It’s a question successive Conservative premiers proved unable, or unwilling, to answer: what is Nigel Farage’s political kryptonite, his soft underbelly — his Achilles heel?
The now-Reform UK leader’s rise from fringe Eurosceptic to, some say, prime minister-in-waiting is without precedent in British political life. Farage maintains he is on the verge of forging an epochal reconstitution of our politics: the logical and inexorable consequence of his decades-long agitation. In fact, before he set foot in parliament as the MP for Clacton — duly elected on his eighth attempt in 2024 — Farage declared himself “the real leader of the opposition”.
It was a characteristically headstrong challenge to the Conservative Party and its future leader — but also to Keir Starmer, the prime minister, whose job Farage now covets.
Much of this routine is familiar: for years the Reform chief has insisted, with little regard to his party’s polling, that only he can authentically articulate Britain’s national voice. The 2029 general election will present his chance to do so in a de jure sense, from the steps of Downing Street — behind the prime minister’s lectern.
The problem posed of Reform’s opponents is how to engage with Farage without tacitly accepting his grandiose (and eccentric) account of his prospects. Similarly, long before the EU referendum in 2016, the Reform leader thrived by hijacking his opponent’s arguments and weaponising them as part of a narrative of betrayal. He confects rows on terms inherently favourable to him. That is what it means to fight Farage on his own turf: he is boxer, referee and judge. He proclaims himself victor before bloodying his opponent to prove it.
In 2024, the Reform leader — ringmaster of the right — proved so successful in ensuring his Tory opponents danced to his tune that they forgot he was an adversary. A populist pied piper, he marched the Conservative Party to and from issues and, eventually, off an electoral cliff edge.
Today, Farage is the lead spokesperson of a band of five MPs — a frankly puny parliamentary force. But our parliament’s constitution and political reality have long since diverged — if they were ever aligned at all. Consider not Reform’s “bridgehead”, but its arriving reinforcements. An Opinium poll last week placed the party on 27 per cent — one point behind Labour and a full six points ahead of the Conservatives. It is a common formulation these days: Reform has leapfrogged the Tories and is vying with Labour for outright supremacy.
In the near term, Farage continues to benefit from Conservative foundering. Having spent much of her tenure as Tory leader tumbling into Reform traps, Kemi Badenoch has made her party’s existential predicament worse, not better.
The row Badenoch was baited into over the 2024 festive period is an instructive case in point. On Boxing Day, a digital tracker on Reform’s website recorded its membership numbers as surpassing 131,680 — the figure declared by the Conservative Party following its recent leadership election. Badenoch, having absolutely none of it, said Reform’s counter was “coded to tick up automatically” in a lengthy statement published to X/Twitter.
“Farage doesn’t understand the digital age”, she added. “This kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly, although not before many are fooled.”
Hook. Line. Sinker.
Farage responded by saying he would “gladly invite” a firm to audit Reform’s membership numbers — as long as the Conservatives did the same. By the time media sleuths from the Financial Times, Telegraph and Sky News verified Reform’s numbers, Badenoch’s blunder was already driving the news agenda.
Wes ups the ante
The Reform-Tory relationship, in fairness, is complicated.
Some form of reconciliation on the right is the subject of incessant speculation, with senior Tories — namely Lord Frost and Suella Braverman — having recently restated their support for an official right-wing liaison. Badenoch has come out fighting, in part, to put such speculation to bed. But her maladroit interventions have only bolstered Reform’s prominence — and therefore those voices promoting accommodation. It’s a continuation of the same demoralising doom loop that possessed the party under Rishi Sunak.
The Reform-Labour relationship is straightforwardly adversarial and therefore less complicated. But for months following the election, Labour remained pointedly cautious when prompted by Farage — reticent of tripping any Reform traps. Starmer ducked Farage’s first PMQ on “two-tier policing” in September, mentioning neither the Reform leader nor his chosen topic in his 160-word answer.
It denied Farage the totemic clash he surely craved. But developments since have rendered Labour’s wish Reform away sentiment untenable.
Step forward Wes Streeting, Labour vanguard. Addressing the Fabian Society conference on Saturday, the health secretary vowed to “take on the populists” and “defeat them in the battle of ideas”. Streeting quickly practised his preaching: he told delegates Reform would “put the NHS as a universal service, free at the point of use” at risk.
