“Latex balloons will be used in this show.” That was the warning on the screens around the arena. And there they were, up in the gantry high above the stage, little white and turquoise orbs, straining against their netting. As Nigel Farage closed his speech this afternoon, they were released. Smirking like a little boy with a secret, Farage gently kicked and punched at them as they fell to the floor.
No pyrotechnic was spared for a Farage speech similarly accompanied by fizzing sparklers and streams of ribbons. After all, here was the high point of Reform conference: the keynote address by its party leader. Following the comparably thin appearances of Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and party chairman Zia Yusuf, here was the full populist set piece for the audience to enjoy. They greeted him with whistling applause. Still flush from their election performance, this is a party in a mode of self-congratulation.
Odd, then, that the most important part of Farage’s speech related to the otherwise dull business of internal party administration. As my colleague Will Dunn has written, this conference marks Reform UK’s evolution from a limited company (of which Nigel Farage owned more than half of the shares) to a genuine political party. Or rather – as Farage announced – to a “company limited by guarantee”. The party will therefore be beholden to a board, and Farage implied members would have a greater stake too. But it’s unclear exactly how much power Farage is really surrendering here. After his speech he told us that he would be on the board, and would also appoint three of its other members. Farage won’t have forgotten the early days of Ukip, punctuated by regular feuding with his supposed colleagues.
However, this isn’t just a question of top-level power-broking, but a broader restructuring and redirecting of the entire party. The scandals around various Reform candidates in the election clearly embarrassed Farage, and he promises the party is closed to “bigots” and “extremists”. Reform is more generally being fashioned into an election-winning machine, with 266 new constituency branches open or opening. “We have to model ourselves on the Liberal Democrats,” Farage joked in his speech. But he was serious: under the entrepreneurial leadership of chairman Yusuf, Reform appears to now be in the mode of a permanent campaign, pushing its literature and its message hard in the constituencies where it believes it has a base.
And Farage has Keir Starmer’s famously “wide but shallow” majority in his sights. A recent poll showed one in four Labour voters would consider voting Reform and, of the 98 seats in which Reform came second in 2019, 89 are Labour. Farage even opened his speech with a gag about the Prime Minsister’s gifted glasses and boasted: “I don’t give a damn who the next leader of the Conservative Party is… the brand is bust.” However, when I asked if Labour were now Reform’s prime target, he told me: “Without any shadow of a doubt… There’s no question that’s where the next big target is. And I think [our] big themes – around family, community, country – appeal very much to an old Labour target. Boris won all those seats in 2019, but these people had all voted Ukip or Brexit Party before.”
Reform members will now vote to ratify a new constitution, and then the new era for this strange, erratic but unignorable party begins. The conference continues, but the self-proclaimed “people’s army” is already on the march.
