Rarely has Britain’s new political landscape come into sharper relief than during the rapid-fire events that unfolded over a hectic lunchtime on Friday.
At noon, 10 Downing Street announced that Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister in the Labour government, had resigned after admitting she had paid too little tax on the purchase of a seaside apartment. An hour later, Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing anti-immigrant party Reform U.K., hurried to the stage at the party’s annual conference in Birmingham, England, to exult in Labour’s misfortune.
Ms. Rayner’s resignation was not a major shock after two weeks of questions about her tax problems. But its timing, on the opening day of the Reform conference, gave Mr. Farage a ready-made moment to press his populist case: that the Labour Party and its prime minister, Keir Starmer, are aimless, incompetent and unfit to govern.
“We are the party on the rise,” Mr. Farage, an ally of President Trump, said to a cheering crowd in a cavernous convention center, with pulsating lights and flashy pyrotechnics. “I frankly, myself, couldn’t believe just how well we’ve done.”
Mr. Farage’s triumphalism glossed over some less convenient truths. He leads a party that has only four out of 650 members in the House of Commons, a meager fund-raising record, virtually no experience governing and policy positions that alarm large parts of the voting public.
Still, the diverging fortunes of Reform and Labour are impossible to dispute and increasingly hard to ignore.
Fourteen months after it swept into power with a landslide parliamentary majority, Labour is in a tailspin. It trails Reform by double digits in most opinion polls. Mr. Starmer’s efforts to “reset” his government have been at least partly unraveled by Ms. Rayner’s resignation. Not only will it distract the government, it could also divide the party, given how popular she is with left-wing members.
Beyond its polling lead, Reform is dominating the debate on an issue it has made central in British politics: immigration. Mr. Farage’s call for Britain to pursue mass deportations of undocumented immigrants has prodded Mr. Starmer to harden his own language about the treatment of foreigners seeking asylum in Britain.
While Mr. Farage steals the spotlight with provocative displays — during testimony before a congressional committee in Washington last Wednesday, he likened Britain’s treatment of free speech to that of North Korea’s — Mr. Starmer has struggled to turn around a stubbornly underperforming economy.
“There is a sense that the wind is changing,” said Jean-François Drolet, a professor at Queen Mary University of London who is an expert on populist movements. Mr. Farage, he said, was pushing the debate into areas that were once taboo. With the plodding Labour government, on the other hand, “we’re having a rerun of the Biden presidency,” Mr. Drolet said.
Mr. Starmer does not have to face voters until 2029, and there are no signs of a challenge to his leadership of Labour. While Reform has gained momentum since its breakthrough in the 2024 general election, when it won more than four million votes, it has suffered its own share of internal divisions — a recurring issue with Mr. Farage.
Yet, it is Mr. Starmer, not Mr. Farage, who is making midcourse corrections. On Friday, the prime minister used Ms. Rayner’s resignation to carry out a shake-up of his cabinet. He shifted the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to foreign secretary and replaced her with Shabana Mahmood, who had been justice secretary.
The goal, analysts said, is to give the government a better grip on immigration. It has not managed to curb an influx of small boats, which carry asylum seekers across the English Channel. Mr. Farage has long seized on the hazardous crossings as an example of what he claims is Britain’s failure to secure its borders.
Rearranging name cards around a cabinet table, however, will not be enough to solve Mr. Starmer’s problems, analysts said. The government, they said, needs to reignite Britain’s economy and repair its public finances. Its policies have been erratic, inconsistent and occasionally reversed when they provoke too much backlash, either with the public or with Labour members of Parliament.
It is easy to link Reform’s rise to Labour’s decline. But Reform has mainly benefited from a collapse in support for the Conservative Party. Deeply unpopular after 14 years in government and led by Kemi Badenoch, who has been unable to turn around their fortunes, the Conservatives now trail Labour and Reform. They are only a few percentage points ahead of the Liberal Democrats in polls.
Labour has also lost supporters since the election, but mainly to center-left or left parties, like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. That has prompted political strategists to argue that Mr. Starmer should pivot to the left, raising taxes on the wealthy, embracing policies to curb climate change and drawing closer to the European Union.
That would also etch a contrast with Mr. Farage, a champion of Brexit, which has become increasingly unpopular. The problem for Mr. Starmer is that, with Ms. Rayner’s departure, he has lost one of his most impassioned left-wing voices.
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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