December 27, 2024 - 7:00am
As late Christmas presents go, it was worth the wait for Nigel Farage, who saw Reform surge past the magic number of 131,680 members on Boxing Day, surpassing the last recorded count of paid-up members of the Conservative Party. “The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world,” he crowed on X.
Reform knew this moment was coming soon, and even had a live membership ticker on its party website to mark the occasion. Farage’s triumphalist and audacious tone matched that of his confident, perhaps even insolent, “newcomer of the year” acceptance speech at the Spectator’s annual awards party in early December: ‘‘We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the First World War,” he said. “Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election.”
While Labour has treated the membership-counter news with dignified disinterest, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch employed her trademark bull-in-a-china-shop approach, accusing Reform of “manipulating” its numbers. “It’s not real. It’s a fake clock coded to tick up automatically,” she posted. Accusing her of being “bitter, upset and angry,” Farage has already fired back a denial, insisting that the numbers are accurate.
Perhaps there is little else for Badenoch to say on a story without a positive angle for the Conservatives. But it demonstrates, again, the core weakness at the heart of both main parties: the inability to sell a clear narrative about how Britain gets back on track. Nobody cares about whether the website code is literally connected to a live membership database — it’s pretty darned clear that the big picture message of “Reform membership is growing rapidly” is true. And that’s all that matters for the story.
So begins the Christmas haunting of not just the Conservative Party, but Labour too. Farage stands before the Westminster establishment as the Ghost of Christmas Future, gesturing pointedly at a pair of political gravestones for the established parties of the centre — should they not change their ways, and reconnect with the electorate, irrelevance beckons.
Labour is in power, but despite improved communications after Morgan McSweeny took over as Downing Street Chief of Staff in early October, it’s still not quite in control of the country’s political narrative. The hardest of the Labour government’s trailed reforms are yet to be pushed through the House of Commons, and the party is yet to publicly build out a robust, well-thought-through story that links together its intentions on planning, growth, and public service reform and improvement.
Wounding Reform will require a much softer approach from both parties that speaks to people’s basal political emotions, rather than arguing by “fact”. It may be unfair, but being founded in 2018, and unbounded by political records, traditions and established influence groups like unions, Reform is free to kick up a narrative fuss — even while the technicalities of governing and implementing policy remain entirely unaddressed.
Reform won’t be challenged on policy just yet. On the way up, what matters is saying how things should be, leaving the details until later. Having set expectations sky high, the open question is whether Farage is suffering from a great deal of pride before a fall. It’s no secret in Westminster that the kind of people that join political parties tend to be a little… unusual.
If Reform does well in the next set of local elections, the influx of oddities will no doubt produce a few off colour quotes. Yet if the party does well in the next set of local elections, it will pose an even bigger problem for Labour and the Conservatives. But for Reform to truly break the Westminster consensus, it will need to prove that its voter ceiling goes well beyond what parties of the populist Right in Britain have yet to achieve — something made much easier on the continent with its more proportional voting systems. Next year will provide the first clues as to whether Reform’s challenge to Labour and the Conservatives can truly match its lofty rhetoric.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe formula for killing off Reform is pretty simple IMO:
*stop mass immigration
*scrap net zero and reduce energy costs
*end budget deficits and massive borrowing
*reduce the crushing chokehold of govt regulation
Unfortunately, Labour and Tories seem incapable or uninterested in doing any of these things.
Indeed but a reform would be a breath of fresh air.
It’d be a breath of something but not fresh air. The lingering smell of B/S much more likely.
You missed out ‘ensure World peace’ JV
That was your favourite Tony Blair’s project.
To be fair to Tone he made a decent start before it all went wrong.
His idea of ensuring ‘World Peace’ was to bomb the crap out of some arabs.
Ah, so at last you are willing to acknowledge that Blair was a disaster for this country. That’s progress of a sort, I suppose. But it makes it kind of odd that you are cheerleading for his mini-me, Starmer, who is already making an even bigger mess – if such a thing is possible.
Blair was a disaster for the world. After his very lucrative years as Middle East Peace Envoy just look round the region and judge how effective he was. A complete failure except in the matter of his bank balance.
I think that may be David Lammy’s forte.
The truly scary thing is all these things are quite doable. It’s not unicorns and lollipops. Tackling the deficit is difficult for sure, but over time it’s more than doable. If they can do it in Argentina, there’s no excuse not to do it in Britain.
