The rise of Reform UK over the past two years has been stratospheric. At the start of 2024 it was a party with no MPs and just a handful of councillors. Most of those councillors were defectors from the Conservative Party. Even in the local elections in May 2024 there was no huge surge for Reform whose councillor base remained low.
In July 2024 the needle started to move as five Reform candidates, including leader, Nigel Farage, were elected to Parliament. The big breakthrough came in the local elections in May 2025 when the party, capitalising on the growing disenchantment with the Labour government and the Conservative opposition, won control of ten councils in England and two combined authority mayoralties. There was also an impressive by-election win for Sarah Pochin in Runcorn and Helsby at around the same time.
While successful, the period since the 2024 general election has not been without turbulence for the party. Two of the Reform MPs who were elected in 2024 now sit as independents while a significant number of the councillors elected in 2025 have left the party or been expelled.
Despite this the party is still very much in the ascendancy. Recent defections from the Conservative Party mean that there are now eight Reform MPs in the House of Commons and their councillor numbers will swell further after the local elections in May. They are in the running to win the Gorton and Denton by-election. The party’s coffers are filling up as significant political donors and the hundreds of thousands of party members, both contribute to the war chest ahead of the next general election.
Nigel Farage’s party now consistently sits at the top of the opinion polls, hovering around the 30% mark. Keir Starmer won a huge majority with a national vote share that wasn’t much higher in 2024. The trick that Starmer, or more accurately his Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, pulled off in 2024 was to get that vote to turn out in the seats that mattered. Tactical voting meant that an alliance of voters across the country came together to send Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government packing.
The signs are that Nigel Farage and his colleagues will not be able to pull off the same trick at the next general election. A recent Senedd by-election in Caerphilly showed that while there is a strong support for Reform UK in many parts of the country, an anti-Reform UK coalition also exists. In Caerphilly this voting coalition came together to elect the Plaid Cymru candidate and block Reform from making another electoral breakthrough.
If this scenario is replicated across the country it will mean that a national vote share of 30% for Reform is unlikely to be enough to win the 300+ seats that would take Nigel Farage into Downing Street. Reform is likely to need something in the region of 40% of the vote. This would mean adding voters who thus far have remained sceptical at best about the party’s suitability for government. Reform’s ability to move past 30% and on to 40% will largely be dependent on Nigel Farage. Can he reach out to a further 10% of the voting public?
To do so he will need to both reassure people that he is not too big a gamble and give a number of them some optimism about his vision for the country. The strategy for getting to 30% has leant on opposing high levels of immigration, focusing on crime and fighting culture wars. There is a limit to the number of British voters who will support a politician whose political repertoire is no broader than this.
By focusing his efforts and language on these traditional (for Farage) areas he can shore up his base, but it is likely that this will repel as much as attract the voters who he needs to bring into his voting coalition.
In the last week Farage has spoken against working from home, and in a BBC documentary, refused to disagree with his colleague Sarah Pochin’s comments about an over-representation of minorities in adverts. Both these swipes are taken at the private sector for business choices that they are making on entirely rational bases. To most people it is not the business of any politician whether businesses allow home working or include representation of minorities in their adverts. To those businesses who do either, or both, it is because they judge homeworking to be more effective and efficient and because their adverts are put together in such a way as to best sell their product.
As one former Conservative MP put it to me earlier in the week, Farage’s comments on working from home were pitched to the “harrumphing classes”. By and large, the voters who he has already won over. Venturing into these areas may further engage those “harrumphing” folk, many of whom are retired and genuinely perplexed by the idea that people could work from home. But to the huge numbers of people across the country who either work from home themselves or find it completely normal that others do – these are comments that do nothing but make Farage look odd and out of kilter with modern Britain. The same is true about the comments about the advertising industry.
With the Labour government becoming ever more unpopular, the Conservative Party struggling to recover and the Liberal Democrats apparently having hit a ceiling in their popularity there is still every chance that Reform could go on to form a future government. To do so there will need to develop their strategy to go beyond 30% in the opinion polls.
At the moment Farage’s strategy is a 30% strategy. To attract more voters and move toward 40% he’ll need to start learning some new tunes. Recent evidence suggests he’s still happy whirling out his greatest hits instead.