Call me a nerd, but I woke up the other morning in a cold sweat after a dream / nightmare. Prime Minister Nigel Farage was waving from the steps of No 10 with Robert Jenrick (it didn’t specify whether he was chancellor or home secretary) by his side. It was election night 2029 and a Reform / Tory merger or pact had come to victorious pass. Kemi Badenoch? Nowhere in sight. Then came the congratulatory phone call from “King” Donald Trump who, apparently, had succeeded in his constitution twisting lust for a third term.
Wide awake, I consoled myself with the thought it had been triggered by too much time reading, viewing and talking on air about this extraordinary week in which Trump 2.0’s wrecking ball approach to the world order hit the 100-day milestone and, in England, local elections and a parliamentary by-election arguably redefining the political landscape and setting the tone for the next general election.
Back in February, with the headline Mayday May Day, my InPublishing column began: “The UK local elections date of May 1st could send out a political and media distress signal against the backdrop of Reform’s seemingly unstoppable populist surge in the opinion polls. Donald Trump’s return to the White House and Elon Musk’s determination / presumption that he has the power to decide how Britain is run and who by.” (In the last lap of the campaign, both the Tories and Reform revived the Musk attack line against the government’s failure to launch a ‘Grooming Gang’ statutory inquiry — an undeniable Achiiles heel in the court of public opinion.)
If the polls are right, I may have underestimated the Farage / Reform populist surge and he really could be our next prime minister, albeit most likely as the leader of a ‘Unite the Right’ electoral pact or party merger, concocted with duplicitous Robert Jenrick and his allies. Even Scotland’s SNP first minister, John Swinney, has told interviewers there is a ‘high likelihood’ Farage will become prime minister, certain right wing newspapers are tilting that way and Britain’s foremost pollster Sir John Curtice has forecast Reform will be the ‘big winners’ — and the dominant post May 1st political media story. Sir John is almost certainly right when he says, “We are entering the five party age”.
Farage grabs the media limelight
Certainly, during the campaign, it was Farage who has attracted the biggest headlines, the biggest, slickest rallies and more journalists following every footstep on the campaign trail. With donations flooding in (often from wealthy ex Tory bankrollers), Reform is undoubtedly a more professional outfit than Farage’s previous excursions into party leadership; witness the young men in designer suits outnumbering middle-aged blokes in tweeds playing key organisational roles. Reform also generally outsmarted their main rivals on the social media front. As one of the travelling press pack followers, the Sunday Times’s Harry Yorke put it: “The Reform leader is swinging away from his roots, courting the unions and backing protectionism.” Exemplified by Farage rushing to the Scunthorpe steelworks (on camera naturally), meeting job-threatened workers and being the first to advocate nationalisation; all part of the Reform strategy of seducing disillusioned voters from both Labour and Tory ranks. It provoked a ferocious response from TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak who accused Farage in The Guardian of being a “political fraud and hypocrite, ‘cosplaying’ as a working class champion”, simply to win votes on May Day.
With mixed success, Farage has also endeavoured to put some distance between Reform and the more fanatical, violent populist movements across Europe and America’s hardcore MAGA warriors.
Let me be clear here: although as a left-leaning commentator (who sometimes appears as an alternative guest on Farage’s GB News show) I disagree with almost everything he and Reform stand for, not least the folly of Brexit. But I also accept that Farage has been the most significant single political influencer of his generation and, undoubtedly, the most charismatic stage performer. Just count the number of references by journalists, both left and right, comparing his energetic, bouncing without notes campaign speeches with the prime minister’s static, constant script-checking style.
But there is one issue on which I agree with Farage. These local elections and the next general election may well begin to sound the death knell for Britain’s two-party dominated, first past the post electoral system. Not before time, perhaps, and in line with Sir John Curtice’s prediction (above).
Populism back with a vengeance
It was significant that the current edition of The Economist is dominated by a close-up cover image of the Reform leader in his very expensive shades, with the indisputable headline ‘THE MAN BRITAIN CANNOT IGNORE’. Inside a leader concedes, “Nigel Farage’s return means a new, more volatile era in British politics”. Hardly members of the Farage fan club, the Economist leader continued: “Today, Populism is back in Britain with a vengeance. In council elections on May 1st Reform UK, the party led by the architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage, is poised to inflict heavy losses on the Conservatives, Mr Farage is once again up-ending politics, with grave implications for Britain and its role in Europe. That is because his second act threatens to be more audacious than his first: the pursuit not of Brexit, but of power.
“The idea that national office is within Mr Farage’s grasp probably sounds fantastical. Britain has a Labour government with a supersize majority. Many of his views are unpopular, notably his excuse-making for Vladimir Putin. What makes Reform a contender is a quirk in Britain’s first past the post electoral system. In the modern political era it has behaved like a pendulum, granting one or other of two big parties a large and predictable majority even if they only win a third of the vote. But Reform has been polling at 20-26% since December. Lately it has been polling slightly ahead of the Conservatives and Labour. With three parties in this range, tiny shifts in voting can produce dramatically different results. Today’s polling could give Reform over 230 seats in a general election; just a 2% increase close to 300, only 30 or so short of an absolute majority.
“The next general election is still as much as four years away. But when it comes, this slot machine could give Mr Farage a jackpot. If he thinks a majority is unlikely, he could strike a pre-election pact with the Tories to carve up the electoral map, and share power with the government. Or he could refuse a pact and, in a hung parliament, install the Tories in a government that depended on his support for its survival. Whatever his title, he would call the shots.”
As it happens, I hadn’t read the Economist ahead of my dream / nightmare. And, although it cited Farage’s pro-Putin history as a potential barrier to his ambition, the leader curiously omits any reference to his long ties to President Trump as another.