Reform won’t do any of it either
*implement Brexit properly and try not to ignore the Referendum
Properly? That Alice in Wonderland fairytale always gets a laugh.
Hadn’t you noticed we are now free to have as many E numbers in our prawn cocktail crisps as we want, and to have as much immigration as we want!
I agree that net zero should be scrapped but I fear that the damage has already been done. Energy-intensive industry is pretty much finished in the UK.
This is from NESO the grid operator’s website;
“In the past, NESO mainly used to take action to manage low voltage but now there are fewer industrial processes and spinning turbines we mainly manage voltage when it is higher than normal.”
On a serious note, what Tories/Reform got to consider is what the world looks like in 2029, and not now. By then Green economy will have moved forward quite a bit (although how much remains to be seen). The danger is they still think they are fighting the July GE.
Possibly, but irrespective of that one cannot have a genuine growth economy without cheap and readily accessible energy. Even if it takes five years to rebuild the industry base again it will never happen without cheap energy. For this reason alone we should consign labour to the dustbin – they clearly understand nothing.
You gotta start somewhere.
“The formula for killing off Reform is pretty simple” – to carry out the party’s policies. I think you’ve just explained their appeal…
Hey steady, we don’t want to kill them off. They’ll top out at 25-30% at best and cripple the deserving Tories in the process. Perfect. And if encourages a realignment/consolidation in the Centre then even more perfect as that’s where Country is.
“the deserving Tories”
There aren’t any. Vote Reform.
A joke is never completely funny until someone misses the irony. I didn’t think this whole Article and comments could make me chuckle more but I was wrong.
I’m just old enough to remember the old Johnny Carson bit where he would put on his pink turban and then take out a card and put it facing out against his head. Ed or the guest would name four things and Johnny would link them in some humerous way. Your bullet pointed recipe for defeating the Reform party calls to my mind several humorous possibilities, such as:
“Name four ways to get kicked out of the Westminster yacht club”
I’m sure you folks across the pond can do better though.
Jeremy Corbyn is suing Nigel Farage, who looks likely to sue Kemi Badenoch. As it did with Boris Johnson, the BBC made Farage famous for a laugh, while the right-wing papers did so because they wanted to be bought by the people who appreciated the joke. With Johnson, it all got horribly out of hand. But with Farage, it is just bad business.
Farage’s excitable supporters thought that he was going to be Prime Minister this year, he himself probably expected 50 or 60 seats for Reform UK, and even the exit poll said 13. Five was so humiliating that there were riots, and the television station that exists to showcase him and Reform is sacking staff or cutting their hours all over the place.
Yet people join Reform specifically to get on GB News, and not without success. But what of the rest? What if Reform really did move to a democratic structure? Imagine the policies, candidates and campaigns that would be chosen by its members. And all because upper-middle-class liberals thought that an off-colour, drunken uncle was funny.
What about including dumping DEI initiatives in the public sector and making it a condition of government grants that recipient organisations do not have DEI programmes in place?
A bit of ‘Blue on Blue’ a proper Xmas present. Long may it continue. They deserve each other.
It will last until 2028, at which point they’ll do a deal and the parasite party will be gone for good. So enjoy it while it lasts.
Which is the parasite party in your view? Or do you follow Talleyrand and opine that ‘We shall see in the morning’?
Labour is the party of the parasite class. Its middle class voters have accumulated almost £2 trillion in unearned property wealth just since the pandemic. More billions are now being poured into the pockets of its clients in the bureaucracy, for whom a new quango has been created almost every day since the election.
Meanwhile the few productive people left – working people, small businesses and farmers – are being squeezed yet again to pay for all this largesse.
One has to laugh HB, having seen Nige tramping yesterday in his tweeds at a Hunt with a bunch of Country toffs. Good for the Golf Club bores, perhaps not so good if he wants to get more than a sizeable pressure group constituent. It also doesn’t surprise that you are enthralled.
You still haven’t explained why Starmer is taxing working people and not your unearned wealth?
Have you never felt even a tiny pang of guilt over accepting all this bunce when many of the people it’s being taken from are going through serious hard times and the impact on the economy as a whole is so disastrous?
Unlike you my friend I was sharing a hammock at Sea, working 4 on/off when in late teens whilst you were at your elite Uni in the US. Your ‘projection’ of guilt is too obvious.
