On Monday night, a hundred Reform staff and donors met at a Marylebone pub to toast the local election results. A jubilant Nigel Farage addressed his troops, who ran up a five-figure bill. They had good reason to celebrate. With 30 per cent of the vote, Reform crushed Labour (20 per cent) and the Tories (15 per cent). They won 677 wards, ten councils and a fifth MP in the Runcorn by-election. Certain results were particularly satisfying: in Ed Miliband’s Doncaster North, Reform won more seats than any other party.
Three speeches defined Reform’s campaign. First, there was the Birmingham rally at the end of March. Farage arrived on a JCB digger, presenting himself as a ‘Mr Fixit’ for the woes of ‘Broken Britain’. Next came Durham in mid-April, just after British Steel came close to collapse. Here, he taunted Labour, claiming its founder, Keir Hardie, would be ‘turning in his grave’. Finally, there was Dover, a week before polling day. Farage’s focus on Channel crossings was designed to motivate the base and get out the vote on 1 May.
All three speeches spoke to Reform’s ambition to ‘upscale’ itself in these elections, in the words of one insider. Instead of beginning its campaign on migration, Reform opted to end on it: a sign that the party is now able to occupy much more political space. Both of Farage’s previous enterprises – Ukip and the Brexit party – focused on a single concern. End the debate on Europe, his opponents thought, and you would end Farage too. Now, however, the party has a far more wide-ranging critique: the whole of Britain is broken. The message is working: YouGov puts Farage’s party on 29 points, seven points clear of Labour.
Opponents argue that Reform will be found out in office. A typical sentiment was offered by Luke Akehurst, the Labour MP for North Durham. ‘I suspect we will see utter chaos,’ he sniffed, ‘as inexperienced councillors find out that running a major council is about serious hard work.’ Yet the performance of individual councils rarely determines national trends. As one ex-minister notes, the fact that Labour had appallingly run councils in places like Rochdale and Rotherham did not stop voters from giving Keir Starmer a landslide victory last July.
Reform intends to use its new councils to wage a series of campaigns. The party says it will fight the Home Office in court to stop asylum-seekers being put up in Reform–controlled areas. Only national and county flags are to be flown by its authorities and diversity training will be resisted. The aim is to create points of distinction between Farage and the other parties. As with any revolution, there will inevitably be casualties. High standards are demanded of the new councillors: each has been sent a nine-page booklet on what is expected and those who fail to live up to those standards will be swiftly removed. Yet staff are sanguine, arguing that fewer candidates were suspended in the 1,600 wards this year than the 650 parliamentary seats last year.
The public is seeing a softer side of Farage. Election fliers now feature him smiling next to his dog
Like a shark, Reform must keep moving forward to survive. Next up are the May 2026 elections in Wales and Scotland, where the party has 11,000 and 10,500 activists respectively. One argument to be made in the battle for Cardiff Bay will be on steel: if nationalisation was good enough for Scunthorpe, why not for the Port Talbot works too? It is likely that the devolution playbook will be deployed at a council level too: take credit for success and blame Westminster for failings.
In the London borough elections, there could be a surprising level of success too. Within Reform HQ, a poll is circulating that suggests the party could challenge for second place, ahead of the Tories. Elsewhere, the party is eyeing up a potential by-election in North East Somerset, where a suspended Labour MP was arrested on suspicion of rape. It could set up an entertaining clash between Farage’s party and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who held the seat for the Tories until July.
Surrounding Farage is a battle-hardened clique of veterans. They have spent a decade at his side and rate themselves highly against their Labour and Tory rivals. ‘Fundamentally’, says one, ‘we just want it more.’ Their next four years will be about presenting Farage as a credible prime minister – a critical task, given the next election could be an ‘anyone but…’ contest. In 2019, the defining issue was Brexit; in 2024, it was about ending 14 years of Tory rule. The next one could be about stopping Reform.
Already, Starmer’s MPs have begun talking about a continental-style ‘cordon sanitaire’. The aim would be to use tactical voting to back progressive candidates across the country. It may well be that, just as in America, voters take a rather different view to progressives on the threat that the right poses to the future of democracy. But it is striking the extent to which Reform downplayed the fundamental stakes of last week’s elections. There was a focus on delivery, not dogma; bin strikes instead of British sovereignty. Rather than leading on the issue of deportations, Farage was happy to go with the political current as he seeks to make Reform the party of the mainstream.
The public is seeing a somewhat softer side of Farage too. In his new year’s address from Blenheim Palace, he spoke fondly of becoming a grandfather. Election fliers now feature him smiling next to his dog. TV hosts remark that he is more restrained in interviews. As one aide puts it, ‘The older he gets, the more relatable he is.’ He now has the best ratings of the four main party leaders. On the campaign trail, voters often treat him as an I’m A Celebrity… star, rather than a divisive partisan. ‘Nigel will always be Nigel,’ says one. ‘But voters are starting to see him through the prism of being prime minister.’
Westminster is starting to see that too. On migration, culture wars and so much else, he is the latter-day Joseph Chamberlain: the man who now makes the political weather. ‘Our Joe’ managed to split two parties over the course of his career; next time, ‘Our Nige’ could do the same in one fell swoop.
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