The Reform UK leader paraded a sharp new look as he celebrated his local election rout of the old parties – and the terrifying thing isn’t how ready he is for power, it’s how unready the rest of us are.
Meet the man with the slick, new haircut, trendy glasses, a healthy complexion and a deceptively inclusive-looking rainbow tie: it’s Nigel Farage – as you’ve never seen him before. The Reform UK leader’s striking “glow-up” – one part Tony Blair, three parts Austin Powers – is no accident. He wants us to know he’s serious. One day, he could lead this country into darkness, and we had better get used to it.
Donald Trump once called Boris Johnson “Britain Trump”. Well, here comes another one. Reform UK has already copied many pages out of the Trump playbook, such as attempts to launch Doge-style schemes to examine council spending, though the Reform version of Elon Musk’s Doge has predictably achieved nothing. Farage – who has always idolised Trump – has mimicked him in waging a war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and has said employees at Reform-run councils “better be seeking alternative careers very, very quickly”. He has called for the Bank of England to “embrace” crypto, another Trump classic. Farage also wants to abolish the BBC licence fee – coincidentally as Trump wages a $10bn lawsuit against the BBC in a defamation case that could effectively bankrupt the broadcaster.
The list goes on. It bears repeating, not least because half the country actively wants Nigel Farage to be our next elected prime minister, and the other half are only just waking up to that fact. In all likelihood, just as Trump is alienating his Maga base with his divisive and deeply unpopular attacks on Iran, a Reform party in power seems destined to spiral into ugly in-fighting. We have already seen former frontrunners like Rupert Lowe split from the party to launch his own, following allegations of bullying and threatening the party chairman, which he denies. Lowe claims he was “forced out” for being a “tall poppy” who was a direct risk to Farage. Even the remaining members of the party do not agree on key ideological issues: “30p Lee” Anderson has advocated for a return to the death penalty, as has current party chairman Dr David Bull – who says he supports it for “extreme cases” – but Farage has insisted it will not be official party policy.
Does anyone know what a “Reformed” Britain would look like? That is the thing about Reform – they are the living embodiment of all mouth and no trousers. For all the dog whistle politics, there is little substance. No rigorous breakdown of how it would work, how it would be funded, or how they would deliver a single policy pledge. That is precisely what makes them so dangerous. If Britain has already reached a point of crisis and collapse, just imagine what it could be like with Reform in charge in a few years.
Farage has vowed to keep healthcare in Britain “free at the time of delivery” but also wants to move to an insurance-based model for funding the NHS. Confused? We will probably see a pricey reinstatement of the Tory government’s botched Rwanda plan, and a possible introduction of Trump’s ICE programme in Britain. We have already heard Farage’s grim plans for mass deportations and the building of “concentration camp-style” internment centres in areas that are not under Reform control.
Yet for all their crowing about tackling immigration – the wedge issue that has won them power this week – the logistics are typically slippery. Reform has no chance of lowering the numbers substantially, and probably no intention to either. They just want to move the goalposts. They know their power lies in uniting their supporters around a common enemy: migrants. Every single pledge Reform makes feels like a wrong turn in a circus fun-house, or a wobbly step that turns out to be a trap-door. Take their promise to halve crime and introduce “harsher sentences for prisoners” – the party has committed to creating 30,000 new prison places but has not explained how it will pay for them, let alone address the problem of prison overcrowding and the backlog in the criminal justice system.
Britain certainly looks to be heading for a Trump 2.0 – or a Trump 1.75 – if the Reform swell continues to surge. This week, the Scottish Greens co-leader Ross Greer said that Reform were taking their campaigning tactics “straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook”. None of this is helped by our current state of isolation: we are already adrift from Europe, and Farage, the chief architect of Brexit, is more powerful than ever. It is deeply depressing. As Reform continues to sweep our lost, fractured nation, and as local councils bounce from red and blue, the colour that is really emerging triumphant is not just turquoise, but orange.
