August 17, 2025 - 5:15pm
In a new attack ad launched today, the Labour Party has attempted to link Nigel Farage with the controversial online influencer Andrew Tate.
The advert highlights comments the Reform UK leader made on the Strike It Big podcast last year, where he described Tate as “an important voice” for young men. Speaking to three male influencers in their twenties, Farage lamented what he saw as a cultural shift against traditional masculinity, saying: “You are all 25, you are all kind of being told you can’t be blokes, you can’t do laddish, fun, bloke things.” He added that masculinity is now viewed as “something we should look down upon, something we should frown upon.”
This is the latest in an emerging pattern of increasingly aggressive — and often bizarre — Labour attacks on the Reform leader. Initially, Keir Starmer’s team brushed Farage off as a mere populist. But as the size of the turquoise wave has grown, Labour has attempted to cast doubt on his patriotic credentials. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister accused Farage of “fawning over Putin”. These supposed Kremlin links were stressed again this week, with Defence Secretary John Healy countering the suggestion that Reform deserves appointments to the House of Lords by stating that the party is full of “Putin apologists”.
Tate and Putin aren’t the only unsavoury figures whom Labour is invoking in a desperate bid to stop the rival party. Just last month, frontbencher Peter Kyle attempted to claim Farage was on the side of sex offenders such as Jimmy Savile, after the Reform leader criticised the Government’s Online Safety Act. Farage has said he won’t respond to the Tate comparison, with a Reform source describing the move as “desperate stuff.”
This is part of Labour’s new “dark arts” strategy. Downing Street has recently formed a dedicated “attack team” targeting Reform UK, under the direction of the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney. Rather than consistently focusing on Farage himself, the unit is expected to concentrate its efforts on figures within his orbit to undermine the party’s credibility through its supporting cast.
But will this strategy work? In the case of today’s attack ad, Tate is a deeply unpopular figure, with nearly half the British population holding a negative view of him. However, a demographic breakdown reveals some striking patterns. Over a quarter of men aged 18-29 hold a positive view of Tate; 41% of black respondents and 31% of Asian respondents view him favourably, compared to just 15% of white respondents. But overall, less than two-thirds of the population have heard of Tate at all.
In doubling down on ad hominem attacks, Labour risks revealing a startling lack of substantive policy alternatives. By fixating on Farage’s tenuous associations with bad men instead of addressing the real-world challenges facing voters, the Government is ceding open ground to Reform on vital issues such as housing, public services and immigration. Negative campaigning without a positive vision seldom wins hearts or minds, and if Farage has emerged from an attempt at association with Putin — a far more unpopular and better known figure than Tate — he is unlikely to be negatively impacted by this latest ad.
If Labour’s aim is to prevent further Reform gains, it will need more than the “dark arts” of comms and strategy. It requires the thing Starmer so conspicuously lacks, and that is answers to the most serious problems Britain faces today.
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