Nigel Farage, Reform UK are still a long way from peaking: Adrian Wooldridge

Key topics:Reform UK’s poll lead may be peaking as Farage’s ratings slideImmigration easing could blunt Reform’s core appealAnti-establishment anger still fuels Reform’s momentum.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Adrian Wooldridge.The political scientist Samuel Lubell argued that US politics was divided between two parties: the “party of the sun” and the “party of the moon.” The party of the sun set the political agenda while the party of the moon merely reflected the moon’s light.One of the many oddities of British politics is that a party with a mere five members of Parliament is the current “party of the sun.” Reform UK has enjoyed a commanding lead in the opinion polls, the God of modern politics, for eight months. The only consistent theme in the Labour government’s flimflam politics is trying to hobble Reform leader Nigel Farage.Which makes it even more significant that several polls suggest Reform’s lead has peaked. A constituency-by-constituency poll by More in Common this month showed the party’s vote share slipping to 31% from its summer high of 35%. Just as important for a one-man movement, opinion of Farage has fallen still further. More than half of voters view him “very unfavorably.”.Read more:.Nigel Farage isn’t unstoppable after all. Reform appears to have hit a ceiling: Rosa Prince.There are lots of reasons for the softening. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has been doing much better since her party conference in October. Feisty and quick-witted, she regularly humbles Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions. Farage has been battered by accusations that he was a racist bully at school. A surge in support for the Green Party under its combative left-wing boss, Zack Polanski, is attracting voters who want to beat the establishment with whatever stick is available.A couple of bigger problems should give Reform’s high command pause for thought, too. One is that there are signs of immigration being brought under control, possibly diluting a key party selling point. Net migration in the year to June was 204,000, less than a quarter of what it was at the peak of the so-called Boris wave, named after the prime minister who presided over the surge. Warwick University’s James Bowes suggests we may see yearly net migration collapsing to about 50,000 by the summer and turning negative by Christmas.The other concern is that being No.1 is a mixed blessing. Reform goes into the May local-government elections — Britain’s equivalent of America’s midterms — with a weight of expectations on its shoulders. Every Farage faux pas, such as his recent freebie-laden trip to the United Arab Emirates, attracts scrutiny. People who hate Reform — and there are lots of them — will be tempted to vote tactically to stop it from getting near power.What are we to make of all this? The polling evidence is, in fact, mixed. The More in Common poll gives even a weakened Reform a majority of 112 seats. The party is advancing into once hostile territory. A recent Ipsos poll puts it in second place in Scotland, with 18% of the vote compared with 16% for Labour, once the dominant party north of the border, and 11% for the Conservatives. The Scottish nationalists lead on 35%.A survey of users of Mumsnet, a website traditionally dominated by left-leaning mothers, shows Reform as the most popular political party, with 20% of users planning to vote for it.Reform is also addressing some of its biggest weaknesses — that it is a one-man band with no policies and a collection of swivel-eyed loons given to casual racism. The party has more members than any other UK rival, about 280,000, despite being only five years old. It is also working hard to maintain a cordon sanitaire against the far right, recently choosing a Muslim, Laila Cunningham, as its candidate for London mayor.The party remains light on policy, particularly economic policy. But it can draw on the advice of a new populist think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, as well as longer established right-of-center think tanks, which are building bridges with the party. Reform also enjoys something more important than volumes of policy papers: confidence that it is serious about its defining policies, getting rid of net zero, killing woke and controlling immigration.This week the party attracted its biggest defector to date, Nadhim Zahawi, a former Tory chancellor of the exchequer and ex-party chairman. Zahawi is not a sitting MP, unlike the previous high-profile defector, Danny Kruger, and his time at the summit of Tory politics was rocky. He resigned as chancellor after just 48 hours, in protest against Boris Johnson’s chaotic premiership, and Rishi Sunak sacked him as chairman over accusations that he failed to pay all the taxes due on the sale of his polling business, YouGov. His arrival nevertheless provides Reform with hard-earned political experience as well as boosting its sense of momentum.And the likelihood that immigration will fade as an issue is small. Many Reform-inclined voters are just as worried about what might be called stock as well as flow. Immigration rose from about 7,800 a year in 1951-2001 to 247,000 a year under the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, 318,000 under Tory Prime Minister David Cameron and 850,000 a year under Johnson, putting enduring pressure on infrastructure. The twin dilemma of illegal boats and asylum hotels will continue to fester.Failing to meet expectations is more of a problem. But Labour has handed Reform a get-out-of-jail-free card by postponing May’s elections in some local authorities on supposed cost grounds. Reform may even be able to create a myth of a “stolen election.” As for tactical voting, that could as easily work to Reform’s advantage as against it, with an angry electorate voting for whoever has the best chance of unseating Labour.British politics is unusually hard to fathom at present because we have five parties trying to fit into a first-past-the-post system that naturally favors a two-party system. But two issues are galvanizing voters today.First, people want to give the political establishment a kicking. This desire is particularly focused on Labour, with Starmer the most unpopular prime minister since polling began, but it extends to the Conservatives, who are as unpopular an opposition party as we’ve seen. It will take more than a few good performances at PMQ’s to wipe out the memory of 14 traumatic, wasted years under Tory-led governments..Read more:.The Economist: The Farage power project - Reform UK on track to govern UK.The second thing driving voters is national identity rather than the old motivation of state versus market. Stephen Davies argues in a new book, The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay, that we are seeing a reordering of British politics comparable to 1900, when the rise of the Labour Party replaced the politics of religion with that of class. He adds that a similar alignment is taking place across the rich world — and that temporary blips in populist support have always been followed by renewed advances.A wobble in the polls or no wobble, Farage remains the Sun King of British politics and all his rivals, Starmer as much as Johnson or Theresa May before him, are mere moons..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Nigel Farage, Reform UK are still a long way from peaking: Adrian Wooldridge

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