Nigel Farage is on course to be PM. This is what the establishment will do to destroy him

The Reform leader is used to being maligned. But what he is about to face will be on a different scale

28 May 2025 

Daily Telegraph 

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Britain has crossed the Rubicon. Nigel Farage is no longer the leader of a protest party. At the age of 61, he has graduated to being prime minister-in-waiting. His announcements are setting the agenda. He is ahead in the polls. He is winning by-elections. He controls his party with an iron fist. He boasts a huge following on social media. He is still as loathed as he is loved, but in terms of raw magnetism, of pure charisma, of presence, he is the only politician of the past 30 years in the same league as Tony Blair and Boris Johnson.

Farage’s critics thought his ceiling was 15 per cent, then 20 per cent, then 25 per cent. He is now breaching 30 per cent as voters decide it’s “Nigel’s turn” and that backing Reform no longer means a wasted vote. He could top 35 per cent if he squeezes the Tories down to their 2019 Euros nadir, enough to win the election outright and without a pact.

I bear the Tories no ill will, and Kemi Badenoch, who I very much like, is doing a good job in impossible circumstances. Ousting her won’t achieve anything.

But voters now treat Labour and Tories as complementary, rather than rival, goods, to use the economic jargon. When a fast food chain is hit by a contamination scandal, the sales of competitor restaurants also drop, while supermarkets benefit. Whenever Labour fails, it is punished but so are the Tories, while Reform benefits. Voters see Labour and Tories as a “uniparty”, jointly responsible for our pathologies.

It may all go wrong, but for now Farage is on course to displace the Tories as the main party of the Right; he will simultaneously detach the English, Welsh and Scottish working class from a hopelessly disconnected Labour Party.

There is a danger Reform moves too far to the Left on welfare and economics to outflank Starmer, but the fiscal crisis that is about to engulf Britain, courtesy of Rachel Reeves, will soon put an end to that. By 2028-29, preventing national bankruptcy will join migration and health as the top issues, pushing Reform towards a Javier Milei-style agenda.

Farage doesn’t want to be a latter-day J R Clynes, the man responsible for Labour’s 1922 breakthrough, when it superseded the Liberals and became the official opposition; these days, he wouldn’t even be satisfied with becoming a 21st century Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first PM who led a short-lived yet historic minority government in 1924.

Farage wants to be a Right-wing Clement Attlee, to win outright, to be in power, not just in office, for an extended period. He sees victory as the realisation of his life-long mission to rescue Britain, launched when he joined the Anti-Federalist League in 1992 in disgust at Tory betrayals.

Johnson was meant to restore the UK’s greatness, but it didn’t work out, so Farage had to return. He is more pragmatic than some realise, but not on the important questions: implementing a real Brexit, slashing immigration, terminating net zero, reversing the “human rights” revolution, cutting tax, defeating wokery, ending the war on speech and unleashing the economy’s animal spirits to spread wealth and consumerism.

With the partial exception of devolution, the principle of which has gone too far to be reversed, and aspects of welfare, which makes him nervous, Farage is targeting virtually all of the Blair/Brown/Osborne/Starmer agenda for destruction.

The stakes are thus exceptionally high. For the Left-technocratic, anti-national, lanyard-wearing elites that hoard most of the power in Britain, Farage’s breakthrough poses an existential threat greater even than Brexit itself.

The establishment can’t rely on Farage self-destructing, or going soft, à la Giorgia Meloni: they will seek to destroy him with unparalleled viciousness before he reaches Downing Street, or, in extremis, afterwards, à la Liz Truss, deploying every dirty trick. The 2016 Project Fear playbook will be rerun, on steroids. Economists will damn Reform. “Bombshell” reports will “prove” that mortgage rates will reach 15 per cent, taxes will rise, house prices will crash, that there will be a run on sterling, that hyperinflation will erupt, that GDP will crater. Banks will threaten to quit the City and car firms to shut factories.

Nurses will claim Farage wants to “privatise” the NHS and charge £100,000 per operation. Celebrities will promise to leave. Environmentalists will warn that ditching net zero will scorch the earth. Charities will accuse Reform of racism, fascism, Islamophobia, nativism, xenophobia and facilitating the spread of super-gonorrhoea. The EU will threaten a trade war, food shortages and queues at the borders. The UN, IMF, WHO, World Bank, OECD, UNRWA and every other useless acronym will be activated. The Archbishop of Canterbury will condemn Farage as anti-Christian. The BBC will become as obsessed with tarnishing Farage as it currently is at demonising Israel. His genuine errors – he was soft on Russia, Reform selected some dodgy candidates – will be remorselessly highlighted.

The aim will be to fuel hysteria, encouraging a French-style front républicain and mass tactical voting to keep Reform out. Lefty activists point to a YouGov poll as a blueprint: Starmer is still preferred as PM to Farage, despite Reform’s poll lead, implying that some Tories or Lib Dems may switch to keep him out.

The Reform leader must therefore prepare for total war. He will need to scale and professionalise his party. Farage has two excellent lieutenants in Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf. He requires another 15-20 managers of that calibre, and hundreds more super-competent, well-vetted operators one level down. He needs a fully-staffed policy unit, AI experts, economists and lawyers. They will have to pre-write thousands of pages of legislation to decapitate the Blob on day one and seize control of Whitehall.

The best way to defeat Project Fear is to be open to scrutiny, to produce watertight, realistic plans, detailed spreadsheets and models, and clear legal analysis. Every idea must be costed, every assumption stress-tested, including plans to withdraw from international treaties and stop illegal immigration.

Can he do it? Can Farage turn his six-man band into the best political machine in Britain? Can he really make history? The years ahead will be nasty, brutish and short.