When Nigel Farage stands up this afternoon to deliver his speech to Reform UK’s annual conference in Birmingham he will do so for the first time as a potential prime minister. His message to the 7,000 delegates gathered at the NEC will be that they need to prepare for a general election as early as 2027.
One cloud looms over Farage’s funfair today
Labour would not have to call an election until 2029, but Farage believes the state of the economy and the emergence of new parties means the government could collapse before that. With Rachel Reeves facing a black hole of anything up to about £40 billion in the public finances, Reform’s leader does not think November’s budget will adequately deal with the UK’s economic problems. He has told his team he expects ‘a real austerity budget’ in 2027 to rein in spending and placate the angry markets.
At that point, he believes, many left-wing Labour MPs, looking at the emergence of the Green party (which is already hoovering up the votes of a third of young women under the age of 25) and the new left wing party being set up by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana and conclude that they have more chance of holding their seats under a populist left banner rather than in Labour’s colours. He predicts they will vote against an austerity finance bill and bring down Keir Starmer.
Even if the left doesn’t get its act together (and there is some precedent for this), Farage believes the pro-Gaza independents will take 30 seats from Labour next time around. Both of these trends, he believes, will be reinforced by giving the vote to 16-year-olds, which in some seats will add a considerable number of teenagers of Kashmiri and Pakistani origin to the electoral roll.
When he addresses the party faithful, the leader will urge the enthusiastic attendees to sign up as candidates and join the fight. When he issued the same call to arms last year, Reform got around 1,000 new faces. They need them. Every party will have to field 5,000 candidates in the council elections next May, the moment Farage really hopes will launch him towards Downing Street. So far, they have recruited and are vetting around half this number. His prediction of a 2027 election means he wants every Reform parliamentary candidate in place next year.
This is highly significant because it means that Tory MPs pondering whether to jump ship to Reform will have to decide much earlier than they might have realised whether they want to defect. Reform’s latest signing, Nadine Dorries, will be paraded around conference today. The news, which broke last night, was kept very tight since Farage did all the negotiating himself and didn’t tell anyone else what he was up to.
One of those who was in the dark was Boris Johnson, who I understand worked quite hard over a period of months trying to persuade his great friend Dorries to stay. But having previously had her arm twisted and deciding to sit tight, when she made the final decision, she avoided an awkward conversation by not telling Johnson what she was planning. That she chose, in the end, to make the leap is proof enough that Johnson does not intend to run for the Tory leadership again. ‘Boris isn’t coming back,’ says one of those familiar with the conversations.
It is a live debate in Reform whether these Tory retreads should be accepted. Farage was keen to land Dorries because he believes she is one of the few British politicians who is known by voters who don’t obsess over politics. He believes her appearance on I’m a Celebrity and her writing career, which has seen her sell more than 3.5 million books, gives Reform a way of reaching the middle-aged female audience who know Dorries.
He accepted Jake Berry because of his role as Northern Powerhouse minister in the last government and because of his access to a network of Northern right of centre donors, whose help Reform wants. He’s also conscious that he needs some people with experience of government — and that will mean some ex Tory ministers. Dorries, don’t forget, was regarded by many civil servants as a good cabinet minister, hard working and able to provide clear direction to officials.
Farage has, however, rejected between five and 10 former Tory MPs who want to refight their old seats as Reform candidates and whom he thinks have little other affinity with his party.
Nonetheless, Reform’s leader does believe there is some utility in building momentum with defections not least pour encourager les autres. The Tories are currently on around 18 per cent in the polls — with Reform comfortably over 30 per cent. Farage thinks the Tory number can be driven down to around 10 to 12 per cent if it looks like they are sinking and believes the realignment of the right is not happening — it has already happened. He has privately told friends: ‘It’s done. A lot of Tories are in denial about that, but it’s over. I wouldn’t be surprised if they won just 20 seats at the next election.’ His hope is that the Conservatives lose more than 1,000 councillors in May, all their seats in Scotland and are all but wiped out in Wales.
Farage will have ‘a few notes’ for his speech but no text, but he wants to use conference to show two things: that Reform is bigger than him — and that he is beginning to think more seriously about policy. New young recruits will appear on stage. But don’t expect announcements about a Reform shadow cabinet just yet. The leader wants to see which of his new people flourish in the public eye, as well as who else crosses the floor before he makes those decisions. ‘It’s evolving,’ is his stock phrase when anyone has the temerity to ask – though he usually finds time to praise the ‘first class’ Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf.
‘Boris isn’t coming back,’ says one of those familiar with the conversations.
After a summer in which Reform secured 22 national newspaper front pages for its crime policies, one area Farage, a former metals trader, has done some thinking is City and financial regulation. He wants to scrap the Financial Conduct Authority and the Competition and Markets Authority and take regulation back into the Bank of England. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) would also be scrapped.
Farage thinks the architecture set up by Gordon Brown when he gave independence to the Bank in 1997 has failed and that the post-Brexit opportunities to get away from the EU-regulatory framework have been missed. He wants Britain to be a centre of new markets like those in crypto currencies. Someone who saw Farage recently concluded from the beaming breadth of his smile that he has a considerable number of crypto investments himself.
One cloud looms over Farage’s funfair today. Angela Rayner’s resignation from government will inevitably hoover up a lot of the attention today.
Farage may not mind. He is firmly of the view that she is the Labour politician who would give him the toughest time at the next election. ‘She’s real,’ he says approvingly. So is Farage’s chance of government.
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