JW, you slung a hammock? That would make you a ‘pensioner’. Still voting Labour?
Oh, now you’re back in the Navy. What happened to your career as an NHS nurse?
You mean to say 4 more similar Xmas presents before the next GE – wonderful. Between them they are going to marvellously do their opponents job for them. It’s a joy to behold.
Cun*
Now that’s not v festive NF is it. Tut tut, even if it made me laugh.
That’s taking flattery way too far.
As I said: enjoy it. Because you really won’t like what comes next.
Don’t be a spoil-sport – we got 4 yrs of Reform vs Tories fun.
Reform’s alleged membership means little, as the connection between party membership and electoral sucess is tenuous. When Labour and the Tories had memberships in the millions they still lost elections.
It’s a fair point UR. In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour had 600k members! What happened then?
The other point worth noting is Reform doesn’t have members in the way Tories do. They can’t vote for the Leader or any policies. Good grief Nige is not going to allow that. Thus they are essentially subscribers. And much like alot of folks here on UnHerd, they won’t get out and knock on doors when it comes to it, so the ‘mobilisation’ benefit probably quite limited.
Corbyn did win more votes than Starmer though
Which is why a nice split on the Right will do nicely
“In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour had 600k members!”
Half of them were ‘Tories for Corbyn’.
If Reform add more members, Labour can import more voters.
That’s undoubtedly the plan
I don’t know what is driving Badenoch to pick a brawl with Farage, but it’s a mistake and she will emerge bruised because she cannot realistically defend her own proposals and actions without explicitly (and I mean that in both the adjective and the noun sense of the word) repudiating her own party’s past, and that simply, is not her.
Badenoch is stuck between a rock and a hard place because fairly or unfairly, as the leader of the opposition she is representative of the failed Tory regimes since 2010 but especially 2019, and whatever she promises she wants to change, won’t have an impact because there is no reason for anyone to believe that the Badenoch iteration of the Conservatives will not break all of its promises just as the previous versions did. She would need to move very significantly to the right of Reform to even get a hearing.
What is driving Badenoch to pick the fight is that she’s a total political amateur entirely out of her depth. The Tories haven’t had a decent leader since Thatcher, but the rot really set in with Cameron. After him there was no way but down for the Tories and the country.
Cameron’s lasting legacy was in the forcing of the Wet/LimpDumb candidates on local Conservative Associations without so much as a by your leave. Just about every new Con MP since his premiership has been a total washout.
Not sure Kemi threw the first punch, but we know she swings back. It’s a glorious ding-dong and long may it last.
Her strategy should be very simple: set a new course based on a clear set of values. If she can take the Conservative party with her on conservative values then she can broadly ignore other parties. Just as Blair, and Starmer later on, had to get rid of as many loony-left as possible she needs to rid her party of those who bow to the ‘progressive’ nonsense of our times.
She could start with allowing the local Associations to choose their own candidates. She might then have a chance of getting an idea what the normal people want from their government (clue: it’s not millions of immigrants, gender-fluid loos or nut zero).
Kemi Badenoch is such a jobber. Gets easily baited into petty squabbles. Always puts her foot in it.
So said the 54k Tory members who voted for her.
Masochists
Indeed. Proven. 87k voted for Mad Liz.
Mad Liz? Why not Mad Rachel? Her budget has had a far more devastating impact than anything Truss did.
We would not be in this ridiculous Sunak/Reeves/Starmer mess if Truss had been allowed to see her policies implemented. We might even have a proper conservative government.
Same Mad Liz who couldn’t hold one of the, previously, safest Tory seats in the Country? I suggest you’re in lonely company UR.
What is sadder is that 20% of tbe electorate voted for labour – but it isn’t hard to rationalise that 1 in 5 people are basically stupid.
1 in 5 people are fully dependent on the state and a large majority take out significantly more than they put in. Many of these people are quite wealthy and have no real need or excuse for pursuing a parasitic lifestyle. Principled people are horrified by this because we know how it will end. But most people don’t care about the eventual consequences so long as they can go on getting something for nothing by voting Labour.
It’s even worse than that. The state directly or indirectly employs about 9m people, and there are a further 9m or so economically inactive (receiving handouts) our of a working population of about 35m. More like 1 in 2.
While you two Einstein’s HB and SE rage at the unfairness of it all, you might want to also think a touch more about how after 14yrs of the Right in power you ended up here. Xmas is a time to reflect after all.
