Keep calm and carry on. Let’s not lose our heads, because the stupidest thing we can do right now is to panic. Thus speak those Labour people who claim to be relaxed about polling that puts Reform ahead of their party, with the Tories languishing in third place. There’s some sense in this warning not to do the headless chicken. Britain’s next general election does not have to take place until mid-2029. No poll taken today is a reliable predictor of what kind of government people will want many years ahead. Voters indicating that they are backing Reform are telling us that they don’t like either Labour or the Tories. That is not the same as saying that they all want Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister.
It is also true that the outlook is less immediately frightening for Sir Keir Starmer than it is for Kemi Badenoch. “Reform is not great for Labour, but it is an existential threat to the Tories,” remarks one Labour strategist, noting that last week’s YouGov poll reported that one in five of Tory voters in 2024 said they would now back Reform. It is a spine-chiller for the Conservatives to see high-value donors defecting to Reform. Another cause for Tory alarm is underlined by the Opinium poll we publish today: their vote share is sinking to depths even inkier than they experienced at last summer’s election. “Every time we think things can’t get any worse, and then they get worse,” groans one Conservative MP. To have any hope of surviving as leader of her regicidal party, Mrs Badenoch has to convince her colleagues that she can prevail in the fight with Reform to be the right’s main competition to Labour. She is manifestly losing that battle at the moment. Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, has taken to crowing: “We have the momentum and the Tories are now splitting our vote.”
That momentum also disturbs the growing number of Labour people who are not staying calm and don’t think they can afford to carry on ignoring Reform. One Labour veteran, usually a phlegmatic sort, recently remarked to me that both his party and the Conservatives “are living in the last chance saloon”. He wondered aloud why we should think that Britain has to be an exception to the rise of the hard right that has been seen across much of Europe. In some ways, the surprise is that Reform is not doing even better against an unconvincingly led Conservative party so badly discredited by its record in power and a Labour government with approval ratings that have plummeted downwards so dramatically. Much of Mr Farage’s support may look like protest voting, but that thought isn’t consoling in the 89 Labour-held seats where Reform candidates came second. Many of these Labour MPs are sitting on terrifyingly precarious majorities. “They’re getting very jumpy,” reports one senior Labour figure. One thing that unnerves them is the torrent of abuse they are receiving from Reform sympathisers on their Facebook pages and other forms of social media. Some of the MPs are responding by trying to get themselves on GB News, also known as Farage TV, because they think a lot of their voters are watching it. Chris Webb, who became the MP for Blackpool South in 2024, recently invited the channel to follow him around his constituency for an entire day.
Labour staffers and campaign groups are now spending a lot of time trying to devise strategies to combat Reform. The topic was on the agenda of the cabinet when it met for a six-hour “away day” at Lancaster House on Friday. One minister present told me afterwards that there was no single “killer” tactic that will do the trick. “I don’t think we’ve figured this out yet, if I’m being entirely honest.” The view used to be that Labour didn’t have too much to worry about because Reform looked more threatening to the Conservatives and would help Labour, as it did at the election, by splitting the rightwing vote. It was also thought that taking on its leader simply gave him the oxygen of more publicity. A shift to a more pugilistic approach was indicated by Wes Streeting when the health secretary recently gave a speech directly confronting Mr Farage with an attack on his “miserabilist, declinist” vision of Britain.
The Reform leader casts himself as an anti-elitist insurgent force against a failed status quo created by the two older parties. Yet one of his recent fundraisers was held at a Mayfair club where attendees were lubricated with Dom Pérignon, and the pleasure of Mr Farage’s company on the top table cost £25,000 a seat. That’s more than the annual income of a lot of his constituents in Clacton-on-Sea – a seaside town on the Essex coast, if you need directions, Nigel. I jeer, but it is a mistake to think that his brand of nativist populism can be punctured simply by ridiculing the jarring dissonance between his pose as a man of the people and his fondness for the company of multi-millionaires. That kind of line didn’t get much traction against Donald Trump.
One school of thought within Sir Keir’s ranks argues that Labour should present itself as the more authentic enemy of the status quo and project the government as the insurgents. There’s a powerful advocate of that view within Number 10 in the shape of Morgan McSweeney, a key architect of its election victory and now chief of staff. The prime minister said at the Lancaster House meeting that the government needed to be less cautious and move faster. “We can either be the disrupters or the disrupted,” he told his senior ministers. The snag with trying to be an “insurgent government” is that it is really hard not to look like the establishment when you are in power and the prime minister is a knighted lawyer who used to run the crown prosecution service. Sir Keir doesn’t have the temperament and doesn’t look the part to be successfully cast as a Trumpesque disruptor-in-chief. “We have to be changemakers,” says one member of the cabinet, but adds: “Burn it all down is just not who we are.” If Labour tries to make the struggle with Farageism all about who can hate institutions with the greater intensity, this is not a contest it is likely to win.
A potentially promising approach is to subject his beliefs and policies to the scrutiny that he is unaccustomed to. Labour has belatedly started to draw attention to his view that we should move to an insurance-based system of healthcare. Sir Keir won a lusty cheer from his MPs at the most recent session of PMQs when he took on the leader of Reform by walloping him for wanting “to charge them (his constituents) for using the NHS”. Says one Labour strategist: “His views on the NHS are like battery acid for Farage. When you put this in front of Labour voters, they run a mile.”
He wants an even harder form of Brexit than the one inflicted on Britain by Boris Johnson’s rotten and now deeply unpopular deal. What his economic programme would amount to also merits more attention. Other than Liz Truss herself, no one was a more enthusiastic cheerleader for her reckless experiment with the national finances than Mr Farage who hailed her for producing “the best Conservative budget since 1986” shortly before it exploded in everyone’s faces.
His signature theme is hostility to immigration and this raises the most vexed questions about the lengths to which Labour should go. A new pressure group of Labour MPs, drawn from those 89 seats that are potentially most vulnerable, is urging Sir Keir to toughen up the government’s stance on immigration and be noisy about it. These MPs are broadly cheered to see their party launch Facebook ads, in Reform-style branding, boasting about how many people the government has deported. What pleases them will make a lot of other Labour people extremely queasy.
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If Labour is to beat back Reform, the job won’t be done simply by coming up with some sharper attack lines. Mr Farage is thriving now, just as he did in the years running up to the Brexit referendum, because he is tapping into high levels of voter discontent about the quality of their lives in a country with a stagnant economy and dilapidated public services. Immigration is one of the factors, but so is the cost of living and the condition of the health service. Sorting that is critical to seeing him off. It is not enough to say that Reform has bad ideas. Labour must demonstrate that it can deliver good results.