Nigel Farage is looking unstoppable

Opinion polls are notoriously a snapshot rather than a prediction, but the latest Ipsos survey of more than 1,100 voters should put a huge spring in Nigel Farage’s step, and terrify both the Tories and Labour, who are placed nine points behind the surging populists.

The poll states that if a general election were held tomorrow, a Reform government would be elected on 34 per cent of the vote, putting Reform leader Nigel Farage in 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister with a massive majority. Labour would be reduced to 25 per cent, and the Tories to just 15 per cent and a pathetic rump of just ten seats or so in Parliament. The remaining Westminster crumbs would be divided between the Lib Dems (11 per cent) and the Greens (9 per cent) giving each only a handful of seats.

The poll gives the highest ever level of support for Reform, a party which has just five MPs in the present Parliament and didn’t even exist five years ago. This is very bleak news indeed for the Conservatives, and again raises the possibility that Britain’s once natural party of government is facing total extinction.

This Ipsos poll offers little comfort to Labour either, whose current Commons majority would be completely demolished. Moreover, the poll claims that Sir Keir Starmer is ‘enjoying’ a record low level of popularity, with just 19 per cent of people happy with the Prime Minister’s performance – less even than the 22 per cent who were satisfied with Gordon Brown after just a year in office.

With Starmer facing a substantial Labour backbench revolt against the government’s planned welfare ‘reforms’, the new poll apparently justifies Farage’s recent strategy of appealing to natural Labour voters, as well as to those Tories who have already defected to Reform, disappointed by Kemi Badenoch’s lacklustre leadership.

The fieldwork for the poll of 1,180 voters was carried out before the recent hiccup over the short lived resignation of Reform’s chairman Zia Yusuf, before the abrasive entrepreneur returned to the party after just two days – albeit in a new role overseeing party finances.

But such internal spats are unlikely to dent the rebel party’s surging popularity, and neither of the two major old parties have come up with convincing policies to counter Reform’s revolt.