Reform party

A year ago, Reform party aides found themselves in a cramped office in Victoria, London, bickering about chairs. ‘There weren’t enough seats to go around,’ recalls a staffer. These days there are no such issues. Leading in the polls and with five MPs in tow, Nigel Farage’s party has moved to Westminster’s Millbank Tower. This 1960s block peering over the Thames is where Tony Blair’s landslide victories were fought for and won; the new tenants are intent on dismantling most of his legacy as they plot a path to 10 Downing Street. Look at any opinion survey and Reform is hard to dismiss. Having won 14 per cent of the

In 1603, James VI managed to do what few thought possible. The self-styled first King of Great Britain succeeded in bringing the ‘auld enemies’ of Scotland and England under one monarch. That union of the crowns is a topic of chatter and inspiration for the British right these days. Admirers of Nigel Farage now talk about the ‘James I model’. The idea is simple: could the two warring tribes of the Conservatives and Reform be brought together under one leader? The next general election may be nearly four years away, but it’s telling that such conversations are already taking place. With every new opinion poll, Conservative MPs grow a little

‘We’ve had enough of living in two-tier Britain,’ bellows Nigel Farage to cheers from an 800-strong crowd at Chester’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, where he is holding court. ‘There is not a single person on that Labour frontbench who’s ever worked in private business,’ the Reform leader declares. ‘So, is it any wonder they’re making such a Horlicks of it?’ Chester is the sixth stop on Farage’s new year tour, which was initially intended to sound a steady drumbeat in the lead-up to May’s local elections. Since those plans were made, however, Labour has announced a devolution shake-up that could allow various councils to delay their elections by a year. ‘It’s

Lying in bed pissed on Boxing Day night, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future, dressed in a grey jacket with a velvet collar, hovering over my pit cackling and in a similar state, alcohol-wise, to myself. It seemed very happy, this ghost. It led me to a graveyard where it pointed, in jubilation, at a headstone which had the words ‘Kemi Badenoch 2024-2026’ on it. ‘You shouldn’t joke about people passing away, Nigel,’ I told this phantom a little sententiously. ‘She’s not actually dead, you idiot,’ replied the wraith, lighting a fag. ‘It’s a metaphor.’ When I awoke 12 hours later, my mobile phone flashed a message

‘It’s like a start-up,’ Kemi Badenoch explains of her new job, as she plumps down on a sofa in the Spectator offices. A month into her tenure as Conservative party leader and she is discovering the upsides to being out of power. ‘Everyone around me in the leader of the opposition office is there because of me – not because they happened to be there when I got there. That changes the dynamic quite a bit.’ ‘What’s a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I don’t think sandwiches are a real food’ She says the ‘biggest difference’ so far between being a secretary of state and leader of the opposition

Arriving on stage to accept ‘Newcomer of the Year’ at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Nigel Farage gave a warning to the Westminster establishment. ‘I’ve got a bit of a shock for you,’ he said. ‘If you think that I and four other people – the newcomers into parliament this year in the general election – were a shock, I’m very sorry but at the next election in 2029 or before, there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label.’ He added: ‘We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war. Politics

A spectre is haunting Wales. Fresh from Reform’s election victories in Westminster, Nigel Farage is turning his attention westwards, to Cardiff Bay. He wants Reform to replace the Tories there as the main challenge to Labour in May 2026, creating a major platform for his party ahead of the 2029 general election. The man plotting the Tories’ downfall in Wales is someone who knows their leader well. Oliver Lewis, Reform’s chief spokesman, worked with Kemi Badenoch at Coutts. ‘She was very aware of the importance of fulfilling duties she felt were important to her,’ he says, carefully, when we speak. To beat his ‘reasonably competent’ old colleague, Lewis stresses an

At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of parliament.  The day after the general election, Reform leader Nigel Farage held his celebratory press conference alongside fellow seat-winners Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe, announcing their new gang of four. Half an hour later, from a Westminster pub, they learned that they would be five – after McMurdock, a supposed ‘paper candidate’, was

Nigel Farage is in some ways a victim of his own success. It was the political threat he posed during the coalition era that more than anything else caused David Cameron to pledge to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership if he won a majority. It is safe to say that without his persistence, we would never have left the European Union. Yet Farage is now politically redundant and what’s so strange about that is that he did it all to himself. When Farage declared that the Brexit ‘war is over’ after the government announced its trade deal with the EU on Christmas Eve, my first thought was that

Right-wing protest politics has just catastrophically over-reached in America, but it is suddenly back in business in Britain. Its dominant figure, Nigel Farage, has a new political start-up and is sounding rather pleased about it. Earlier this week the Electoral Commission finally — after more than eight weeks of humming and hawing — gave him permission to rebrand the mothballed Brexit party as Reform UK. ‘It is excellent news that the Electoral Commission has approved our name change application. The need for Reform in this country is greater than ever,’ tweeted the new Reform UK leader (an unelected post, naturally). Given that the Brexit party has not only been in