For his next trick, perhaps Comrade Farage will belt out all the verses of The Red Flag and tell us that his favourite book is The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Brother Nigel has popped up on the government’s left flank by demanding the immediate nationalisation of the steel industry. He’s also expressed a solidarity with trades unionists hitherto undetected in this longtime admirer of Margaret Thatcher.
At an event at a working men’s club in one of the more deprived wards of County Durham, the old fraud even claimed to have a personal affinity with steelworkers because he used to be in the “metals business” himself. This was a disingenuous reference to his time as a trader at the London Metal Exchange, which involved long lunches in the City fuelled with copious quantities of port. Or maybe he was thinking of his gig as a paid “brand ambassador” for a firm that deals in gold bullion.
Many descriptions come to mind when contemplating the leader of Reform UK, but I’m finding it a stretch of the mental elastic to get to working-class hero. Maybe he’s forgotten his recent vote against outlawing fire-and-rehire and his party’s opposition to banning zero-hours contracts.
So what is going on here? With his trademark malevolent grin, he told us exactly what he is up to during an attention-seeking swing through Labour heartlands in the north of England where Reform is hoping to make hefty gains in the local elections. He cackled about “parking their tanks on the lawns of the red wall”, a phrase he’s used before, but not previously with quite such an intensity of intent. The plan makes sense. If he is to advance on his stated ambition to be the next prime minister, it won’t be sufficient to get the better of the Tories in the scrap between the two of them for traditionally rightwing voters. He’s also going to need to garner support from at least some of the voters who backed Labour last July.
The local elections on 1 May will be a first test of whether this strategy has viability. The outcome of these contests are awaited eagerly by Reform, nervily by Labour people anticipating a difficult night, and even more fretfully by the Tories, who are expecting an absolutely diabolical one. Kemi Badenoch is so desperate to depress expectations that she’s warned her party that it could lose “almost every single one” of the more than 900 wards being defended by the Conservatives. Sir Keir Starmer’s party has many fewer seats to lose, but much to fear if there’s evidence that Farageism has the potential to wreck Labour at the next general election as grievously as it hurt the Conservatives at last year’s one.
With both an unpopular government and a floundering official opposition to go at, this is fertile territory for Reform, and the more so because polls suggest its vote share is up about 10 points since the general election. That said, the path towards polling day has been rocky for Reform’s leader. The fat cheque once rumoured to be on its way from his erstwhile “hero” Elon Musk has never materialised. The billionaire has since said Mr Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” and transferred his benedictions to Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth who is now sitting as an independent as a result of a ferociously ugly falling out between him and Mr Farage. Mr Lowe, a wealthy fellow with deep pockets, has just announced that he is going to sue for defamation because of allegations made about him by the Reform leader and his acolytes.
The bromance with Donald Trump has been much vaunted, mainly by Mr Farage himself. That looks to be even more of an electoral liability since the US president ignited the trade war that has unleashed mayhem on global markets. Nige made like a submarine for a while. When he finally surfaced to break his radio silence, he was forced to admit that his buddy in the White House might have blundered just a little bit, putting it down to doing “too much too soon”.
Many Labour people used to be rather complacent about Reform, thinking it to be mainly a menace to the Tories. Now Morgan McSweeney and other Labour strategists are treating it as a serious threat. Sir Keir has been taking the gloves off by calling the Reform leader a danger to the NHS and attacking him for past fawning over Vladimir Putin. Then there is Mr Farage’s unfortunate habit of attracting the repulsive to his ranks. For all his boasts that the party has become much stricter in vetting the characters it allows to be its candidates, a string of them have had to be ditched for making comments so repellent that even Mr Farage couldn’t dismiss them as banter.
Disowned candidates, being a Trump tribute act and internecine warfare. That’s a cocktail you might expect to be toxic to a party’s popularity if the normal rules applied. But it doesn’t seem to be off-putting to Reform supporters. His well-honed talent is for exploiting grievance, and there’s a lot of that about. As Ukip and the Brexit party were before it, Reform is a vehicle for the angry to express their discontent with the quality of their lives and local areas, and to vent their animosity towards Tory and Labour parties that Reform’s leader is adept at painting as two failed faces of a dismal status quo. The tactics are ruthless, but the policies are vacant. He’s promising voters that Reform mayors and councillors will implement a Musk-inspired “British form of Doge” to purge alleged inefficiencies and excesses in council spending, with diversity and equality programmes predictably topping the hitlist. The chainsaw may be coming to your city, county or town hall. Burning it all down Musk-style will not solve, it will deepen, the problems in the areas that Reform is targeting.
The party’s national prospectus is no more plausible. He claims he’ll slash taxes, but starts waffling whenever asked how he would pay for it. Unfunded tax cuts are from the Liz Truss school of fiscal responsibility and economic management. None of which is likely to matter much on 1 May because for those attracted to Farageism, it is not, and never has been, about its credibility as a programme for government. He provides a spittoon for the angry voter to gob their fury into.
The poison between him and Mr Lowe suppurated into public view when the other man made a mocking reference to Reform being a “protest party led by the Messiah”. I’m not with him on the Messiah bit, but the first half is correct. It is precisely because Reform is a protest party that it ought to do extremely well at these elections. Polling suggests that big majorities of voters in the North and the Midlands agree that “Britain is broken” and heading in the wrong direction. For those who feel they were betrayed by the Tories and are now being let down by Labour, Reform offers a boot with which to inflict a kick in the ballots on both the older parties.
In some ways it is a rightwing nationalist version of the Lib Dems, past masters of harvesting protest votes, who are also looking to make chunky gains, concentrated in southern England in their case. Reform hopes to replicate the Lib Dems’ successful model of building a substantial base of councillors and using them as beachheads to go on to capture parliamentary seats in the same localities.
He’s predicting a “turquoise wave” across the North and Midlands. Polling suggests Reform won’t just gain councillors, but also councils and possibly bag a mayoralty in Lincolnshire and another in East Yorkshire. The Runcorn and Helsby byelection, also on May day, ought to be winnable if Reform has as much momentum as Mr Farage claims. On paper, the Cheshire seat is the 16th safest in Labour’s possession, but the concept of “safe” seats has much less relevance these days when the political landscape is so volatile and fragmented. The circumstances that triggered this byelection – the former Labour MP assaulting a constituent – also work in Reform’s favour.
Whatever he may claim, a victorious night for Nigel Farage won’t mean that he is marching on Downing Street. It will mean deeper existential angst in the ranks of the Conservative party and elevated anxiety among Labour people that they haven’t found an answer to the seething mass of grievances that he so cunningly and cynically exploits.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
