This is the age of political disruptors. US President Donald Trump is obviously the Disruptor-in-Chief, joined in different ways by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as leader of the Brothers of Italy party, President Javier Milei of Argentina, the far-right AfD in Germany, and others including the Reform UK party.
Reform is Nigel Farage’s latest political incarnation, and his leadership took the party to great success in the English local elections last week. It also won a byelection, taking a House of Commons seat from the governing Labour party. Mr Farage’s political genius is to connect strongly with some voters even if he repels others. He does well with older voters and those who are not university graduates.
In person he’s affable, humorous and good company, but is better known for exploiting problems rather than solving them. His focus is hot-button grievances about immigration, the alleged (but unsubstantiated) preferential treatment of ethnic minorities, climate change and “diversity”.
Now Mr Farage has gone full Trump, claiming to be leader of the UK’s political opposition. He isn’t, although he could be. The current leader of the opposition is Kemi Badenoch, with 121 Conservative MPs. Labour has more than 400 MPs. Reform, despite picking up that new MP last week, still has just five members in a Parliament of 650. Under Mr Farage, Reform is the mouse that roared, threatening to destroy the Conservative party.
The Conservatives are sometimes described as the most successful party in British history, but nowadays they have only themselves to blame for successive failures. Between 1886 and 1997, they were in government for an astonishing 77 out of 111 years. Since 2010, however, their leaders have been serially incompetent.
This began with then-prime minister David Cameron’s promise in 2016 of a Brexit referendum in the hope of seeing off the hard-right threat from Mr Farage. It proved to be one of the biggest mistakes in modern British political history, giving Mr Farage a platform for his many grievances. Mr Cameron lost the referendum and quit. His hapless Conservative successors – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – rapidly entered the dustbin of political history.
All the while, Mr Farage survived and thrived by inventing new parties and making new converts through constant campaigning. The former New York state governor, Mario Cuomo, once warned that campaigning is like poetry, while governing is prose. Mr Farage is about to understand what Mr Cuomo meant.
Having run an engaging campaign last week, his Reform party governs through control of some English local councils. But local government is prosaic, difficult and often dull work that demands competence, not rousing speeches. Voters who love a feisty campaign will soon loathe local governments if the garbage isn’t collected, the schools don’t work and the buses don’t run on time.
Mr Farage also has a track record of making enemies, internal party feuds and personal gripes. One former Reform MP, Rupert Lowe, is now shunned and aggrieved. The news organisation Politico catalogued 11 significant Farage feuds with colleagues (now mostly former colleagues). One of them, in the European Parliament, is quoted as describing Mr Farage as “snarling, thin skinned and aggressive”.
Mr Farage himself began as a member of the Conservative party (1978-1992), then the Anti-Federalist League (1992-1993), then the UK Independence Party (1993-2018), followed by the Brexit party, renamed since 2021 as Reform.
The real story of the past few days, therefore, is not Mr Farage’s personal talents nor the collapse of the Conservative party. The overarching story is that delusions about having a two-party British political system have at last been exploded. There are now five significant parties in England – Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives, the Greens and Reform. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have nationalist parties of considerable importance.
The British delusion about a two-party system based on “first past the post” voting – resulting in “the government” and “opposition” (Conservatives and Labour) – does not reflect the profound diversity of the modern British electorate. This delusion is an abuse of democracy. We have, as we noted last year, a Labour government holding two thirds of the House of Commons seats based on just one third of the votes in last year’s general election.
Predictions in this unpredictable decade are, therefore, not worth much. But Mr Farage’s latest party will face scrutiny as never before.
Reform lacks in-depth talent, as it is little more than a vehicle of convenience for Mr Farage. Without him, it would be a party mostly of political nobodies. For now, therefore, the Conservatives will keep Ms Badenoch as leader because in this mess no one else wants the job. Ms Badenoch probably has a year to turn things around, or say goodbye.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has longer – four years before the next election – but he needs to lead, not merely manage. He could begin by conceding that the two-party system is a living fossil and promise that if Labour wins the next general election, he will introduce a fairer voting system fit for the 21st – not the 19th – century. He could also publicly recognise that the vast majority of British people now think Brexit – Mr Farage’s supposed great success – has failed by every conceivable metric.
Reform’s success is a wake-up call and yes, it’s time – at last – to wake up.
