Nigel Farage has just finished his keynote speech at the Reform party’s annual conference. In a performance enhanced by Eminem, balloons and pyrotechnics, the Reform leader received a rapturous response from the packed NEC arena on the outskirts of Birmingham. Farage used the speech to argue that his party is only just beginning. He said he had debated returning for the general election but now he was back planned to go much further:
I looked at the facts that frankly without massive public borrowing, there would have been no growth in our economy for year after year after year. An NHS in which you can’t get a GP appointment, roads that are clogged behind comprehension. And frankly I thought to myself Britain is broken.
And I thought to myself, and I couldn’t help it, if Britain is broken, then Britain needs reform. So I was really in a terrible quandary as to what to do, genuinely. And then when I went down to Dover for a day, I went to Skegness with Richard [Tice], Lee [Anderson] in Ashfield. And I had people speaking to me almost as if I was letting them down by not giving up my lovely life.
He said that his party had done as well as it could have given the short timeframe ahead of the election: succeeding in electing MPs to parliament and winning millions of votes. Now, he said, is the time to go further, starting with the professionalisation of the party. He said votes were lost as a result of a lack of vetting of candidates. He will also change the party in a vote on Saturday that will give power to the membership and bring in a new constitution: ‘The time has come, the infant that Reform UK was growing up. We had the teenage tantrums which were those that caused us harm in the general election. But we’re now at a different part. This party is an adult and this weekend is when Reform UK comes of age.’
Farage said it was time to learn from an unlikely source of inspiration: the Liberal Democrats. The Reform leader said his party needed to learn the lessons of Ed Davey’s party when it comes to putting down local roots and building from the ground up: ‘It’s about building teams, it’s about having unity, and it’s through the branches that we get those structures.’ The clear theme of Farage’s speech was a call on the attendees and members to get involved and do their bit in order to make the party a serious electoral force.
The question is whether he can now put these plans into action
There was still humour in part. Farage said the Tory leadership race didn’t matter – before blasting each Tory leadership candidate as rubbish for different reasons. He suggested Robert Jenrick sounded the most like a Reform supporter but ‘lacks any discernible personality whatsoever and would lead a deeply divided party split in two’. As for Kemi Badenoch, he tried to send her up for her recent comment on working in McDonalds: ‘One of them thinks that having worked in McDonald’s for a week makes them working class’.
Farage was clear on the opportunity he sees for Reform, noting that he could not recall a time when there has been ‘greater disenchantment’ with the two main parties. He was of course speaking to the party faithful – but the audience lapped this all up. Farage knows that the challenge he has always faced in previous outfits such as Ukip is a struggle to professionalise. The hope is that the thousands gathered today will make that work possible. He and his fellow MPs this afternoon repeated talked about themselves as the silent majority, as the mainstream option. The question is whether he can now put these plans into action ahead of the local elections next year – which will be the first serious test.
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