For much of the time since Nigel Farage resumed the Reform UK leadership two long years ago, his party has been an island of relative stability in the increasingly rough sea of British politics. While other parties plunged queasily in the polls, messily purged dissidents, argued publicly about their direction and changed leaders, Farage dominated Reform UK and gave impregnably self-assured interviews. The party’s popularity moved steadily upwards, comfortably above that of all the others.
It is a paradox that a new party with wildly expectant members, not many experienced politicians and few properly worked-out policies became the pole around which the country’s political debate revolved, and yet this seemed to do no harm to Reform’s chances of winning the next general election. As with rising rightwing populist parties across the world, Reform’s tendency to make it up as it went along appeared to be not a weakness but, for many voters, much of its appeal. That seems less the case now.
Amid multiple, worsening funding scandals, and with the party openly divided about how to respond to them, this year Reform has lost about a quarter of its support and its poll lead over Labour. There are internal mutterings about the attention-seeking and leadership ambitions of its home affairs spokesperson, the relentlessly abrasive Zia Yusuf, and its Treasury spokesperson, the slippery former Tory Robert Jenrick. Meanwhile, Farage himself, who at 62 is two decades older than them, and has been active in politics for more than 40 years, may be finally losing his composure.
Interviewed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg last weekend, after months of largely and uncharacteristically avoiding journalists, he switched between anger at his enemies, claims to victimhood and unconvincing insouciance: eyes bulging with fury one moment, head bobbing with forced laughter the next. Even by the feverish standards of modern British politics, it was a strange, almost manic performance. What might happen to Reform and our wider politics if the party’s troubles continue and deepen?
The answers may be less reassuring than Reform’s enemies like to think. While the diminishing likelihood of a Reform government is welcome, the party’s crisis could change Reform, and the forces massing further to the right of it – both in parliament and on the streets – in unpredictable and dangerous ways. At the party’s conference last week, the mood felt brittle and volatile.
Whereas speakers insisted that Reform was still a “government in waiting”, and banners, lanyards and speeches relentlessly hyped its potential “first 100 days”, the delegates I spoke to were worried about the party’s slide in the polls and general election chances, Andy Burnham’s assured start as prime minister, and the growing pressure Farage was under. After his speech was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers from the green group Climate Resistance, I overheard two delegates, mild-looking, middle-aged men in suits, discussing the protest. The other said: “Smash ’em in the face!” Another Reform reaction to the party’s difficulties has been to announce ever more extreme, dramatic policies, such as deporting foreign prisoners, possibly to the infamously brutal jails of El Salvador, and deploying the Royal Navy and Royal Marines to intercept and take all small boat migrants back to France, in “the biggest military operation in the English Channel since the second world war”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
