Arriving on stage to accept ‘Newcomer of the Year’ at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Nigel Farage gave a warning to the Westminster establishment. ‘I’ve got a bit of a shock for you,’ he said. ‘If you think that I and four other people – the newcomers into parliament this year in the general election – were a shock, I’m very sorry but at the next election in 2029 or before, there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label.’
He added: ‘We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war. Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election. Thank you very much.’
‘I think about Nigel
Farage a lot,’ says one
government figure
While many of the attendees laughed off Farage’s claims and went back to their wine, he had hit on an acute concern in Downing Street. As Keir Starmer struggles to get a grip on government, some in Labour are anxious that his shortcomings could see voters move to the right. ‘An anti-politics mood is spreading across the country,’ says a minister.
Ahead of the election, Labour aides said that they would face one of the toughest inheritances in living memory. Five months in, most of the party still can’t quite believe how badly it has gone. ‘I’m not panicking yet,’ says one aide. ‘But I might soon.’ The Prime Minister ends the year with collapsing approval ratings, a fall in business confidence and his first cabinet resignation in the form of Louise Haigh, who stood down following the revelation that she had a fraud conviction (which Starmer knew about).
In a sign of the increasingly febrile mood in the Labour party, Haigh’s exit is being viewed as suspicious by parts of the Labour left.
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