Nigel farage

Ten Reform party councillors in Derbyshire have resigned in protest at Nigel Farage’s ‘autocratic’ control of the rising party and its direction of travel. Farage has dismissed the revolt as the action of what he calls a ‘rogue branch’ of Reform, but there are stirrings of discontent in the grassroots of the fast-growing party that may signal more than minor teething troubles. There are legitimate questions to be asked both about Reform’s structure and the way that Farage’s robust personality impacts upon it During the Reform UK East Midlands conference, a former Tory MP for the Dudley seat – Mario Longhi – defected to Reform and was introduced by Nigel Farage as, 'a loyal member of the Conservative Party for the last goodness knows how many years'.

Lying in bed pissed on Boxing Day night, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future, dressed in a grey jacket with a velvet collar, hovering over my pit cackling and in a similar state, alcohol-wise, to myself. It seemed very happy, this ghost. It led me to a graveyard where it pointed, in jubilation, at a headstone which had the words ‘Kemi Badenoch 2024-2026’ on it. ‘You shouldn’t joke about people passing away, Nigel,’ I told this phantom a little sententiously. ‘She’s not actually dead, you idiot,’ replied the wraith, lighting a fag. ‘It’s a metaphor.’ When I awoke 12 hours later, my mobile phone flashed a message inviting me to join Reform UK, Europe’s fastest-growing political party.

Santa will have a tricky time this year fulfilling all the Christmas wish lists in Westminster. Keir Starmer is desperately hoping for a change in the political weather and Kemi Badenoch would like an in with Donald Trump. Ed Davey dreams that Labour’s electoral troubles will get so bad that proportional representation starts to look appealing. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, wants to avoid what usually happens with him and keep his party from falling out. Come the new year, all four leaders will have their eyes on May’s local elections. The 21 county councils, ten unitary authorities and one metropolitan district are up for grabs for the first time since 2021. Back then Boris Johnson was riding a wave of popularity after the vaccine rollout and the Tories won Hartlepool from Labour.

Arriving on stage to accept ‘Newcomer of the Year’ at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Nigel Farage gave a warning to the Westminster establishment. ‘I’ve got a bit of a shock for you,’ he said. ‘If you think that I and four other people – the newcomers into parliament this year in the general election – were a shock, I’m very sorry but at the next election in 2029 or before, there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label.’ He added: ‘We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war. Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election. Thank you very much.

A spectre is haunting Wales. Fresh from Reform’s election victories in Westminster, Nigel Farage is turning his attention westwards, to Cardiff Bay. He wants Reform to replace the Tories there as the main challenge to Labour in May 2026, creating a major platform for his party ahead of the 2029 general election. The man plotting the Tories’ downfall in Wales is someone who knows their leader well. Oliver Lewis, Reform’s chief spokesman, worked with Kemi Badenoch at Coutts. ‘She was very aware of the importance of fulfilling duties she felt were important to her,’ he says, carefully, when we speak.

Last week I arrived in London from the Cotswolds just in time to witness the collective meltdown from everyone around me as it was announced that Donald Trump was the President-elect. I was delighted. Who are we to complain? The American people knew exactly what they were doing. I had been booked on to ITV’s This Morning where we were to discuss Kamala Harris’s resignation speech, a story so feeble it wouldn’t last until the 6 p.m. news. The tone in the studio was ‘poor Kamala’. I was having none of it. She fully deserved to lose. She had no coherent policies on immigration or the economy and banged on endlessly about women’s reproductive rights as though that were all women cared about.

At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of parliament.  The day after the general election, Reform leader Nigel Farage held his celebratory press conference alongside fellow seat-winners Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe, announcing their new gang of four. Half an hour later, from a Westminster pub, they learned that they would be five – after McMurdock, a supposed ‘paper candidate’, was declared the MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock.

Few people had heard of Zia Yusuf before he spoke at Reform’s final campaign rally in Birmingham. But after a stirring speech to 4,000 supporters, he became one of the election’s overnight stars. ‘This boy’s got real talent,’ admitted Nigel Farage afterwards. He is now emerging as one of the more intriguing figures in the landscape of the right: a self-described ‘British Muslim patriot’, a 37-year-old multimillionaire, who says his mission in politics is to take Farage to No. 10. Farage is clearly Yusuf’s political lodestar: his name features dozens of times in our hour-long exchange When we meet at The Spectator office (his £100,000 Range Rover parked outside), Yusuf says that a Reform UK government is quite conceivable.