But that’s a theme seized on by Andrew Neil in his April 19th Daily Mail column headlined: ‘Farage beware! No politician aspiring to win power can afford to align themselves with Trump’s dumpster fire’. Neil warned: “Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party should take urgent note. One of the unforeseen aspects of Trump’s presidency is that he has proved a boon to struggling left-wing wing governments in foreign countries.”
Effectively, Neil’s column accurately predicted how Canada’s election (also held in this extraordinary political week) would see its once-doomed Liberal government, under the new leadership of former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, overturn a 20%-plus poll deficit into a victory based almost entirely on hostility to Trump and his tariffs, lies about trade imbalances and demented demand that Canada should become the 51st state of the US with a mere governor instead of a prime minister. Farage is also savvy enough to have noted that, for all his bombast and the MAGA hard core, Trump has just chalked up the lowest 100 day poll ratings of any US president in history.
Even before that figure emerged, Andrew Neil wrote: “There is a lesson in all of this for Farage. His Reform UK party is riding high, poised to make significant gains in the May local elections, when it is contesting nearly all seats. It is favourite to win the by-election on the same day at Runcorn and Helsby too, Labour’s 16th safest seat, with a majority of almost 15,000. It would confirm Reform as the indisputable insurgent of British politics, with the power to make the political weather. It would consolidate Reform’s credentials as the main threat to Labour, whose Northern Red Wall seats are under siege from Reform, and provoke a crisis in the Tory party, relegated to third place in most polls.
“So the prize for Reform is huge — and it’s not clear Trump is any help in winning it”, he argued, pointing out in both Britain and Australia 70% of the public see the US president as bad for their countries and Farage has been far closer to Trump than right wing leaders Down Under or in Canada.
Meanwhile Neil’s Trump cheerleader, fellow Mail columnist Boris Johnson finally went to war with POTUS over his Ukraine peace plan that the former prime minister protested offered “heroic” Ukraine nothing and aggressor Russia everything. “It’s time for Donald Trump to take the boot off Ukraine’s neck and put the squeeze on Putin”, he demanded. So what took you so long, Boris?
Trump becomes Farage's liability?
Back to Andrew Neil who stressed, “There are signs that Farage has already clocked that Trump could be something of a liability... the Reform leader has wisely not endorsed Trump’s tariffs and seems to have cut back on trips to America. His messaging in the current elections — ‘Britain is broken’ and ‘fix the council, fix the country’ is more geared to current British sensibilities than any MAGA pitch.”
But what Neil doesn’t reference is that Farage has also been lucky in the sense that, with that elusive US/UK ‘special’ trade deal in mind, neither Labour nor Tory leaders have particularly targeted his own ‘special relationship’ history with Trump. And, for once, Farage is playing it down on the campaign trail. The LibDems and Greens, who both stand to score well in this week’s voting, haven’t been so restrained and one of the intriguing political, media and academic analyses after May Day will be how much the ‘Trump factor’ played?
But the spectre of his pro-Trump, pro-Putin history could still come to haunt Farage’s prospects of power in a fiercely fought, no-holds-barred general election. A sellout of Ukraine to Putin by Trump, the economic repercussions for the UK of a protracted trade / tariff war, failure to offer Britain a favourable trade deal or even a disastrous and unpopular state visit just some of the factors that could come decisively into play.
In an InPublishing column soon after the US election, I predicted the narcissist I once knew well personally would seek to make himself the nearest thing to an absolute American ‘king’ than anyone since George III, by surrounding himself with a court of loyal sycophants. To my amusement, not only did some leading US media platforms mockingly adopt the ‘King Donald’ tag but some members of his administration openly began deploying the K-word. A politically astute friend of mine, horrified by Trump’s chaotic, despotic obsession with disrupting the world, demolishing America’s institutions, perverting its legal system and constitution and intimidating the media, this week suggested that another English king makes a more appropriate analogy than poor mad George... Canute’s the name. Fair point.
Just two days before the May Day ballot box test, another prominent Conservative columnist weighed in. Under the headline, ‘Don’t panic! Here’s how to see off Reform’, former party leader and foreign secretary, William Hague, acknowledged, “When the results of this week’s elections roll in on Friday with serious gains for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, both main parties might wonder whether the time has come to panic. But Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have had to fight Farage with one hand behind their backs. Britain is seeking to flatter Trump into a trade deal and its leaders are constrained from pointing out that Farage has spent years cheering on the president whose policies are already having disastrous effects.
“The signs are that many British voters are still some distance from seeing Farage as Donald Trump with a pint. Reform is likely to gain hundreds of council seats, win more votes than any other party and run Labour close in a by-election in one of its safest seats... by this weekend we will be looking at Farage being carried aloft by triumphant supporters while doom-laden commentaries look ahead to the fall of the Labour government and the extinction of the Tories...
“Both Conservatives and Labour will need to calm themselves, avoid panic and understand that Reform is entirely beatable, provided ‘business as usual’ in politics and government is ditched. For Reform to make a major breakthrough in a general election is still very hard; they lack support among women voters and their tendency to take mainly Conservative votes means they would help Labour hold onto many of its seats where Conservatives are in second place. This week’s results will not mean Farage is cruising to No 10.”
The same day, The Times ran a prominent page 3 news story claiming that the UK government is seeking to switch the prestigious British Open Golf Championship to Trump’s Turnberry course in Scotland as part of the trade deal wooing process.
So will Sir Keir and Kemi Badenoch along with an excitable UK media feel as sanguine as Hague by the end of the May Day bank holiday weekend? I wouldn’t count on it.
