Populist leader Nigel Farage unequivocally ruled out any deal with the faltering Tory Party, declaring that his Reform UK party is “here to stay” and is the only viable opposition with a chance to take down the leftist Labour Party government.
While Mr Farage and the previous incarnation of Reform UK, then named the Brexit Party, made an election pact with the Conservatives in the 2019 general election to give Boris Johnson a large majority to “get Brexit done”, no such alliance looks to be on the cards to save the Tories after their disastrous defeat to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in July.
“Reform is here to stay. The Tories had their chance and they blew it. All talk of whether a future deal between me and the Conservatives can be done is irrelevant. It is not even on my agenda, I simply don’t trust them,” Farage wrote in The Telegraph.
The comments from the Brexit boss come as the remaining four Tory leadership candidates — self-styled culture warrior Kemi Badenoch, establishment darling James Cleverly, war hawk Tom Tugendhat, and alleged immigration “hardliner” Robert Jenrick — continue to make their pitches to members at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
Farage said that “it makes very little difference” to him who the Tories select to replace failed PM Rishi Sunak at the head of the party, saying that according to internal polling, Reform voters “loathe” the Conservatives as they feel “completely let down by them”.
“They are no longer trusted,” he wrote, pointing to failures of the establishment party to fulfil multiple campaign promises to the public to cut migration to the tens of thousands, while allowing net migration to soar to over 1.2 million over their final two years in power.
Mr Farage also pointed to failures in ending the illegal migrant crisis in the English Channel and the previous Tory government’s move to raise taxes to their highest level since the Second World War while supposedly being the party of low taxes.
“The truth is that the Conservative brand is broken. It may recover, but I believe it will be many years before that day comes. In Birmingham, activists and parliamentarians seem oblivious to all of this,” Farage said.
“Our aim is not to reach a compromise with the Conservatives. It is to replace them as the real opposition to a socialist Labour Party that is in trouble already. Ambitious? Yes. Impossible? No,” he added.
The Reform leader argued that there is a fundamental “misunderstanding” about the political landscape in the West, asserting that the “old centrist, conservative, stuffy approach to politics no longer inspires” voters on the right, pointing to the takeover of the Republican Party in the United States by Donald Trump and the victory over the weekend of the populist Freedom Party over establishment parties in Austria.
Therefore, Farage said that the ultimate ambition of his party will be to convince Labour Party voters to defect and join the ranks of the populist movement, pointing to polls showing a movement of support towards Reform amid growing anger towards the early failures and scandals surrounding Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
Meanwhile, Reform is seeing noticeable momentum, with party membership more than doubling since the election to nearly 90,000. In July’s election, the Farage party win over 4.1 million votes equating to 14 per cent of the vote, a significant accomplishment given Farage only returned to frontline politics weeks before ballots were cast.
Due the first-past-the-post voting system, this only equated to five seats in Parliament. However, a point for optimism was the strong second place finishes for the party in 98 constituencies, 89 of which in Labour districts.
Most of these came in the so-called “red wall” areas of the country, traditional working-class Labour strongholds, which voted heavily for Brexit and therefore may be willing to side once again with Mr Farage in the next election.
“Political historians will say that the Conservatives can recover and Reform will fade away, but I don’t believe them. I’m used to being told that I’m wrong. For years, people told me we would never leave the EU. They said I was wasting my time. But I kept going and we won,” he said.