Nigel Farage Is Back, Upsetting the Applecart of British Politics

W hen Donald Trump descended that golden escalator at Trump Tower nine years ago this month, no one predicted it would lead to the effective death of the Republican Party of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush — the party’s three previous presidential nominees. But it did, and a battle-scarred and powerful Donald Trump dominates the GOP today.

Similarly, the sudden decision, announced today, of Nigel Farage — a close friend of Trump’s — to become leader of Britain’s Reform Party and directly challenge the ruling Conservative Party could set in motion a series of events that may see him become the leading figure of Britain’s Right.

Certainly, Britain’s Conservatives are in deadly peril. Having called a snap election for July 4, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has had a disastrous start to his campaign. On Monday, two polls predicted that the Labour Party under its leader, Keir Starmer, is on track for a parliamentary majority that could exceed Tony Blair’s landslide win of 1997.

One, conducted by YouGov for the Times of London and Sky News, projects Labour would win 422 seats if the election were held today, with Conservatives plummeting to 140. That would be their lowest number since 1906. The other poll, conducted by the More in Common think tank, projects the Tories will win a slightly better 180 seats.

Farage, the most visible supporter of Brexit during the 2016 referendum and the successful but painful efforts to later implement it, is under no illusions that he will win the July 4 election — one that Sunak called early in the vain hope it would preclude Farage from entering the race to boost Reform. Analysts say that if Farage can take Reform up to 18 percent of the vote — currently hovering at between 12 and 15 percent in polls — it can win several seats and become a real force in British politics.

Farage freely admits that the Labour Party will win the election. His goal is to decimate the Conservatives the way his old UK Independence Party did in the 2019 European Union elections — a showing that sealed Britain’s exit from the EU. Farage told the Times last Saturday: “I want to reshape the centre-right, whatever that means.”

Farage has a precedent for what that could mean firmly in mind. He reminded the Times that when he co-founded Reform in 2021, he chose the name “because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where (its) Reform Party comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here. It took them time, it took them two elections, they became the biggest party on the centre-right. They then absorbed what was left of the Conservative Party into them and rebranded.”

That history is largely right. In the 1992 election, the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada won a mere two seats, seeing its own incumbent prime minister lose her seat. After several years of internal debate, National Citizens Coalition think-tank president Stephen Harper negotiated a merger that formed the Conservative Party of Canada. He was the party’s first leader and was elected prime minister in 2006, going on to serve just shy of ten years as Canada’s leader.

Farage, the new leader of Britain’s Reform Party, says the “political revolt” he plans to lead has similar room to grow. “I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again. I will surprise everybody,” he promises.

Britain’s Conservatives are clearly worried that the populist Farage will eclipse the colorless Sunak over the next month. The Tories have proposed reintroducing military service and topping up pensions in an effort to appeal to senior, right-of-center voters who sympathize with Farage.

While illegal immigration wins headlines for the Reform Party, the “Contract with the People” it is campaigning on emphasizes restoring Britain’s doleful economy — a move reminiscent of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, which helped the GOP win control of Congress in 1994.

Everyone in Britain with open eyes worries that the nation is falling behind. The World Bank forecasts that with current growth trends, GDP per capita will be higher in the former communist nation of Poland than in the U.K. by 2030. Reform wants to abolish business rates for small businesses, offer tax relief for private health-care users to help ease overcrowding in the National Health Service, and lift an estimated 7 million people out of paying income tax altogether by raising thresholds.

Illegal immigration has also undermined public confidence in the government’s ability to enforce its own laws. The technocratic approach of PM Sunak promised to repatriate migrants to Rwanda if their asylum claims are found questionable. So far only one well-paid volunteer has left Britain’s shores.

Henry Olsen, a U.S. political expert on populist movements, says that Farage’s “focus on immigration and his everyday British-bloke image present a stark alternative to Sunak’s slick, polished approach.”

It is already working, as disaffected Tories have fueled Reform’s polling rise. It would not be a surprise at all if many more of these voters decided to make a clean break with Sunak’s Conservatives and swing hard to Farage and Reform.

If it’s true after July 4 that Conservatives wind up with a minority of only one-quarter or one-third of the seats in Britain’s Parliament, the job of choosing a successor to Sunak as party leader would fall on the survivors.

One can easily see them choosing a figure who pledges to once again root the party in the principles that made Margaret Thatcher the heroine of both the white-collar and blue-collar middle class in 1980s Britain. That new leader may see that the fastest way to political recovery against Labour in the 2029 elections is to indeed form an alliance with the resurgent Reform Party.

That’s why Nigel Farage’s return to front-line politics this week not only promises a vastly more exciting campaign, but the possibility of an eventual realignment of British politics.