At first, Nigel Farage kept his cool. When protesters disrupted the victory speech by Farage, a veteran British politician, anti-immigrant activist and ally of former President Donald J. Trump, he ignored them.
But as the chaos continued at Friday’s press conference, Mr Farage began to respond to the critics, shouting “boring!” into the microphone no fewer than nine times.
With Mr Farage around, things are rarely dull, as Britain’s centre-right Conservative Party has just discovered to its cost.
Driven from power after 14 years by a landslide victory for Labour, the Conservatives suffered their worst defeat in modern history, a stunning loss that left the party’s remnants in disarray. In contrast, Mr Farage’s small rebel party, Reform UK, is on the right track, and has elevated him to the role of a determining factor in the future of the British political right – and perhaps the direction of the country altogether.
His presence on the political stage and his tough, anti-immigration rhetoric could have a crucial influence on the trajectory of the Conservatives, whose leader, former prime minister Rishi Sunak, said on Friday he would step down once a successor is chosen.
Not only did Reform candidates win five seats in Parliament – including Farage’s, for the first time after eight attempts – but the party also won around 14% of the national vote. By this measure, Reform is the third-best performing party in Britain, comparable to France’s rising right-wing National Rally.
“Reform has to be a serious challenge not just for the Conservatives but also for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent, of Britain’s new Labour prime minister. “The question is: can Nigel Farage put together an organisation, a party structure and a professional operation that can achieve what he has historically struggled to do with his previous parties?”
Bombastic, pugilistic and charismatic, Mr. Farage, 60, is a polarizing figure who has long been an irritant in the Conservative Party, which he left in 1992. During that time, he and his allies were often sidelined and ridiculed — including once by David Cameron, a former leader who called supporters of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, which Mr. Farage then led, “theweirdos, lunatics and closet racists.
But it was pressure from UKIP that forced Mr Cameron to promise a Brexit referendum, which he ultimately lost in 2016, ending his time in Downing Street.
Mr Farage recently retired from politics and I decided to run in the general election at the last minute. But his impact has been electric, with his anti-immigration campaign striking a chord with Conservatives, whose government has presided over a tripling of legal immigration since Britain left the European Union.
“He has a way with people,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “He’s a consummate political communicator and he has the charisma that a lot of more traditional politicians struggle to match, because they have to deal with real issues rather than invented ones.”
Some right-wing Conservatives would like Farage to return to their party. Others fear he will alienate their moderate voters.
He suggested that the Reformers could supplant the Conservatives and that he might even engineer a takeover of the party.
But without doing either, he has already proven the threat he poses.
In 2019, the Brexit Party, then led by Mr Farage, chose not to run candidates against many Conservative lawmakers, avoiding the risk of a right-wing vote split and helping Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, win a landslide victory.
Last week, Farage’s new party fought elections across the country, losing dozens of seats to the Conservatives. Professor Goodwin calculated that in about 180 constituencies, the vote for Reform was larger than the Conservatives’ margin of defeat.
“They have problems on a number of fronts,” Professor Goodwin said, noting that the Conservatives had lost votes to Labour and the centrist Liberal Democrats, “but Farage is by far the biggest problem the Conservatives face.”
The party now faces a crucial decision about who should lead it and what kind of policies to adopt.
One faction wants a shift to the right to combat the Reform Party, which in general elections has eaten away at the Conservative Party in pro-Brexit areas in the north and centre of the country, often making it easier for Labour to win. Professor Goodwin argued that post-Brexit, support for the Conservative Party is now more concentrated among more socially conservative and anti-Europe voters.
But the Conservatives also lost votes to Labour and the small, pro-European, centrist Liberal Democrats, which won 72 seats by focusing its campaign on more socially liberal Conservative constituencies in southern England.
“The Conservatives lost this election on two fronts, but they seem much more concerned about one than the other,” Professor Bale said. The Conservatives appear to be blaming the Reform Party for their defeat, he said, while ignoring the fact that the right-wing policies they promised to counter the Farage threat have cost them votes in the political centre.
The final choice of Conservative candidate is made by party members who tend to be older and more right-wing than the average Briton. “It is hard to imagine a more moderate Conservative being chosen by members who are so unrepresentative of the average voter ideologically and demographically,” said Professor Bale.
To complicate matters for the moderates, their pool of credible candidates was reduced when Penny Mordaunt, a senior minister, lost her seat in the election, putting her out of the running.
This has boosted the chances of right-wing candidates, including Priti Patel, a former home secretary, Kemi Badenoch, a former trade and business secretary, and Suella Braverman, another former home secretary. Some of her comments have echoed Farage’s, and she has described the arrival of asylum seekers in small boats on Britain’s south coast as an “invasion”.
Some Conservatives hope that the scandal-prone but charismatic Mr Johnson – who did not stand for re-election – might eventually return to combat the reformist threat.
The candidate most likely to welcome Farage into the Conservative ranks is Ms Braverman, and analysts say she has no chance of becoming party leader. Most of her rivals are wary of Farage, perhaps sensing that he would be well placed to eclipse them.
“I don’t think we’ll see a Conservative Party involved in Farage for a long time; he just doesn’t believe in the Conservative Party,” Professor Goodwin said.
Speaking before the election, Farage told the New York Times that he could “really not see that the Conservative Party as we know it is fit for purpose: Brexit has exposed the divisions between the two very clear wings of the party.” Asked if he would rejoin, Farage replied: “That’s not going to happen.”
Assuming this is true, much depends on his ability to transform the new British Reform Party, which has only a skeletal infrastructure, into a force capable of contesting the next general election, which is due by 2029.
Whether it can do this is not clear. In the local elections, Reform fared worse than UKIP, suggesting that its base is uneven and demonstrating that it is what Professor Bale calls an “astroturf party rather than a grassroots party”.
Racist and homophobic comments Statements by some reformist activists and candidates have sparked outrage, highlighting the party’s difficulty in selecting its main supporters.
As leader of the Reform Party, Farage has struggled to delegate or share the limelight. He also has a reputation for falling out with colleagues.
Mr Farage “clearly finds it very difficult to tolerate any form of opposition or alternative direction for the party suggested by anyone else,” Prof Bale said.
“He is the one-man band par excellence.”
