LEO McKINSTRY: Labour and the Left are desperate to destroy Nigel Farage this year – because his success spells their doom
Reform UK begins the New Year in the same commanding position that it started 2025. Far from collapsing under the pressure of intensified scrutiny, as Nigel Farage’s enemies had hoped, his party flourished throughout the year. Reform’s continuing domination of the British political landscape is a remarkable achievement, given it has only five MPs and was created just seven years ago. In that short space of time, it has become a formidable, vote-winning machine.
Its current total of over 268,000 paid-up members makes it Britain’s largest political party, having recently overtaken Labour whose activist base has reportedly shrunk under Keir Starmer to less than 250,000. Organisational muscle is accompanied by sustained popularity. Farage’s party has topped 175 consecutive opinion polls, with an average lead of 10 points. If such figures were replicated at the next General Election, the outcome would be a crushing Parliamentary majority for Reform.
The party’s depth of support is further illustrated by the results of municipal contests during 2025. Reform was the overwhelming victor at the local elections last May, winning 677 seats and outright control of ten authorities, while the Conservatives and Labour jointly lost nearly 900 seats. That pattern continued for the remainder of the year.
In addition to winning their first Parliamentary by-election in Runcorn, Reform made a net gain of 58 seats in council by-elections. No part of the nation can be regarded as a Farage exclusion zone, as shown by recent town hall triumphs in West Lothian, Scotland and Bromley in London. After the Reform win in Bromley, local Labour MP Liam Conlon warned his activists: “This is the first Reform councillor to be elected anywhere in London, and I fear it marks the start of a new trend.”
Yet, paradoxically, Labour is the key driving force behind the rise of Reform. It is the Starmer Government’s mix of incompetence, cowardice and dogma that has been Reform’s greatest recruiting sergeant. It is the front-bench’s contempt for Britain’s democracy, identity and heritage which had fed the demand for a patriotic alternative to the woke ruling elite.
By far the most compelling propagandists for Reform are Sir Keir and his own gruesome Cabinet colleagues as they dream up new fiascos like the provision of expensive hotel accommodation for illegal immigrants or the fawning welcome given to vile antisemitic Egyptian radical Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
The popularity of Reform is not hard to explain. After decades of establishment misrule, voters yearn for a party that prefers genuine equality to cultural diversity, that wants the police to tackle real crime rather than censor speech, that thinks hard work should be rewarded, not punished, and believes that our welfare state should be primarily for British citizens.
Roy Jenkins at 1982 SDP conference was last politician to really challenge two-party status quo (Image: Mirrorpix)
What Farage has done so brilliantly is both to articulate the widespread despair at the state of Britain, and to convince much of the public that Reform could enact real change. In 2026, with important elections coming up in the devolved assemblies of Scotland and Wales, as well as a host of municipalities and mayoralties in England, he has a golden chance to consolidate Reform’s political ascendancy.
Even so, such a goal will be hard to attain. In seeking to break the traditional two-party duopoly, he aims to do something no politician has achieved since Labour superseded the Liberal party a century ago. The Social Democratic Party, led by Roy Jenkins, came close in the early 1980s but ultimately failed because it was unable to translate its popular backing into Commons representation.
The same bias in the voting system could work against Reform, especially if the parties of the left unite behind a strategy of tactical voting. Nor will the left hesitate to mount a campaign of character assassination against Farage, as we have already seen in the recent barrage of moth eaten accusations of bigotry from his schooldays.
But such ugly tactics just prove how effective he has been. Labour and the left are desperate to destroy his leadership precisely because his victory would spell their doom.
