vicki Roskams, a one-time Reform star who came second in a north Wales seat and is taking the party to tribunal alleging constructive dismissal.
She described a dictatorial approach under Yusuf and suggested Badenoch was right to question whether Reform had 140,000 members. Those members, she claims, included a dog called Maverick in Wales signed up as a “young member”. Reform says it has invited media organisations to inspect IT systems recording the size of its membership, which now exceeds 200,000.
Roskams said: “So many people at grassroots level feel really taken for granted or are being pushed out.” She said she was also acting for people surprised when Reform continued to debit £25 from their accounts after they were suspended. “If they can’t run a party and treat people correctly then how can they run a country?”
The Musk moment
Grassroots tensions over how to treat the extreme right are mirrored among Reform’s five MPs, with Farage caught in the middle. At one end, Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, has said Robinson “deserves credit” for his controversial focus on grooming by gangs of Pakistani-heritage men and described his supporters as “solid British citizens”. At the other, Tice insisted “we want nothing to do with Tommy Robinson” and “all of that lot”.
In the end, Farage came down on the side of Tice, saying Robinson was not welcome in the party – a statement that may have cost a donation of $100m from Elon Musk.
After years of wooing Trump, Farage was riding high after being given a shout-out by the presidential candidate at his eve-of-election rally in November. He later went with Candy, Reform’s chief fundraiser, to meet Musk. But things started to go wrong: the unpredictable billionaire was unhappy with Reform’s anti-Robinson stance, and subsequently posted on X that Farage was not the right man for the job, questioning whether Lowe could replace him.
One Reform official says this was the worst moment he had known for Farage, causing pure panic for 45 minutes before they worked out how to deal with it. In the end, Farage was firm. Reform would have nothing to do with Robinson, even if that meant losing money from Musk, he said, while being careful to not pick a fight with him.
Later, the Reform leader did not make the cut for Trump’s inauguration ceremony, unlike Boris Johnson. Instead, Farage attended a pollster’s party alongside the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, the former Brexit campaign donor Arron Banks, and Christopher Harborne, the crypto and aviation fuel entrepreneur who gave Farage’s Brexit party about £10m in 2019.
Farage shrugged off the episode. But Musk’s support for Lowe helped fuel the idea among some Reform activists that they would prefer a leader more favourable to Robinson.
Farage may have sided with Tice but Reform watchers say the two men are not as close as they once were. Tice kept the party afloat with £1.4m of loans and a skeleton staff after Brexit. But in the end he was told only at the last minute that Farage had decided to take over as leader and stand as an MP, two weeks into the election campaign, after meeting people in Skegness and Ashfield who told him he was “letting the base down”.
Tice is still friendly with Farage, and his allies insist he has not been sidelined. The former leader and MP for Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire is now focused on Westminster politics and some policy, such as opposing the push for net zero. “But he is not in favour as much as Zia,” said one insider.
Two sources said there were some at the heart of Reform who did not trust Tice’s partner, Isabel Oakeshott, the former Sunday Times political editor who turned over Matt Hancock’s lockdown WhatsApp messages to the Daily Telegraph after helping the former health secretary write a book. Oakeshott described these suggestions as “nonsense” and said she was “full square behind everything the party leadership is doing”.
Defections
One-time Tory donors thinking of switching to Reform are delighted by Yusuf’s moves to tighten its operation. A rejection of Robinson also creates a dividing line with the far right and makes alignment with the Tories more possible, if not under Badenoch then under an alternative leader such as Robert Jenrick.
Reform has poached at least two former Conservative staffers – Luigi Murton and Michael Hadwen, who both worked on Jenrick’s leadership campaign – and there have been rumours swirling about plots to bring the Tories and Reform together in a Farage-Jenrick or Farage-Johnson merger, denied vigorously by all sides.
Andrea Jenkyns, the former Tory MP who is running as the Reform candidate for Lincolnshire mayor, said she would like a pact with the Conservatives and claimed Reform has better resources than her old party, including candidate WhatsApp groups with direct access to HQ officials.
“When I first defected, a few former colleagues contacted me but didn’t want to do it at the same time. It’s a big move – your friendship group as well. But I know more want to come over, including a former secretary of state,” she said.
The mooted defections may include Braverman, the former home secretary whose husband, Rael, is in Farage’s circle and attended the party’s fundraiser last month. Associates of Braverman think she will jump but is biding her time to attract maximum attention, such as a bad set of local election results. In the meantime, some in Reform are uncomfortable about having the husband of a Conservative MP so close to the top and wish she would make up her mind.
While Reform has been hampered by the postponement of some local elections in May, Farage is still bullish, suggesting it could eventually be in a position to take a governing role on Essex county council. In the mayoral elections, the party is advertising for candidates, with “no prior experience … necessary”.
Ant Middleton, the former soldier who left Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins show after controversial comments about the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, is tipped as a potential Reform London mayoral candidate. But making headway in the polls requires well-funded campaigns, something Farage did not have under his previous party, Ukip.
Candy the money man
“This is the house that Nick built,” says one Reform insider of the money rolling into the party. Candy, a property developer who owns Britain’s most expensive home (a £150m penthouse at One Hyde Park), is the other linchpin of Reform’s new-look operation and has been persuading Tory donors the party is worth a punt.
He is understood to be eager to fundraise “more in the American way” and is not bashful about asking for cash outright. Along the way, Farage and Candy want to make it “fun” – plans were drawn up for a “Reform Glastonbury” festival at Blenheim Palace, though it appears to have been dropped because of charity laws.
Candy was drawn into the party by his wife, the former Neighbours actor and pop star Holly Valance, who came close to contesting a seat for Reform. Tory donors including Bassim Haidar and Mohamed Amersi, who paid £25,000 a head to attend Reform’s Mayfair fundraiser, where guests supped on Dom Pérignon and Farage aped Trump by singing along to YMCA, have come through his contact book.