Farage’s response came, inevitably, via X. “Wes Streeting is so scared of Reform that he has now resorted to lying about our plans for the NHS”, he argued. The health secretary hit back by quoting Farage at Farage: “The funding of the NHS… is a total failure. The French do it much better with less funding. There is a lesson there. If you can afford it, you pay; if you can’t, you don’t. It works incredibly well.”
“‘If you can afford it, you pay’ is not free at the point of delivery”, Streeting protested. “They’re your words, not mine. And I thought you were straight talking…”
Farage was prompted again on Reform’s health policy in a Sunday morning interview on LBC. He said he was “open to anything”.
Streeting pounced on the comments. “So there we have it straight from the horse’s mouth: Nigel Farage says he is ‘open to anything’ when it comes to replacing Britain’s NHS with ‘an insurance-based model’.
“With Reform, our NHS would be reduced to a poor service for poor people, with working people forced to pay to go private… Every single voter considering Reform needs to ask themselves if they could afford to pay for health insurance like patients have to elsewhere?
“There are elections in just three months time. Voters deserve straight talking from Reform about their plans to move to health insurance.”
It was a novel exchange: a call and response with Farage conducted on terms that do not favour him politically — a stark contrast to the Conservative Party’s attempts to confront the Reform leader over the past decade.
This “Save our NHS from Farage” tactic is the latest product, it would seem, of Starmerism’s ideological and strategic laboratory: Labour Together. The think tank’s chief executive, former Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth, warned of “Nigel Farage’s shocking plan for the NHS” in a recent op-ed for the Daily Mirror.
This line of argument and the prosecution of it by Streeting — Labour’s most creative communicator — is no doubt a sign of things to come.
Farage’s fallibility
It is right that Labour is beginning to compose and hone its Farage-facing attack lines. The upstart party is already too big to ignore. But Starmer’s foremost challenge will be to capitalise on the mistakes the Reform leader makes all by himself.
Farage’s rise to prominence has not been inexorable or irresistible. It has developed over several years and in waves — characterised by troughs as well as peaks. During the 2024 general election campaign, indeed, Reform’s insurgency often found itself stalled by damaging revelations and unforced errors. Farage himself was criticised for suggesting the West “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by expanding the European Union and NATO military alliance eastwards. It was a conversation that, at best, distracted from Reform’s central election pitch and, at worst, repelled potential voters.
Next, a Channel 4 News exposé filmed Reform activists in Clacton making racist and homophobic remarks, with one referring to the then-prime minister using a slur. Reform candidates up and down the country, concurrently, won national headlines for conspiracy-laden comments.
Following the summer riots, Farage’s popularity took a notable dent after he was accused of encouraging some of the early online misinformation — comments he later blamed on internet misogynist Andrew Tate. His favourability ratings resultantly tumbled among “Leave” voters in the 2016 EU referendum and 2024 Conservative backers.
Even more recently, Farage’s online liaison with tech billionaire Elon Musk was unceremoniously ended after the latter concluded he “does not have what it takes”. This saga proved especially prescient as it underlined, anew, Farage’s fallibility at a moment of apparent ascendancy.
Still today, the Reform leader’s news-generating embrace of the Online Right deludes him. He continues to insist that Musk is popular in Britain — contrary to all available polling data.
Hope?
Labour’s battle with Reform this parliament will be one of attrition. There is no panacea for populism; victory will never be truly total. Rather, a successful response will involve steadily driving a wedge between the Reform leader and his target voters, by engaging in precise battles over policy and values.
Badenoch, as Conservative leader, risks rowing her party into irrelevance. The desperate spiral of Conservative placation, replication and validation of Reform-style politics has accelerated under her watch. The balance Starmer strikes will need to be significantly finer — and strictly cognisant of Farage’s reputational baggage.
Rhetoric and political strategy are important, of course. But Starmer’s worthiest weapons are his policy levers: only successful, sustained and felt delivery will stem the populist tide in the long term. In the end, progress (or lack thereof) will dictate the prime minister’s fate — as it has centrist bastions the world over in recent years.
Faragism thrives, like its international counterparts, in a milieu of deepening disillusion.
Nigel Farage’s hamartia would be his innate pessimism. But first Labour must inspire hope.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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Source: Politics