BIRMINGHAM — It had suits, wonks, outriders, sponsors, lobbyists, receptions, and a rapidly-growing party flock. But Reform UK’s conference remained in many ways the Nigel Farage show.
From the scrum around the populist leader to the teal “No. 10” football shirts in his name, Farage — a 30-year veteran of right-wing insurgency — dominated. He filled most of the hall at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre for his Friday speech, despite a last-minute timing change.
Much of Reform’s runaway lead in U.K. opinion polls is down to one man’s charisma. “It’s like going on tour with the Pope,” said one party figure, granted anonymity (like other officials and politicians quoted in this piece) to speak candidly. But to survive in government, Reform will need more.
And Farage, who turns 65 in 2029, knows it.
He and his allies are now conspicuously trying to emphasize that Reform is not just about him. Attendees could barely move for talk of new party structures and policy fringes. Farage tries to farm out media interviews and visits to his allies, particularly his deputy Richard Tice and new Head of Policy Zia Yusuf (neither of whom have ruled out eyeing the job of chancellor).
Yet Farage’s word is still gospel. The leader personally pushed to have Aseem Malhotra, an adviser to Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, on the conference’s main stage due to his links with the U.S. administration, one party figure said. Malhotra then used the platform to suggest Covid vaccinations may have caused King Charles’ cancer (Reform distanced itself from his comments).
Like the MAGA movement — reflected in the conference’s “Make Britain Great Again” caps, stage pyrotechnics and talk of the death of the old right — Reform is still vested in an ultra-high-profile figurehead. But Britain does not have presidents, and Downing Street has far fewer political appointees than the White House. Reform must prepare for a system that is bigger than the principal. That begins, for now, with policy.
The small tent
Reform now has three fully-fledged paid policy officials, said a party figure, including Simon Marcus, a former Tory councilor in London.
This is a small number for a party hoping to reach government, though soon he will have more backup. Reform is recruiting at least four more paid policy officials, several officials told POLITICO, including two on central policy and one each for Scotland and Wales ahead of devolved elections in May 2026. There are unpaid officials too, such as Yusuf, and the party relies on enthusiastic volunteers. In Scotland, where the party does not yet have a paid policy official, party figures pointed to an unpaid activist as the main backroom thinker on policy (as part of a committee).
Broadly speaking, though, the circle of people in the room for key decisions is small. As well as key elected representatives and Yusuf, Reform figures who were asked by POLITICO pointed to Farage’s Director of Communications and effectively his chief of staff Dan Jukes; long-time Farage ally and strategist Chris Bruni-Lowe; Director of Operations Aaron Lobo; and Reform Director of Communications Ed Sumner.
A second Reform figure described Farage’s core team as “very tight.” A third Reform figure suggested four people plus Farage were in the room at key moments, adding: “Ultimately Nigel is the leader and he makes the decisions.” Yusuf told a conference event that Reform’s recent immigration policy — a sprawling pledge that would lead to around 600,000 deportations — was drawn up “entirely in-house.”
On policy, though, Reform figures are keen to show that they know they’ll need a wider pool of thinkers. “Our biggest weakness is we have no experience in government,” said a fourth Reform figure. “We have no one that knows the ropes.”
Sometimes it seems to show. Farage’s big announcement in his Friday speech, to stop migrant boat crossings in the English Channel “within two weeks of winning government,” became “within two weeks of legislation being passed” by the time he gave press interviews Saturday. Tory strategists are separately keen to pick at what they paint as fiscal incoherence in Farage’s call to ease a two-child limit on benefits — a pledge that emerged from his desire for more British babies — at the same time as “serious cuts” to the welfare budget.
A fifth Reform figure argued the leader is a factor: “Nigel’s not a huge policy guy,” they said. “Nigel’s role is to drive the party forward, to inspire the ranks.”
And so, enter the wonks
Reform’s nine-member party board met for the first time last week. It consists of Farage, Yusuf, chairman David Bull, racehorse trainer Andrew Reid, the former leader of UKIP (Reform’s predecessor party) Paul Nuttall, ex-GB News presenter Darren Grimes, regional mayor Andrea Jenkyns, former Tory Greater Manchester mayoral candidate Dan Barker, and Farage’s former press chief Gawain Towler.
Yusuf, who Farage named as head of policy on Friday, told a fringe event that board will have a “subordinate committee” that essentially “rubber-stamps” party policy.
Then there is a nascent ecosystem of think tanks including the Reform-friendly Centre for a Better Britain (referred to verbally by supporters as CFABB). Its chief executive Jonathan Brown — Reform’s former chief operating officer — meets Tice roughly every couple of weeks, said a person with knowledge of the meetings.
While the group declined to say who funds it, a document leaked to the Sunday Times suggested it wanted to raise more than £25 million by 2029 — much of it from the U.S. (A CFABB official insisted to POLITICO that all current donors are either British or reside in Britain.) The chair of its advisory board, James Orr, has been a friend of U.S. Vice President JD Vance since 2019.
But CFABB also has a British flavor — as a home for Brexit warriors of old. Veteran Tory Euroskeptic John Redwood is helping with some of its work. Christopher Howarth, the former fixer for the Tory European Research Group, is one of its seven or so current staff. Brown is in a WhatsApp group with right-wing Conservative peers, including Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator David Frost. And his fellow CBB director David Lilley — who has donated more than £250,000 to Reform — previously funded Johnson and the Vote Leave campaign.
