LONDON — British politics is cracking up. And Nigel Farage is here to help.
The Reform UK party’s firebrand leader is celebrating one of his most famous victories after ousting Labour in a stronghold seat that Keir Starmer’s center-left government should never have lost.
For much of his two decades in politics, Farage has been seen as a bigger threat to the Conservatives than the left.
But after winning the special by-election for parliament in Runcorn and Helsby, north-west England — and taking hundreds of local council seats, too — he is making good on his vow to go after Labour.
If there is one thing Thursday’s set elections in England shows it’s that the Reform UK surge which has taken the party into first place in opinion polls in recent months is real.
That in turn means it is no longer fantasy politics to ask whether sooner or later Farage himself could end up as Britain’s prime minister.
First of all it’s worth appreciating the scale of the party’s achievement in Runcorn. Excluding the seat held by the Commons Speaker, Runcorn was Labour’s 49th safest constituency, with a majority of almost 15,000 votes — 34.8 per cent — at the last election. If Farage can win here, he might well think there’s no place he can’t succeed.
Danger zone
On paper, the Runcorn result would put more than 350 of the 411 seats Labour won at the 2024 election now firmly in the danger zone. That’s more than enough to win a majority in the 650-seat House of Commons and a nightmarish prospect for Starmer’s government just 10 months after its landslide victory.
Of course, Reform won by a tiny margin in Runcorn on Thursday — just six votes. And conventional wisdom holds that one by-election and one set of local council victories are poor guides to what will happen at a general election, when the government of the country is at stake.
But recent history in British politics and elsewhere suggests conventional wisdom may be the worst guide of all.
Few of the conventionally wise predicted Brexit in 2016 or the rise (and return) of Donald Trump. Across Europe, meanwhile, populist rightwing parties are consistently chipping away at the centrist mainstream.
The populist right is surging in France and Germany and has been in power in Italy since 2022. These are all Western European G7 economies with a lot in common with the U.K. Why should Starmer’s Labour Party be immune to the threat?
Ministers at risk
Even though Reform UK is highly unlikely to replicate Runcorn by wiping out Labour at the next general election, it could still do enough damage to rob the government of its majority. Reform is currently in second place behind Labour in 89 seats. Some 60 of these are in the north of England and 13 in Wales, areas conventionally seen as Labour heartlands.
In 37 constituencies, Labour’s lead over Reform is fewer than 8,000 votes. These encompass the seats held by numerous ministers, including Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, Defense Secretary John Healey, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
The small majority can be a misleading thing. It was a feature of Labour’s dramatic landslide last year that the party won many more of its seats by small margins — quite deliberately. It was a result of a dazzlingly successful effort to spread its campaign resources in the target seats where they were most needed, rather than building up piles of votes in seats they already had in the bag.
Under the U.K.’s “first past the post” electoral system, that delivered the most disproportionate election result in history, with Labour winning 63 per cent of the seats in the Commons with just 34 per cent of the votes cast in the country.
Failing better
Farage’s Reform UK suffered the reverse effect due to a highly inefficient campaign. They amassed 14 per cent of votes — 4.1 million nationally — but only won five seats in the Commons last year (one of those elected has left the party since).
That was a result of having no real campaign infrastructure, no organization of ground troops to knock on doors and very little planning. Farage only entered the election contest himself two weeks into the campaign, having previously ruled out standing.
Some Labour strategists take comfort from the fact that Thursday’s results could have been worse and are patting themselves on the back for still having a good ground operation that can deliver when it counts.
But Reform now has a chance too. After winning hundreds of seats in local councils this week, it will have a chance to build an election infrastructure and an army of activists who can deliver leaflets and organize campaigns around the country far more effectively.
If Farage’s election strategists can mobilize these greater resources more efficiently, there is no reason why he won’t have an army of MPs to command after the next election.
Building a machine
Reform has already started professionalizing its approach and focusing ruthlessly on its election machinery, including boosting its membership to what it now claims to be 227,000 — larger than the Tories and closing in on Labour’s total.
“We’ve certainly taken these council elections so much more seriously than we’ve ever done before,” said Alex Wilson, Reform member of the London Assembly. These elections are crucial for “getting that sort of information and data locally on the ground that will then feed into targeting for future campaigns,” Wilson said. “Having a base of people elected in local government then gives you people that will be leading the campaigning on the ground as well, because your best foot soldiers are those who’ve got skin in the game.”
Last year, Starmer’s strategists took the conscious decision not to fight Farage because they knew he would do more damage to the Conservatives. In the end, they were right and Labour stormed to its landslide.
Many Tories are deeply worried about their dire results this week, and calls for some kind of merger or pact with Reform are likely to grow.
Fighting Farage
Starmer also sees the risks. Labour’s strategy is to try to be tough on Farage and tough on the causes of Farage, to adapt Tony Blair’s famous phrase.
They’re working to show off their successes at tackling illegal immigration and to revive ailing public services, especially the NHS. At the same time, Labour strategists plan to keep hammering Farage over his past comments expressing admiration for Vladimir Putin, as well as his suggestion that the NHS needs a fundamental rethink of its funding model.
But none of this is guaranteed to work. Voters opted for “change” last year — it was Labour’s one-word election slogan. They have yet to feel it, as Starmer himself acknowledged. It’s not clear that they will be willing to wait, with cynicism apparently on the rise.
As the British Election Study found, Labour’s 2024 landslide came amid high levels of political alienation with one in three voters saying they have “no trust” in politicians.
That kind of attitude makes a fragmented electoral landscape even more volatile. In the space of five years, British voters veered wildly from giving a huge majority of 80 seats to Boris Johnson’s Tories, to ejecting them from office with their worst ever result and handing a massive landslide of 174 seats to Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, there is no clear favorite for the next election. Reform UK is currently on 26 per cent, with Labour on 24 per cent and the Conservatives on 21 per cent. Could Farage convert this position into a realistic bid for Downing Street?
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, is skeptical of Reform’s chances of winning power nationally at the next general election in 2029. “I suspect that, on their own, there’s still a ceiling to their support given how poorly Farage is regarded by most Brits, given the likelihood that some of the people currently winning all these seats for them will end up embarrassing him, and given they might not be able to match Labour’s (and the Lib Dems’) ground game,” Bale said.
“That said, I wouldn’t completely rule it out — what sort of results ‘first past the post’ might throw up if both Labour and the Tories remain phenomenally unpopular and we have, say, four parties getting 20 per cent or so, who knows?”
Noah Keate contributed reporting.
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