Something doesn’t seem quite right about Nigel Farage. We’re in the backseat of a car parked outside the Rifle Volunteer, and he’s just spent a solid hour in his element: shaking hands, grinning and taking selfies with supporters in Ashfield. Standing on an open-top bus in mustard-coloured trousers, he had announced a six-year plan to make Reform UK the biggest party in the country.
Hidden away from the din of excitement, I ask if he regrets not standing to be an MP. He mumbles something about the Tories shafting him in 2015, about the work he is already doing. And then a pensive silence.
It was, as we now know, scenes like those outside the Rifle Volunteer that prompted Farage to change his mind and stand for election. In his press conference last week, Farage mentioned the weekend he spent first in Skegness and then Ashfield. “Something is happening out there,” he warned. But what exactly? As the election circus pitches its tent in Clacton-on-Sea, a far better yardstick for Reform’s chances nationally — and Labour’s chances of building a dynasty — can be found in Ashfield, the home of Reform’s only current MP.
Squatting between Nottingham and Mansfield, Ashfield was once surrounded by coalfields. These days, it’s Amazon warehouses and quiet industrial estates. There are things called Library Innovation Centres, a planetarium built with Levelling-Up money and streets where people die 10 years younger than the rest of the country. In response to the statement “there is no political party I actually like”, only one constituency was more in agreement.
Come 4 July, it will be a three-way fight. For Reform, it is one of their top-10 targets; for Labour, a chance to prove they can win in a place where people still talk fondly of Boris Johnson. To complicate things, there’s also an independent candidate — Jason Zadrozny — who came second to Lee Anderson, then a Conservative, in 2019. A Brexiteer sympathetic to the 70% who voted Leave in the constituency, Zadrozny is, depending on who you ask, either a “corrupt nonce” or the “best thing that’s happened to Ashfield”.
The crowd gathered to see Farage and Anderson give a taste of Reform’s base in the area. “The red wall,” a Reform strategist tells me, “is not a geographical location but a feeling.” Many here dismiss cliches about the “left-behind”, the “somewheres”, and older disaffected working-class voters. Here middle managers, accountants and dentists rub along with builders and former miners; on age too, first political memories range from Arthur Scargill’s 1984 visit to Nigel Farage’s appearance on I’m a Celebrity. If this group is indeed united by a feeling, it is one of a nation on the brink.
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