A cast of thousands
Yusuf told members he will take the “best ideas” from right-wing think tanks — others include the Prosperity Institute (formerly known as Legatum) and the Taxpayers’ Alliance — at the same time as building out internal policy. But at other times they will disagree. Brown has also met Robert Jenrick, the ambitious Conservative shadow minister who is pushing on law and order. Reform is keen to stress that CFABB is independent of the party.
Reform is involving its own MPs (Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and Sarah Pochin) in policy development, while Farage is also leaning on outsiders with real-world experience such as detective Colin Sutton and prison governor Vanessa Frake. Yusuf told a fringe event: “We have draughtsmen working on legislation. We will have thousands of pages of legislation ready to go.”
Reform can rely too on its growing pool of elected officials in councils and mayoralties across England — expected to increase dramatically after May 2026 elections in Scotland and Wales.
Yet this growing cast leaves some of Reform’s own foot soldiers in the dark. Helen Manson, interim chair of the South Cambridgeshire branch, told Yusuf — who focuses both on red meat policies such as migration and his personal interests like cryptocurrency — that she receives many questions on the doorstep about whether the party is ready for government. “We don’t know what Reform is doing. We can’t respond to that,” she said.
Lobbyists at the conference for the first time felt similarly. One industry figure complained that Tice, when holding private business round tables, tends to lay out his “talking points” but does not respond well to challenge. A second said: “It was obvious that a small group of think tanks are currently the only engine room for ideas beyond Reform’s pet interests.”
Speaking to POLITICO, Brown said: “You can’t really judge them on the policy for the next election because it’s early days. I think the idea is to build out a full and integrated policy platform and an implementation strategy before the next election.”
But some senior Reform-linked figures resist opening the conversation too widely — as the center would lose control.
Orr told a fringe event: “Don’t underestimate how much effect a small band of dedicated people in the cockpit of the nation can do.”
Orr looked to an unlikely comparison — what he called Tony Blair’s “catastrophic and extremely consequential” Labour government in 1997. That, argued Orr, was run by “a gang of six … [and] they completely overturned the constitutional, legal, political and cultural landscape of the U.K. for 25 years. In fact, we’re going to spend the best part of the next 15 years trying to unravel it.”
No succession plan?
Small team or not, the importance of elevating the background players out of Farage’s shadow isn’t just desirable for Reform — it’s existential.
When Farage denied on stage that his party is a “one-man band,” he used the example of the branded football shirts in the conference shop — pointing out that several other party figures had their names on shirts as well. Tellingly, when POLITICO visited the shop, only the “Farage” shirts were filling the shelves. An announcement that Farage was to sign shirts for 45 minutes (price for a signed shirt: £100) caused a jolt of excitement in the venue.
More importantly, it was Farage’s return to the party last year that turbocharged its (already healthy) poll rating, and has senior Reform figures beginning to eye up which Whitehall department they would like to lead.
Contrary to protestations by Farage’s allies, aides and the man himself, the party is still tied closely to him — to the point where some in Reform darkly wonder how the party would survive if he suddenly wasn’t on the scene.
“If something happens [to Nigel] now, we’re fucked,” a Reform candidate in the last election said. In four years “maybe we’d be fine,” they said, but right now “there’s no one else with the charisma or the ability to pull people together.”
Towler, his longtime former aide, has a more nuanced view. “There is nobody else in Britain who can do what he does,” he said, but “there is a bunch of driven people who want to change the country and I think they would still do it without him. It would be awful and it would be harder, but I really think the mood of the country is so febrile and so anti-the last two, that we need change. Nigel is a vector for that change — he’s not the only vector.”
Farage is keen for the public to agree. He closed the conference by inviting all the main speakers for an on-stage singalong of the U.K’s national anthem led by the Greater Lincolnshire Mayor Andrea Jenkyns — who had earlier surprised attendees with a solo musical performance of her own-self written song Insomniac.
The hope in Reform circles is that by boosting those around him, Farage will create figures substantial enough to be major players in a future government, while also reducing the party’s reliance on his oratory and leadership skills.
“I think Reform is coming out of Nigel’s shadow to some extent,” said Brown. “All of a sudden there’s a raft of elected officials who are there. Are any of them Nigel yet? No, of course not. But Nigel has had 30 years so it’s very unfair to pick the consummate performer of his generation and say ‘why aren’t you like him?’ Nigel wasn’t like that in 2005.”
Others point out that Farage, despite being electoral dynamite, remains a Marmite figure with harder-to-reach sections of the electorate. “Yes he’s a brilliant communicator and no one’s doubting that, but he’s a known quantity and a lot of voters don’t like him,” said one Labour Party official.
Then there is the question of whether Farage — who spent years in lucrative TV work — really wants the grim responsibilities of being prime minister at all. His allies insist he does. Towler said: “He made a decision last year to get back involved. Is it his want, is it his ambition? Really, I don’t think it is. But does he think he’s the only person to break the duopoly of failure in this country? Yes. And he takes that responsibility deeply seriously.”
Wherever things go from here, though, Farage remains a godhead for now — sometimes quite literally.
“His body is stronger than anybody else’s,” said a sixth Reform figure, when asked about what the party would be without him. “He’s survived a plane crash and everything.”
Some Reform figures are daring to dream of the party’s fortunes as similarly immortal. But things don’t always work out that way.
John Johnston and Abby Wallace contributed reporting.
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