Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. Party — the latest incarnation of the right-wing, anti-immigrant political movement that he has led for twenty years — has been atop the British polls for the past six months. It is currently polling at thirty per cent, ten points ahead of the Labour government. If there were a general election tomorrow, there is a plausible chance that Reform would win hundreds of seats in the House of Commons; that the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives, which has ruled British politics for a century, would be broken; and that Farage, once nicknamed Mr. Brexit by his friend Donald Trump, would be Prime Minister.
There are plenty of sane, sensible arguments for why this won’t happen. For one thing, according to the law, there doesn’t need to be a general election until the summer of 2029. But British politics haven’t been sane or sensible for a long time — since Brexit, really, the last time that Farage jolted the country’s traditional two-party system off the rails. So, instead of looking upon the rise of Reform with resolve or equanimity (the Party currently has five members of Parliament, less than one per cent of the total), everyone is losing their mind. Whether out of shock, revulsion, or genuine affection — according to the polling firm YouGov, Farage is the most popular politician in the country — all that anyone can talk about is the unthinkable possibility of a Reform government, thus making it more thinkable by the day. The political center, occupied by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and what remains of the moderate wing of the Conservative Party, is the most morbidly mesmerized of all. Watching mainstream British politicians obsess over the threat of Farage is a bit like watching the video on the internet of the guy standing motionless on the beach in Thailand, the water draining around his ankles, waiting for the tsunami to arrive.
Farage, who is sixty-one, doesn’t need the help. He is already the country’s most capable politician by a mile. Earlier this month, I went to see him speak at a Reform Party conference in Birmingham. Britain’s main political parties generally stage conferences in the fall, to debate policy, raise funds, and gird themselves for the parliamentary year ahead. In Reform’s case, the gathering felt more like a celebration: the culmination of a long summer of Farage-led stunts, interviews, and speeches that had successfully bored their way into the nation’s brain.
The Party’s messaging isn’t subtle. In July, while Parliament was in recess, Farage had staged a Lawless Britain campaign, during which he claimed, variously, that people were afraid to walk the streets of London after 9 P.M.; that “droves of unvetted men,” a.k.a. asylum seekers, were loose in the country, posing a threat to women and girls; and that crimes such as shoplifting and cellphone theft now go unpunished by the police. Parts of the country, Farage warned, were facing “nothing short of societal collapse.”
The following month, Farage announced Operation Restoring Justice, Reform’s plan for the deportation of six hundred thousand illegal migrants. Caught on their heels, neither Labour nor the Conservatives particularly objected to Farage’s diagnoses of Britain’s problems, just his methods for addressing them.
The conference in Birmingham was branded “The Next Step,” and you could buy turquoise-and-white Reform-branded soccer shirts with “29” on the back (indicating victory in 2029), for forty pounds each. Up close, you are reminded how thin and gimmicky the Party still is. (Reform was formed in 2021, when Farage rebranded his previous electoral vehicle, the Brexit Party.) A lot of the conference booths in Birmingham belonged to blockchain or crypto businesses. The most eye-catching display, reaching upward to the conference-hall ceiling, was for Direct Bullion, a gold dealer, decorated with pictures of Farage clutching a gold coin.
And yet Reform possesses something that Britain’s traditional political parties can only dream of. “It was weird to be at a party conference at the moment where people were happy,” Luke Tryl, the executive director of More in Common U.K., a think tank, founded in 2016, that explores political polarization, told me. As in the U.S., Tryl observed, the main fault line currently running through British politics is not to do with left or right but with whether voters feel pro- or anti-system. He said that More in Common’s most revealing research question for understanding the British public was to test respondents’ reaction to the statement: “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” “Crudely, you’ve got about sixty per cent who are ‘Preserve and improve,’ but forty per cent who are ‘Burn it all down,’ ” Tryl said. “Reform’s popularity comes from the ‘Burn it all down.’ ”
In the “Reform U.K. Village” — a corner of the hall where Party members mingled, near the toilets — I met Ron Hartle-Ryton, the chairman of the Party’s branch in Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire. Hartle-Ryton was wearing a dark three-piece suit. “In my early days, I was a bit of a socialist,” he said. As he grew older, he took to shouting at the TV. In last year’s general election, according to Hartle-Ryton, Reform ran its campaign in Sherwood Forest for around two thousand pounds, and almost pushed the Conservative Party into third place. Local membership had more than doubled, to some twelve hundred supporters.
I wanted to ask Hartle-Ryton about Operation Raise the Colours, a seemingly spontaneous, Reform-adjacent campaign to encourage the public to start flying Britain’s national flags. The movement took shape this summer in Weoley Castle, about fifteen miles from the conference center. “Giving hope to local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone,” reads the GoFundMe page of the Weoley Warriors, a group of anonymous activists who started the craze of tying the Union Jack and red crosses of St. George — the flag of England — to streetlights, as a form of protest against a remote and dysfunctional ruling élite.
