As Reform UK revels in its success in last week’s local elections – winning 1,450 council seats – the idea of prime minister Nigel Farage no longer looks like a pipe dream for the Clacton MP.
In response to Friday’s results, Farage said this is “a truly historic shift in British politics,” and that these results would not be a “one-off”.
There is no doubt that the party has capitalised on public frustration over immigration, living standards and distrust in Westminster – and has gone from a fringe movement to a serious force in British politics. But, can Reform UK keep growing – or has it peaked?
Michael Crick, Jonn Elledge and Zoë Grünewald offer their perspectives.
Some people seem to think it’s all but certain that Nigel Farage will be prime minister within two or three years. But hold your horses. Stand back from the crowd. It’s far from certain – indeed, unlikely.
True, last week’s election results were a stunning achievement for Reform – a historic moment. Farage’s forces trounced all the others in Thursday’s local elections, winning hundreds more seats in our town halls than any other party, and significantly more votes.
Farage undoubtedly has all the momentum right now. But I am confident he won’t be occupying 10 Downing Street after the next Westminster election, due before the summer of 2029.
Despite last week’s results, regular opinion polls suggest the British people as a whole don’t want a party of the hard, nationalist right, led by a leading architect of Brexit, a good friend of Donald Trump and occasional admirer of Vladimir Putin.
The opinion polls got last week’s council results pretty much spot on, and they also show most people now think Brexit was a huge mistake, and that only about 15 per cent of British voters support Trump.
When Sir John Curtice and other election boffins projected last week’s results to work out each party’s notional, national share of the vote, the outcome was Reform got 26 per cent, compared with around 30 per cent in last year’s similar projection after the local elections.
The national projection for all the other parties and independents combined was 74 per cent. That means almost three times as many people voted against Farage and Reform as voted for them.
And while Labour suffered its worst election battering in decades, the local results suggest significantly more support for parties who are broadly on the left compared with those one could say are on the right.
The Greens got 18 per cent, just ahead of Labour’s 17 per cent, with 16 per cent for the Liberal Democrats. That’s a total of 51 per cent. Add in another three per cent for people for voted for the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru and you get around 54 per cent for parties of the left.
On the right, add Reform’s 26 per cent to the per cent achieved by Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives, and you reach 43 per cent for right-of-centre parties. So, 54 per cent for the left against 43 per cent for the right.
The trouble is that our first-past-the-post voting system disproportionately rewards parties who get the most votes. In the 2024 general election, outrageously, Labour were easily the biggest party even though they got only 33.7 per cent of the votes. That was barely a third of all ballots cast, yet Labour won 411 constituencies, almost two thirds of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
What will ensure Nigel Farage never becomes prime minister, and that Reform never forms a national government, is the growth of tactical voting. Many voters no longer choose the party they most want, but instead go for the party best placed to defeat the party they don’t want.
We already saw tactical voting at the 2024 general election, of course, on a bigger scale than ever before (though in that case, millions deserted their traditional preferred choice to support the party best-placed to beat the Conservatives).
In 2029, or whenever the next general election takes place, the UK will see even greater tactical voting than in 2024. In 2024, it was quite difficult to vote tactically because nearly all the constituencies had new boundaries, and it wasn’t always easy to know who was best-placed to beat the Conservatives.
In 2029, in contrast, voters will have not only the voting figures from 2024 to go on, but also figures from last week’s local elections, from the “locals” in 2025, and future local council polls in 2027, 2028 and even May 2029 to help work out the best party to stop Farage.
Anti-Reform groups will bombard voters with statistics on who, seat by seat, is most likely to defeat the Farage candidate. And AI will no doubt play a major role on working out the figures.
This tactical voting doesn’t involve a formal pact between parties, or any agreement or even a conversation. It’s just about informal understandings. As in 2024, Labour will devote people and money to certain seats, while the Lib Dems, Greens and Scottish and Welsh nationalists will prefer to concentrate on winning elsewhere. They’ll know what to do and where to do it without having to say a word, or to withdraw candidates.
Such tactical voting is limited in local elections like last week because many voters don’t know much about who’s best placed in their local council ward. In a national general election it will be very different: voters will often notice who is taking their seat seriously and campaigning hard, and who isn’t.
And we’ve already seen Farage and Reform thwarted by tactical voting in recent major electoral tests. In the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, many traditional Labour supporters and Lib Dems – maybe even some Conservatives – lent their votes to back the Green candidate Hannah Spencer, the former plumber, and ensured Reform were defeated in a seat where Farage began the contest with very high hopes.
We saw similar in a by-election for the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly, in Caerphilly last October, where tactical voting occurred on a huge scale. Once people realised Labour was unlikely to hold the seat, many lifelong Labour voters held their noses to vote for Plaid Cymru, and Plaid clearly picked up support from Tories and Lib Dems who were willing to abandon their traditional loyalties so as to halt Reform’s ambitions.
Indeed, nobody knows better than Farage the dangers of tactical voting to him and his party, and the danger that supporters of other parties will gang up to defeat him. That is exactly what happened in South Thanet in the 2015 general election, where Farage stood for Ukip with aspirations of becoming an MP for the first time.
Even though South Thanet had once been Labour, it was clear that in 2015 many Labour people in South Thanet voted Tory just to stop Farage, even though the Conservative candidate Craig Mackinlay was a former acting leader of Ukip and his views weren’t that different from Farage’s.
The Conservatives held South Thanet, and Farage almost immediately resigned as Ukip leader. Although Farage changed his mind three days later and returned as Ukip leader, he declined to fight the subsequent elections of 2017 and 2019, largely through feat that the other parties would always gang up to ensure he was never elected.
The challenge for Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and even some centrist Tories is to ensure that what happened in South Thanet in 2015, when Nigel Farage was denied his then-modest ambition of becoming an MP, is repeated on a national scale in 2029.