After a tricky few months for Nigel Farage’s party, Reform UK is fighting back. Senior figures have spent the summer discussing how best to tell their side of the story, amid a wave of negative headlines about personnel and funding. Now, after last month’s party conference, they are preparing to launch their own eight-page newspaper, called The Reformer. It is set to be distributed to 15 million households across the country within the coming weeks – a reach that will likely greatly exceed the readership of The Metro, Britain’s most popular free newspaper.
Mick Hume, a former Times columnist, ex-editor of Spiked and Reform employee is expected to play a leading role in its production. The move is part of the party’s media push to get their message directly to voters. ‘We are stepping up our game and will ensure our message is heard by the masses’, says one senior figure. They suggest it will rival any free paper in the country, with Reform claiming to have placed the biggest paper order in the world this year ahead of the first edition. Features will focus around Reform policies, recent announcements and comment pieces from Farage.
The new production is part of Reform’s new media push to bypass gatekeepers in both the traditional press and in the online sphere too. With Labour ministers stepping up their efforts to produce taxpayer-funded content on the official government website ‘gov.uk’, members of the right-wing party are keen to respond in kind. Adverts are appearing online to recruit journalists to write content which will appear on party websites, by-passing advert-based places and ranking them higher in Google searches too.
Amid much talk of a new ‘Reform TV’ channel, those within the party are keen to dispel talk that this will function as a traditional broadcast channel. Instead, video content is likely to revolve around long-form interviews, rather than the rolling 24/7 coverage of channels such as the BBC or Sky. A recent example of this in action was Reform hiring a Nigerian journalist to investigate a past claim by Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader.
Such efforts are what Farage and his allies believe is necessary to create a new media eco-system more attuned to his party’s political economy. After a big push to ingratiate themselves with parts of Fleet Street in 2025, the party is now focusing on building up their own channels, with Farage launching his own Substack and an official Reform podcast too. With traditional media consumption in decline, alternative media outlets like Bruce Unfiltered are being favoured too.
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