Peter Hall, a London-based Australian financier who gave £500,000 to the Tories, told the Guardian he wanted to stand as a Reform MP and had given Farage a copy of Six Degrees, a seminal book warning of the impact of the climate crisis, which they have debated.
“It [Reform] was born of the fringes and it is gradually moving towards the centre,” said Hall, who is sometimes credited with bringing the flat white coffee to Britain and has given Reform £60,000.
Amersi, a controversial figure who gave almost £500,000 to the Conservatives, is considering a switch to Reform too and said he and others may fund a thinktank for the party to prepare for government.
“The Tories have had thinktanks like Policy Exchange and Onwards. This would have financial support and it’s always best to have at least 10 funders. Anything less than that, then it looks like it’s captive – but if it’s diverse and spread out then nobody can control [it],” he said.
Stumbling blocks
One old friend of Farage says they do not believe the Reform leader will stumble now before the next election as he is “pretty much the most experienced politician in Westminster”. But they said of his faults: “It’s the same story: details and patience.”
They also do not believe Farage will be prepared to shift towards the centre or follow the whims of focus groups to win. “He’s actually not a populist,” the friend said, arguing that the Reform leader sought to persuade people to come round to his position, as on Brexit, which for many years was seen as eccentric.
At the same time, some observers think Farage is still too attached to fringe-right hangers-on who could cause future problems over controversial comments or conspiracy theories. Among those at his Mayfair fundraiser was Amanda Eliasch, one of the founding supporters of Turning Point UK, a spin-off from a pro-Trump US youth campaign, whose personal blog contains conspiracy theories about 5G, George Soros and vaccines.
The party is also accepting donations from Jeremy Hosking, the former Tory donor turned funder of the Reclaim party, led by a hard-right figure, Laurence Fox, and supportive of Andrew Bridgen, who lost the Conservative whip over Covid vaccine claims that were criticised as “dangerous”. Hosking said he gave £100,000 to Reform before the last election seeking to encourage it to “engage more in cultural issues”.
Farage himself walks a thin line when it comes to his associations with macho online podcasters and rightwing pundits, using them to build support among young men. In America he was photographed with Conor McGregor, the MMA fighter who lost a civil rape case in Ireland, while Farage has more than once said he can see why young people are drawn to Andrew Tate, the self-styled misogynist influencer.
Then there are his jobs. Since becoming an MP, Farage has made £600,000 from social media activities, his GB News job and a gig flogging gold for a firm called Direct Bullion. In one month, he spent 28 hours recording personalised Cameo video messages for £76 each, making £27,000.
While there is no suggestion he has broken any rules, the amount of time Farage spends on non-political work may ultimately play badly with the electorate, both in his Essex seat and at the next election.
When asked about the professionalisation drive, tensions within Reform and criticisms of the party, a party spokesperson said “hit pieces” on Reform were “unsurprising given that under new management it has surged to be the most popular party in the country”.
They said: “Bad-faith actors attempting to infiltrate Reform will not succeed. Our grassroots strength is illustrated by the remarkable membership growth, Reform has added 100,000 members in 75 days and will shortly become the largest party in the UK.”
All eyes on 2029
“All deliveries via the Big Fat Greek Taverna, please,” says a Reform-branded sign on the door of Farage’s new office in his Clacton constituency, in the side room of a Mediterranean restaurant on the seafront.
During the election, Farage operated from an office block above an amusement arcade, but he vacated the £1,500-a-month space last summer, leaving a landlord angry about late bills, walls painted Reform-turquoise and scattered political detritus.
Farage claims the Essex town appreciates being “put on the map” by his presence, despite frequent trips to the US and various side gigs. Countering criticism that he is rarely there, he has just bought a house in Frinton-on-Sea, an upmarket seaside town within the constituency.
Giles Watling, a former Tory MP, is charitable, saying it is difficult to balance being an MP with being a big public figure. But he says that despite smartening up its act, Reform still does not have enough depth beyond Farage.
“Anyone can just rush in front of an audience in a presidential style and say: ‘Do you believe in Britain? Do you believe in the NHS?’ Everyone says yes. But at the moment Reform doesn’t have the basis, background or detailed policies.”
More policy may be the next step from Reform, which had no manifesto last year, having released instead a “contract” with the electorate. It began by announcing plans last week to impose taxes on the renewable energy sector.
Political analysts are on the fence about whether Reform can break through a ceiling among voters while its MPs continue to hold stances including support for the death penalty and hostility to net zero. Farage’s past attacks on the NHS model and claims Russia was “provoked” on Ukraine hang over him.
Polling from YouGov this week put Reform on 26%, Labour on 25% and the Conservatives on 21%, but showed Starmer holding a firm lead over Farage on who would make the best prime minister; the Reform leader was neck and neck with Badenoch.
Despite the doubts, Rob Ford, a politics professor at Manchester University and co-author of one of the first books to examine the appeal of Farage’s politics, says “there has never been a better window of opportunity for them”.
“What they represent now is a distinctly more credible challenge to the two-party duopoly than the Farage-led parties before,” Ford said. “Britain’s first-past-the-post system mitigates against new parties, but once you can get past a certain point it can really help them to take off. They are now just below the take-off zone, but if they can get to above 25% and 30% then the electoral impact is enormous and could translate into hundreds of seats in the Commons.”
In words that will come as a boost to Reform as it tries to professionalise, and will strike fear into the hearts of those on the mainstream right and left of UK politics, he added: “With this current combination of three parties being in the mid-20s, it is a very unusual sort of electoral weather formation. If you were trying to design a scenario in which a party like Reform overturned the established two-party duopoly, it would look rather like this.”
