Reform UK have topped a poll for the first time – but Nigel Farage shouldn’t celebrate just yet

Let us be clear: Reform UK may well have ‘the Big Mo’ – but it is not about to become the next government, writes Sean O’Grady

An historic moment? Reform UK has, for the first time, topped an opinion poll – and beaten Labour in the process.

Prompting some breathless (and possibly over-excited coverage), the latest Sky News/YouGov opinion poll indicates that Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle is supported by one in four voters, just ahead of Labour and the Conservatives. Given the squalls and missteps since the general election, some weakness in the Labour vote is to be expected; but it seems the principal beneficiaries at the national level are Reform UK – rather than the Tories, Liberal Democrats or the Greens.

It’s certainly made Farage even more bumptious than usual. He’s planning what he calls the biggest political rally in history in Birmingham at the end of March, likely inspired by Donald Trump.

Farage also claims Reform’s membership has overtaken that of the Conservatives – and that it has all the momentum in British politics right now. There’s the promise, maybe, of generous funding from Elon Musk and the party has its own TV channel, GB News, both gifted by complacent British regulators. Regional organisers are being recruited; candidates vetted; and the machine “professionalised”. He’s looking for gains at the local elections in May and in the Welsh Senedd in June. The bookies make him favourite to be the “next prime minister after Keir Starmer”, at 3:1, ahead of Kemi Badenoch and Wes Streeting.

Farage thinks he’s on a roll. You can’t blame him.

Let us be clear: Reform UK may well have the Big Mo, but it is not about to become the next government. To be fair, the trend is certainly upwards for Reform, who polled some 14 per cent of the votes in the general election – and their support has been consistently above 20 per cent and around the same as the Tories and Labour for some months. A recent MRP poll, which uses a different methodology, is fairly in line too, suggesting they’d win 76 seats at an immediate general election – many at the expense of Labour.

That, indeed, is the point. Because Reform’s vote is spread fairly evenly across the country – and more so than any other national party – its popularity tends not to be very “efficiently” distributed in our first-past-the-post election system, in stark contrast to Labour and (nowadays) the Liberal Democrats.

Reform would have to be doing better still to have a chance of becoming even the largest party in the Commons. There’s a slim chance if they approach the 30 per cent vote share mark; but an overall majority looks extremely unlikely. On the most optimistic/pessimistic scenario (depending on your outlook), Reform would only be able to enter government in coalition with the Conservatives, or with their tacit support. The prospect of Nigel Farage as premier and Kemi Badenoch as leader of the House is as unlikely as it is forbidding. Some even suggest that Reform could eclipse the Tories on the right, just as Labour supplanted the Liberals on the progressive left a century ago. In this view, the strange death of Conservative England is at hand.

At this point, then, we need to calm down. Many of us might be guilty of still being trapped in feverish pre-election mode, when every new opinion poll was seized upon and dissected. The reality now is that an election is very likely more than four years away. Much can change. Governments can collapse and remain unpopular during the rest of their term, as John Major’s did after the ERM debacle in 1993. But they can also recover from the doldrums, as Major did after he took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990, and turned what seemed an irretrievable unpopularity into a comfortable victory at the 1992 election, before it all went wrong.

More pertinently, a third-party insurgency can also subside if and when the main opposition gets its act together, the challengers always hobbled by the electoral system. The most spectacular example of that was in the early 1980s and the first Thatcher administration.

Then, as now, the government was taking deeply controversial decisions to repair the public finances and lay some foundations for figure growth, even as the economy edged into recession. Something called the SDP Liberal Alliance was running at 50 per cent in the polls. But by election day 1983, the government won by a landslide with 144 seats – and the then Labour opposition finished just ahead of the Alliance in votes and got about ten times as many Commons seats.

In more recent times, Farage’s Ukip also challenged the two-party system, and even won the European elections (ironically) in 2014 and 2019; but, a couple of by-elections aside, a Commons breakthrough eluded them.

Politics is about more than polls and history. Policy and personality matter. On both, Reform and Farage are vulnerable. The closer Farage gets to power, the more he’ll be challenged. As his latest interview with Emma Barnett on the Today programme showed, he doesn’t have all the answers, and he’s much more about exploiting grievances than offering positive workable and popular solutions.

Wes Streeting – Labour's XL bully – is now on his case and has already exposed the flaws in Reform’s plan to replace the NHS. Farage seeks a harder Brexit than the other parties; a deeply unpopular approach now that most people think Brexit – Farage’s project – has failed.

Reform’s approach to tax and the public finances makes even Liz Truss look prudent. They could not be trusted with our fragile democracy. They admire Trump and Musk; the British do not. The same opinion polls that put them ahead, invariably show how far Reform supporters lie outside the political mainstream, especially on cultural and social issues – suggesting that there’s a ceiling to their support. Reform is, like Ukip and the Brexit party, Farage’s fiefdoms: heavily dependent on him and prone to splits. At the moment, they are quietly troubled by what to do with Tommy Robinson and the emergence of the apparently uncharismatic Rupert Lowe as a more militant alternative leader.

Weak as Badenoch has proved thus far – and still living down their lamentable record – the Conservatives can still credibly say that only they can replace the Labour government at the next election. They can claim that a vote for Farage is a wasted protest vote: cruel, but true.

Far from being on the brink of breaking the mould of British politics, we may actually be at “Peak Farage”, if only we knew it. Sorry, not sorry, Nigel.