Nigel Farage and Reform have changed UK politics forever

“They have nowhere else to go”. For generations, that was the smug mantra of self-reassurance uttered by Tory grandees as they promoted some initiative that was a slap in the face to their constituents and supporters, their interests, hopes, ideals and principles. So ingrained was the aversion of Conservative voters to Labour that Tory MPs could confidently implement leftist policies in the entitled expectation that their resentful voters would have no alternative but to return them to office.

That arrogant assumption no longer obtains. The emergence of Reform UK has finally broken the stranglehold of Cameronian metropolitans on the authentically conservative constituency they have so long abused. We have even reached the point where some pollsters are predicting an extinction event for the Conservative party on Thursday; sensible people will believe such an outcome when they see it. However, the fact remains that the Tory party is in dire trouble and has no assured future. What happened? How did we come to this situation? Where did Reform come from?

In the genealogical tradition of the Book of Genesis, UKIP begat the Brexit Party and the Brexit Party begat Reform UK. The midwife at all three begettings was Nigel Farage. By any objective criteria, Farage is the most successful British politician of the 21^st century. His chief objective, for a quarter of a century, when he began his project in a marginalised political party amounting to little more than two men and a dog, was to detach the United Kingdom from the European Union. In the face of mountainous opposition, he persisted, awakening the public to the iniquitous effect on British interests of the EU and gaining so much electoral support as to compel David Cameron to hold a referendum on Brexit.

The subsequent Leave campaign had many effective leaders and campaigners who contributed significantly to the success of the Brexit vote; but they were all crowding through a door that had been opened for them by Nigel Farage. No other name could credibly be fitted into the equation: No Farage, no Brexit. That is why he is so hated by the embittered Remainer rump. No other British politician has any achievements to his credit comparable to those of Farage. A recital of the long line of Tory duds who have occupied Number 10 over the past 14 years illustrates that inferiority: Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. Farage towers above them all.

And yet, as his once scornful, today tremulous, Tory opponents are fond of pointing out, he has never sat in Parliament. They lack the discernment to recognise the ominous corollary to that statement: the fact that the most important events and decisions are increasingly taking place outside Westminster, a sleepy village of outdated opinions and parish-pump preoccupations, isolated from the rest of the country. That claustrophobic environment anaesthetised the Conservatives into importing millions of immigrants and allowing the woke Left to colonise all our institutions. There will be a price to be paid for that on Thursday.

There has even been a certain narcissism about the presumption that entering the House of Commons at his eighth attempt would magically endow Nigel Farage with additional powers. It is true it would be helpful to his long-term project to enter Parliament now, establish a bridgehead there and use Westminster as a platform; but do his opponents imagine he would not be equally dangerous, at large in the country, building, brick by brick, as he has done before, a party structure to fight the 2029 general election? He will do that, regardless of whether he is in or out of Parliament. By 2029, he will most certainly be in, and heading a significant contingent. Five years ago, it was an axiom that just one politician in Britain was universally familiar by his Christian name alone. That name was Boris; today it is Nigel.

A Starmer government will be Corbyn without the prince of darkness: spendthrift economic incompetence, despite the pre-election pledges; punitive taxation even above the Tory level; class warfare; crippling net zero impositions, until the financial costs implode the fantasy; and intrusive wokery. This is the first British government to be unpopular even before its election: by the end of five years, it will provoke a volcanic eruption of resentment and hatred, worse even than today’s nationwide animus against the Tories.

This is what Rishi Sunak and his colleagues are despairingly trying to impress upon Reform voters. They are wasting their time. Every Reform voter is already well aware of these facts – probably acknowledged them earlier than the Tories did. They know they will have to experience five years of hell of accelerated immigration and national humiliation. They are grimly prepared to endure a Labour government for two reasons. First, it is the only way to decommission the Conservative party under the present electoral system; and second, the tsunami of public resentment that will destroy Labour in 2029, on at least as punishing a scale, will complete the liquidation of the two legacy parties.

The Tory party has to be removed, since it is not susceptible of reform, to clear the way for an authentic conservative movement. Nigel Farage will spend the next five years building that movement. Critics have claimed, correctly, that Reform’s manifesto, or contract, is not realistically costed; in that one respect, it resembles the manifestos of the three legacy parties, still trading on the usual inflated promises. But, in the case of Reform, it is less a manifesto than the first draft of a blueprint, one that will be revised and refined many times, to present Britain, in 2029, with a realistic vision for the 2030s.

