Nigel farage

There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event this week, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. ‘You mean you were very negative before?’ she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare. I muttered something placatory, but the truth is that a year ago I thought she was rubbish – and that was the mainstream view in her own party. She was arrogant, flat-footed, absenting herself from a stage that was being dominated by Nigel Farage, resistant to advice, convinced she was great at PMQs when even Keir Starmer was wiping the floor with her.

The loudest man in politics knows when to keep his silence. Nigel Farage held his tongue on Monday as Keir Starmer’s premiership floundered. Aside from a few PFLs – proper f***ing lunches – to celebrate the local election results, the Reform UK leader was already looking to the next challenge. Like a shark, Farage keeps moving forward, into new waters, hungry for more. One ally sums up his approach to politics in a single word: ‘Momentum’. For the past few months, Farage has had one goal: destroying the Tories. The figure ‘1,453’ was the total of gains proudly pumped out on Reform’s Instagram. For Farage, 7 May was the political equivalent of the fall of Constantinople – the point when the Conservatives ceased to be a national party.

Dear wannabe leaders of Britain. What a lot of you there are! I’ve been writing about leadership and the craft of politics for 25 years and I’m sick of watching the same mistakes repeated. I’m keen to help. So listen up Nigel, Kemi, Zack, Ed, Ed, Andy, Angela and Wes – and you Keir, it’s never too late to learn. 1) TL;DR: If you have no time for impertinent journalists, here’s the executive summary. You need a plan, plus strategy and tactics to deliver it. You need a narrative to explain it to voters. You need the charisma and application to take your party, the civil service and the country with you. And you need to build a team to do the bits that you cannot accomplish alone.

When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago. Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a party from scratch and expect to be the biggest winners in the local elections on 7 May. With more than 270,000 members, their grassroots base is the largest in Britain, bigger than both Labour and the Tories. ‘I would argue no party has built political infrastructure and established itself more quickly in British history than Reform,’ Yusuf says.

Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a ghost town after the pit closed in 1991, but they built a largeish retail park on the outskirts so people could spend money they didn’t have on useless shit and bad food. Its north side has one of the lowest average incomes in the county (£34,400) and a much lower than average life expectancy. Benefit take-up somewhat high, above 50 per cent. I hope, in these few sentences, I have brought the place to life for you.

There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?… Because nothing grows under him.’ The comparison to this acid-leafed tree which stifles all beneath it is one the Reform UK leader has never accepted. ‘I don’t fall out with people,’ he once said. ‘They fall out with me.’ Like Tintin, Farage has enjoyed many different adventures in different guises: ‘Nigel in America’, ‘Nigel in the Jungle’, ‘Nigel in the City’. This week, we got another: ‘Nigel and the Gang of Four’, the leader who seeks power only to yield it to others. Four names were unveiled as part of Reform’s new ‘shadow cabinet’ to show he is building something bigger than himself.

Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the performance of Kemi Badenoch, but the key conversation was the one he had with his father on Boxing Day. ‘He’s a very straight talker,’ Jenrick explains when we meet at Reform’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon. ‘He said, “If you weren’t in politics and there was a general election to-morrow, which party would you vote for?” I said, “Reform.” He said, “If you weren’t in politics, weren’t a candidate, had no particular loyalty, who would you want to be prime minister if the choice was Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage?” I said, “Nigel Farage.” He said, “Well, be honest with yourself and become a Reform MP.