Nigel Farage has set out a two-election strategy that he says will see his Reform UK party become the main opposition to Labour before he takes over as prime minister in 2029.
Speaking before the launch of his party’s manifesto – called “Our Contract With You” – on Monday, Farage said he hoped the upcoming 4 July election would result in Reform having a “bridgehead” in the House of Commons. He would then use this to build a “big national campaigning movement around the country over the course of the next five years for genuine change”.
The “ambition”, he said, was to vie to be prime minister at the next election, which must be held in 2029 at the latest.
What did the commentators say?
The most obvious route to Number 10 for Farage would involve staging a “reverse takeover of the Conservatives”, said the i news site. He has “made no bones about his desire to see the Conservatives ‘destroyed’ and for him to pick up the pieces to shape the remnants of whatever is left in his own image”.
But the choice of Merthyr Tydfil for Monday’s manifesto launch was telling, said UnHerd. Far from the fabled Red Wall, the South Wales town has been solidly Labour for more than a century.
For Farage “that seems to be the point”, said the news site. “He barely bothered with the Tories in his remarks, but rather set out a two-election strategy to establish Reform as the true opposition to Labour – and then storm to power in 2029.”
That has a “fleetingly plausible ring to it,” said John Rentoul, The Independent‘s chief political commentator, “and sounds less like a snake-oil preacher predicting the Rapture”, which was how Rentoul described the two pages of ‘costings’ at the end of the ‘contract’ document that “look like a ChatGPT version of something the Institute for Fiscal Studies might endorse”.
For all the oxygen his return to frontline politics has taken up in the campaign so far, there is still a debate about how popular his policies actually are with the wider public and if the manifesto is really a winning platform with the electorate.
“The mainstream elite in the media and in politics who claim to oppose Farage, and who pretend to stand as a bulwark against far-right politics, are again duly buying into the hype he has created for himself,” said Aurelien Mondon, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Bath, on The Conversation.
What next?
Farage may be right when he said that UK politics was becoming more “presidential-style”, where people vote for leaders rather than parties. But this still does not translate strong poll numbers into power in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. Even in a best-case scenario Reform will enter the next Parliament with just a handful of MPs.
Should the Tories actually suffer a near-extinction level event, Farage will still “not be the leader of the opposition, and he will not be the ‘real’ leader of the opposition”, said Rentoul. “He will be a lonely figure at the back of the far end of the opposition benches, where George Galloway, Lee Anderson, Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Bridgen used to sit.
“The ‘What to do about Nigel’ question may continue to split the Tory party, but the prospect of a reverse takeover, of the larger entity by the smaller, will remain distant.”
So if Farage is “serious about spearheading a movement, is Reform really the right vehicle for it or is a broken Conservative Party a better host for his ambition,” asked Sky News‘s deputy political editor Sam Coates, “given there is a chance the membership could well elect him leader if he ever got into the last two candidates in a contest to run the party”.
He has repeatedly side-stepped questions about whether he would rejoin the Tories to lead them, probably because he “genuinely has not ruled out the possibility, depending on the success or otherwise of Reform UK and the makeup of the Conservative Parliamentary party after 5 July”.
“He is clearly enjoying himself – the TikTok videos, the TV interviews, the campaign events… It’s all part of his love of publicity and the airtime which Reform’s position in the polls gives him right now,” said Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC.
But questions remain about whether he genuinely wants to be PM – or even become an MP, with all the limits that entails.
“He’s just a reality TV star: going to the jungle wasn’t leaving the political arena, it was coming home,” one source said.