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Speaking as local election wins poured in from across England for Reform UK on Friday, Nigel Farage was adamant that this was just the start of his journey to become Britain’s next prime minister.
“I am going to transform the landscape of British politics, just like I have in the past,” he told the Financial Times as he proclaimed Reform was the real opposition to Labour. “The Tory party is finished, its 195 year history is drawing to a close.”
On Friday, Reform won its fifth parliamentary seat, taking the safe Labour constituency of Runcorn and Helsby by just six votes, as well as two mayoralties. It now controls seven councils, all won from the Conservatives, and holds more than 400 council seats.
Pointing to big local election wins by the other major challenger party in British politics, the Liberal Democrats, Farage said that the “strength of the Conservative party has always been in Shire England. By the end of the day that won’t exist”.
The test of whether Farage’s confidence turns out to be hubris will come over the next few years, as all five parties in Britain’s increasingly fractured political landscape hone their campaigns ahead of the next general election, expected in 2029.
There are still sizeable obstacles on Farage’s path to power. These include the need to secure more funds to compete with the two major parties in British politics, and the risk that councils led by inexperienced Reform politicians will descend into infighting and ignominy, hurting the party’s nationwide popularity.
Ben Ansell, professor of politics at Oxford university, said he believed there was still only a 10 to 20 per cent chance that Farage would take power at the next election. “It would rely on the Conservatives — the most successful party in British political history — not coming back from the dead,” he said.
The widespread victories suggest the party has not just picked up disgruntled former Conservative voters, but also a sizeable portion of people who voted Labour at last year’s general election.
Steve Akehurst, polling analyst at Persuasion UK, said detailed polls of voting intention for the mayoral elections also showed clearly that Reform was mobilising people who had not voted before.
Several Labour campaigners in northern England, in reference to more than one race, said they believed people who do not usually vote went out to give Labour and the Conservatives a kicking, because Farage had given them a way to do so. This pattern was also particularly pronounced in the 2016 EU referendum, contributing to the vote in favour of Brexit.
Farage now plans to double down on the Lib Dem model by heavily targeting the regions that have shown particular support for Reform, building a loyal coterie of party members and activists ahead of the next general election.
Chris Hopkins, political research director for pollster Savanta, said he had been a sceptic of Reform’s rise until recently but is now convinced that Farage has a plausible path to power. “It does feel like the sky’s the limit for Reform at the moment,” he said.
For decades it was widely believed that Britain’s first-the-past-post electoral system was an obstacle to the rise of smaller parties, maintaining the two-party hegemony of Labour and the Conservatives.
Peter Kellner, former president of the YouGov polling organisation, said it used to be the case that parties would need to secure at least 30 per cent of the vote to reach a tipping point at which it could win an election. But now, he argued, because of the fragmentation of voters and the rise of smaller parties, that figure stands at around 25 per cent. Reform won around 30 per cent of the projected national vote share on Thursday, compared with Labour on 20 per cent.
“Reform no longer suffers from a [first past the post] penalty,” Kellner said, adding that this should “terrify both Labour and the Conservatives”.
Reform is hoping to capitalise on its wins this week to attract more donations to the party — Farage has said he hopes to secure more than £40mn before the next election. “There are new donors coming in and I’d expect after this set of local election results to see a lot more,” Farage told the FT.
Reform raised £280,000 in the final quarter of 2024, the most recent period for which figures are available, compared with the Tories, who raised £2mn, and Labour, who secured £1mn. The party is understood to have raised several million in the first quarter of this year, but still has some way to go to match the roughly £5mn to £10mn other major parties receive outside of election years.
There will now be extensive scrutiny of how Reform uses the executive power it now holds to run local governments and mayoralties across England.
In County Durham, where Reform became the largest group on the council, it was unclear how the party might run an organisation under severe financial pressure. The party’s literature focused on national issues and gave little clue to the party’s plans for local government.
It is also yet to be seen how new Reform councillors — many of whom won their seats promising to implement a version of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency in areas like Lincolnshire and Kent — will be able to identify sufficient savings to keep council tax low in local authorities that have suffered huge financial cuts in recent years and are struggling to contain mounting deficits.
One Tory insider said: “Candidate scandals, media mis-steps and internal rivalries could destabilise the party just as it rises.”
