Can Nigel Farage turn Reform into a serious contender for government?

As 2024 draws to a close, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is pulling in the cash, whether from billionaire donors or punters betting that the populist party is on the verge of turning British politics on its head.

Ladbrokes now has Farage as 5/2 favourite to succeed Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, ahead of Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative opposition.

This week property tycoon Nick Candy switched his support from the Tories to Reform, taking on the role of fundraiser and vowing to bring in “tens of millions” for the party.

Farage may have momentum, but can he turn a rag-tag start-up party with just five MPs into a serious vehicle for power? “Farage can articulate the disenchantment of the British public better than any other political leader,” said election expert Professor Sir John Curtice. “But can he create a political party?”

As deputy leader Richard Tice points out, Reform has “maxed out” its war of attrition on the airwaves and social media. “We need a ground game, and that takes money,” he said. 

Next year will be vital in building that ground operation — notably with local elections in May — and trying to prove that Reform UK can become a national party and a viable government in waiting ahead of the next general election, which is expected in 2029.

Working in Reform’s favour is the fact that the British electorate is more volatile than at any point in modern history, with five UK-wide parties in the 2024 election: Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Reform and Greens.

Polls are now showing Labour neck and neck with the Tories, at about 26 per cent, while Reform has climbed from around 14 per cent at the time of the general election, to 21 per cent.

The threat to Britain’s two big parties is obvious. For Badenoch, trying to rebuild from the ashes of July’s election defeat, Farage is a clear danger on the right. But Farage poses a threat to Labour too, particularly in its working class heartlands.

“If you ask me where will our future increase in vote come from, I think more will come from Labour from this position, than it will come from the Conservatives,” Farage said this month, adding that there had been “a realigning of how voters view the old left-right spectrum”. The party came second in 98 seats, 89 of which Labour won.

“Could Reform UK win the next election? Yes, but it’s unlikely,” said one Starmer ally. “We have to show we’re delivering. There is no blueprint for how a centre left party beats a populist rightwing party.”

To date, Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system has prevented insurgent parties from taking the reins of power by rewarding concentrated support rather than a broad spread of votes.

One poll last week put Reform ahead of Labour for the first time, with 24 per cent of support, but even a 10-point swing towards Reform in every single constituency would still leave Farage far from power.

When the polling was run through a seat-prediction model created by Ben Ansell, a professor at Oxford university, the party won only 99 seats, compared with 199 for Labour and 233 for the Conservatives.

Ansell believes there is a less than 10 per cent chance Farage will win a majority at the next general election.

But for it to happen, he argues, Reform would need to do three things simultaneously: firstly aggressively target seats in the “Danelaw” regions — the swath of northern and eastern England once colonised by Vikings — where it already has a strong base.

Secondly it must increase national vote share significantly to win dozens of slim majorities in three-way marginals; and thirdly the party needs to galvanise voters who never normally turn out.

Conditions would have to be just right, with a Conservative party still in tatters and a severely depressed Labour vote.

Tice argues that the ceiling on the Conservatives’ support at the next general election will be 30 per cent, and that Labour could drop to between 20 and 25 per cent. “You only need 33 per cent of the vote to get a big majority, as Labour has shown us,” he added.

“We’re polling at a point where the first-past-the-post system stops impeding a party and starts to help it,” Zia Yusuf, chair of the party, told the Financial Times.

Since the summer, Yusuf has been tasked with building an efficient political party from scratch that can mobilise members to stand as candidates, distribute leaflets and gather data. The party now has 400 branches across the UK and more than 100,000 members.

Many analysts believe Farage’s most likely path to Downing Street would be a hung parliament in which some form of deal was struck between the Conservatives and Reform — though for the time being both parties reject the idea outright.

Money will be less of a problem for Reform now that it has the backing of Candy, who in the past has given more than £300,000 to the Tories. The two major parties usually spend between £30mn and £50mn a year outside of an election, but senior Reform figures believe they can fund their growth with £10mn a year — even without Elon Musk’s reported plan, which the Donald Trump adviser has since denied, to give the party $100mn. 

If membership doubled over the next year to 200,000, the party could make up to £5mn from annual membership fees, which would be supplemented by big ticket donations from wealthier individuals. Candy has pledged to give a seven figure donation to the party himself.

Reform received about £1.6mn during the six week general election campaign, the bulk of which came from companies owned by Tice, Yusuf and City financier Jeremy Hosking.

“We’d be delighted for any major player to support us, whether it’s Elon Musk or anyone else,” Tice said, adding that Musk has serious UK businesses that would mean he could “easily donate here”. Candy claimed he exchanged messages with Musk on Tuesday after his appointment was announced.

Tice has mapped out his party’s path to power. It will involve fielding candidates in 90 per cent of the 2,240 seats that are going to be contested in local elections across England next year, with the hope of winning between 200 and 300, and at least one mayoralty, he said.

Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a former Tory minister, hopes to become the elected mayor of Lincolnshire and Reform’s most important holder of executive power.

Then, the party hopes to make huge inroads in Wales — where support has increased dramatically — at the next Senedd election in 2026. “It’s not impossible that we could win Wales,” Tice said.

The party has been buoyed in recent weeks by high profile defections from the Conservative party, including Candy, Jenkyns, Conservative Home founder Tim Montgomerie and Rael Braverman, husband to former home secretary and sitting Tory MP Suella Braverman.

Most of these were fringe voices on the hard right of the Conservative party, but there is growing unease among Tories that a trickle could yet become a flood.

David Campbell Bannerman, a prominent Tory activist and chair of the Conservative Democratic Organisation, who used to be deputy leader of the UK Independence party, said: “Reform UK is fast arising as another Conservative party — one many Tories see as being closer to the real thing.”

The bulk of Reform’s support is still coming from former Tories, which many argue places a hard ceiling on its prospects for growth. 

A recent analysis by academics at Royal Holloway, University of London found that “one of the striking features of the Reform vote in 2024 is its similarity to Ukip’s vote at the 2015 election” though it noted that there was some evidence the party had “deepened its base in those areas where Ukip was most popular”.

Tice believes that Labour’s Achilles heel is its net zero policies, and attacking the government on environmental issues will allow Reform to broaden its support beyond the anti-immigration base it has cultivated over the past decade. 

It is here that he believes Farage’s friendship with Trump and Musk will be most valuable to the party, helping to amplify and legitimise Reform’s message that there is an anti-green route to prosperity.

Meanwhile, Farage believes he can widen his electoral coalition by appealing to young people, just as Trump did in the US.

“Something very exciting we have to do is to turn that enthusiasm into people that actually register and get out and vote,” Farage said this month of his TikTok followers and support among young men.

Chris Hopkins, a pollster at Savanta, is sceptical that people under the age of 25 can move the dial in any British election, given they make up less than 5 per cent of the electorate. For now, he argues, Reform is “fishing in the same pool as the Conservative party so it’s difficult to see how they can mathematically win power. 

“But if anyone can do it, it’s Nigel Farage.”

Visualisations and cartography by Jonathan Vincent