All the liberating possibilities the Tories neglected, such as abolishing inheritance tax, unfreezing income tax thresholds, freeing SMEs from strangulating red tape and fiscal banditry, will be realistic prospects for a party prepared to abolish the entire net zero charade, for which Labour’s plans, as we have recently learned from a leaked recording, will cost hundreds of billions of pounds. Yes, the Reform contract, as the party’s leaders know, is little more than a wish list, in fiscal terms; but the important thing is that what Reform is wishing for chimes with the aspirations of the British public, while the legacy parties’ wishes do not.

All the dirty tricks deployed against Reform – a BBC Question Time audience in which the first questioner, railing about supposed “racism”, turns out to be a BBC producer, and another a pro-Palestinian activist posing as a blokeish businessman, as well as Channel 4 broadcasting an actor in an assumed cockney accent spewing a caricature Alf Garnett stream of abuse which the Prime Minister, at the height of a general election campaign, absurdly dignified with a televised response – all these are transparent.

So are the here-today-gone-tomorrow candidates, supposedly disillusioned Tories, who return to their former home, with loud denunciations of racism and similar claims, in obvious attempts to damage Reform – Trojan horse candidates, Richard Tice has called them. The candidate for Erewash claimed “a significant moral issue” with Reform, resigned and endorsed the Conservatives, who presumably have no moral issues, which is something they would bet on. As they say on the unfashionable side of Hadrian’s Wall, “Ay, right”.

The latest to resign, Georgie David in West Ham and Beckton, claimed the vast majority of Reform Party candidates were “racist, misogynist and bigoted”. That’s more than 300 people at least, out of 600 candidates. Yet, as Richard Tice pointed out, she has never met the other candidates; they are all in their constituencies campaigning and she was adopted at the last moment. If they had said anything remotely “inappropriate”, in speeches, interviews or on social media, it would have been broadcast from the rooftops by the mainstream media. So, how does she know this? Unsurprisingly, she has endorsed the Tories.

It is possible that the concentrated fire of the Tories and media might sway a few naive voters against Reform. If so, it will be the last hurrah of the mainstream media, whose fast-waning influence will be non-existent by 2029. What was once a small, marginalised political party with no sophisticated promotion is now far ahead of Labour and the Tories on Tik Tok.

Farage’s sojourn in the jungle has, as he calculated, gained him much support among youth, as was evident at his Birmingham rally last Sunday. A J L Partners poll has just shown that, if Labour extends the vote to 16-year-olds, 23 per cent of that cohort will vote for Reform. All three successive parties led by Nigel Farage have largely been one-man bands, due to his natural ascendancy and the lack of effective people to supply a management team. That is no longer the case: as caretaker in Farage’s absence, Richard Tice took Reform from four per cent to 12 per cent in the polls, giving Farage, on his return, a strong base on which to build.

It is also becoming clear that, although as ambitious as any politician and keen to be prime minister, Farage recognises he must plan for a succession. He dropped a broad hint on Sunday morning, just hours before Zia Yusuf, the Muslim entrepreneur who is Reform’s largest donor, delivered an impressive speech second only in quality to Farage’s contribution. Success is beginning to attract serious people to Reform, at a time when the legacy parties are, as the dismal succession of prime ministers since 2010 demonstrates, bereft of talent.

It is often said Farage imitates Trump, in organising increasingly large rallies – 5,000 attendees last Sunday (the Tories would struggle to fill a telephone kiosk) – and other campaigning devices. That is undoubtedly true; but recently he has begun to channel another American president, Ronald Reagan, in seasoning his dire denunciations of broken Britain with a strong element of optimism, that what is broken can be fixed, provided those managing the decline are removed.

The future of the voting system, along with immigration, will be the main focus of politics in the next five years. It is Reform that has pointed out that, if this election were being held under proportional representation, none of the polls would be canvassing an extinction event for the Conservatives: instead, they would be fighting to secure a narrow majority or a hung parliament. The first-past-the-post system which favoured the Tories in their pomp threatens, in their decline, to extinguish them. If anything close to the worst poll predictions occurs, the Tories may adopt a startlingly new and benevolent attitude towards PR.

If the outcome of this election finds Reform garnering several million votes, but only a handful of seats – or none at all – the pressure for electoral change will become irresistible. This is also a strange election in that the outcome was supposedly known on the day it was declared. The question arises: have the pollsters become too clever for their own good? A wise person will withhold judgement until the votes are counted. The old cliché, resorted to by politicians in desperate straits, as the Tories currently are, is that the only poll that counts is the one recorded by voters on Thursday.

That, however, may be qualified by acknowledging the proven track record of accuracy of the exit poll, broadcast immediately after polls close. Unless it loses that well-founded credibility in the face of this supremely unusual election, we should know at least the approximate outcome by ten o’clock on Thursday evening. Regardless of the result, it is already evident that we have entered a radically new era of British politics and that the two-party system belongs to the past.

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