We aren’t raging, we’re reflecting on the inevitable culmination of Wagner’s Law – which has been in operation for many decades; but feel free to obsess about the last fourteen if that makes you feel happy.
This ‘Right’ you talk about is a straw man. The reason that you and everyone you know have been getting richer for the past thirty years whilst the rest of the country is steadily pauperised is Blairism. Nothing changed in 2010.
But you know all this already. Your entire narrative is a self-serving fiction.
Kemi is probably correct about the Reform membership counter but she was wrong to go public. She should have fed the story to a suitable journalist and let it emerge that way.
I doubt she’s “probably correct” about the numbers. NF’s rebuttal was very strong and believable. She’s now got herself into a position where she has to back down or get further into dodgy accusations. Got herself into a bit of a hole for nothing I think.
Agreed. She should have given the facts she knew to a proper journalist and waited for the results of their investigation before making a fool of herself, again.
No, she’s wrong. The site code and is feeding from a perfectly sensible third party membership software platform, so likelihood of funny business almost zero. She is being silly. Ensure brain engaged before opening mouth is advice she should heed.
Reform UK does not have members. They are subscribers to the limited company of a politician who supports the decriminalisation of drugs. 60 per cent of Reform MPs, a higher percentage than Labour, voted in favour of assisted suicide. Of 176 local by-elections since the General Election, real votes cast by the people who never missed an opportunity to vote, Reform has won seven. If it were any threat to anything, then it would not be on the BBC. And Labour had more members than the Conservatives under Jeremy Corbyn, who is not Prime Minister.
Still, Reform’s figures have been augmented by the fact that a subscription costs only £10 per year for those aged under 25. If there is one thing that the Western cultural and political Establishment cannot tolerate, then it is anything with a young male following. Again, ask Corbyn. But this does provide some context to the apparent revival of the idea of lowering the voting age to 16. Some people should be given what they wished for. And that is before the ill will that will be created by digital ID, targeting trade unionists and peace activists at least as much as anyone else. We need a national network of establishments that would never ask for it, and we should boycott any that did.
The issues that concern conservative,small state voters are high levels of taxation, a health service that is inefficient and increasingly difficult to access in a timely fashion ( elective surgery, A and E waiting times, GP appointments), uncontrolled and very expensive immigration, declining infrastructure ( roads, water, railways),a legal apparatus structured to prevent free expression/ speech and the impediments to business growth
Any party that can address these concerns will get my vote.
And maybe of even more concern how the Policies and Philosophy of a ‘Small State’ party got you there? In fact maybe an easier start would be – is there anything better after 14yrs of Right wing Govt?
Yes.
Labour and Tory are Uniparty with different coloured neckties.
I was a member of the Conservative Party for a good few years, I’ve now voted Reform & joined the Party… I’m regarded as “Unusual”? I prefer the description ‘concerned & thoughtful.’ Reform states it will give the majority of voters what they vote for, not too complicated surely, but it seems the other two main parties cannot do this.
Where I live the neighbours get on, BBQs, Xmas, birthday parties etc. Politics is a verboten topic, the growling of a dog behind a locked door. In this respect I too am ‘unusual’. I prefer ‘ahead of the curve’ which can be as bad as behind it. (the curve). I do notice much overt support of Reform in Telegraph and Spectator comments, to such editorial dismay Reform are given grudging column inches. Badenoch’s foolish, I suspect festive fuelled, outburst has trebled pro Reform and bitter Tory backfoot comments. It’s shy Reformers on the doorstep now becoming less shy as that ticker goes up.
Farage has the initiative and the attention that Badenoch lacks. The ultimate failing of the Starmer party is the dearth of talent in its ranks and it’s hard to see how Reform could offer anything better. The Tories lack credibility but have more depth. Farage provides the leadership that might galvanise the Tories, the tragedy is that his mission to destroy them will serve only to split the right vote and give chance for Labour to stay in power. Surely the best outcome is some form of accommodation with the Conservative Party, an organisation that historically has been pragmatic about the need for change and to embrace changing political currents as the basis for survival and success.
Accomodation in that reform will not target any remaining Tory safe seats at the next GE, is the best they can hope for. In all other respects, they are too toxic. As Labour will become in the next couple of years. A bigger question might be, is whose next in the game of impending musical chairs and who will be defecting from where to where?