If the Reform leader Nigel Farage really considered throwing in the towel this summer, as the Times of London reported last week, it’s not hard to see why. He admits that his family had “begged” him to quit politics for his own safety and theirs.
Moreover, his party has recently lost its lead in British opinion polls, and Farage’s personal popularity has been sinking. And over the weekend, Reform’s biggest-ever party conference was eclipsed by yet another donations scandal. Close aides were surreptitiously filmed doing dodgy business with a reporter posing as a wealthy American donor. (Farage was present, too.)
Reform officials didn’t go ahead with the discussed plan to acquire £500,000 by devious means; they did, however, apparently connive in the foreign financing of three opinion polls. If substantiated, this could be a violation of Britain’s electoral laws, which prohibit political parties from accepting donations, in cash or in kind, from foreign nationals.
Farage insists nothing illegal was done. He says he wasn’t really listening to what was being said at the meeting with the phony donor, and in any case assumed the would-be contributor had been vetted. Reform claims “entrapment” and interference in UK politics by a foreign-based organization, the Centre for Climate Reporting. But it has nonetheless suspended the two party officials involved—James Orr, head of policy, and Dan Jukes, a senior aide to Farage—from their official roles.
This is not the first time foreign gifts have caused a headache for Farage. He has been embroiled for months in a scandal over £5 million he accepted from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire without reporting it to the parliamentary authorities. (He didn’t hold public office when he received this “purely personal” gift, but under the Westminster standards code of conduct, members of Parliament are supposed to declare any large gift received within a year of being elected.)
Fearing that he would be censured by Parliament, and possibly expelled by a recall petition, Farage elected to resign first and force a by-election in his Clacton-on-Sea seat, which he won last month. But the main political parties boycotted the ballot, and his only real challenger was a comedy candidate, “Count Binface.” It was a pyrrhic victory.
Scandal isn’t the only reason Farage has questioned the wisdom of remaining in frontline politics. In July, a well-loved colleague, the former Conservative minister and television celebrity Ann Widdecombe, was killed in her remote cottage in Devon. Police have not ruled out a political motive.
Farage insists that he is the “most targeted politician in Britain,” his family has been harassed, and he has received inadequate protection from the police. He says the hundreds of death threats he has received more than justify his acceptance of that £5 million gift to provide long-term personal security.
Death threats appear to be par for the course if you are a right-wing populist politician. Donald Trump, his one-time mentor, has been the target of multiple assassination attempts. Left-wing activists turn up to heckle and harass the Reform leader wherever he appears. There were scuffles with demonstrators who tried to disrupt his speech to the Birmingham conference.
In his address to the conference, Farage promised to call “a national emergency” if he wins the next general election to ensure that Parliament delivers on four key pledges: stopping the boats, slashing benefits, scrapping “net zero lunacy,” and freeing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights, which Reform believes has been exploited by left-wing lawyers to prevent the deportation of illegals.
Farage said he would make Parliament sit “24 hours a day, six days a week” to get these measures done. And should the House of Lords tries to stop him, he pledged to put the upper chamber’s continued existence to a referendum. Left-wing critics say this confirms his dictatorial tendencies. But Farage insists he remains a democrat and is merely delivering what the people of Britain want.
And indeed, many Britons do seem to want what Farage is promising. The 8,000 bright-eyed folk at the Reform conference weren’t discouraged by the financial scandals in which their leaders are enmeshed. Perhaps this is because they regard these scandals as attempts by media and political elites to defeat Reform by non-democratic means. And just as “lawfare” against Trump backfired in the United States, it is conceivable that this could actually improve Farage’s political prospects.
Be that as it may, for now Reform’s 18-month dominance of British opinion polls has ended. Farage has lost his lead to another kind of populist politician: Andy Burnham, the newly installed Labour prime minister who is enjoying a kind of honeymoon period with the British electorate. And Reform is also under pressure from elsewhere on the right—namely from the Conservative Party, under its dynamic leader, Kemi Badenoch.
Badenoch has carved out a policy agenda not dissimilar to that of Reform: deporting illegal migrants, scrapping net zero, and taking Britain out of the European Convention. According to a recent YouGov poll, Badenoch is now seen by British voters as a better prospective prime minister than Farage.
It is far too early to say that Reform has been beaten, but it may have peaked. And commentators, even sympathetic ones, are increasingly asking whether Farage may have become a liability.
One such commentator, the political analyst and writer Tim Montgomerie, has been saying recently that he doubts Farage’s commitment to becoming prime minister. Montgomerie has now been suspended from Reform following a row over free speech, which perhaps tells us something about the internal state of the party.
Farage insists that he has reassured his family about his safety and is still “up for the fight.” But the gadfly of the right must decide whether he really wants the hassle of turning his boisterous following into a legitimate party of government. At present, one suspects that—as Succession’s Logan Roy might have put it—these are not serious people.
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