Barely a year ago, Nigel Farage appeared willing to stay on the sidelines of British politics. “Do I want to be an MP? Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?” the former Brexit campaigner mused.
Soon after, he announced that he would not stand in the UK general election because he was too busy helping Donald Trump win the US presidency.
But Farage, as so often, reversed course. He ended up winning the seat of Clacton in Essex in 2024. The astonishing performance of his Reform UK party in Thursday’s local elections now suggests that he may go further — ending up as Britain’s leader of the opposition or even prime minister.
No other modern British politician can match Farage’s knack for regeneration. While other Trump allies, such as Canada’s Pierre Poilievre and Australia’s Peter Dutton, have been undone by their closeness to the US president, Farage is thriving. A heavy smoker and drinker with a penchant for three-bottle lunches, the 61-year old is somehow the great survivor.
Fifteen years ago this week, Farage nearly died in a plane crash, when the tail of a light aircraft he was using for a campaign stunt became wrapped up in a UK Independence party banner that it was pulling. The accident left him in severe pain for years.
Politically, Farage survived various internal battles and attempts by six Conservative leaders to destroy him. Yet, even as Ukip’s cause gained ground, the former metals trader was frustrated by “having to deal with low-grade people every day” and the impossibility of making decent money.
He retired from party politics on several occasions, including after the Brexit referendum in 2016 (“I want my life back”) and again in 2021 when Britain officially left the EU (“It’s over . . . I’ve achieved the one thing I set out to do: to achieve the independence of the UK.”)
He found new vehicles: after leaving Ukip, he set up the Brexit party, then Reform. Recently, he shrugged off a call from Elon Musk to replace him as Reform leader, and won an internal battle with one of its other MPs, Rupert Lowe. He has also withstood fallout from his support for Trump, who is deeply unpopular in Britain.
Perhaps Farage’s electoral career would have been truly over had the Conservative party wooed him after the Brexit referendum.
“The biggest political mistake made by the establishment in the last 20 years was not to give him a peerage in 2016,” said Gawain Towler, a former adviser to Farage.
“He couldn’t have set up the Brexit party if he was in the House of Lords . . . Because of their own spite and short-sightedness, they left him free. Oh boy, do they regret it now.”
Farage’s resilience owes something to national circumstances, something to his opponents and something to his own gifts.
He has an ability to speak directly and engagingly, sometimes with blokeish humour. He often manages to look like he is having fun. At a victory rally in Kent on Friday, he joked about whether, given Reform’s previous lack of female candidates, he had a woman problem: “I’ve been having that problem all my life!”
His charisma has been particularly notable since the departure from front-line politics of Boris Johnson, the former Tory prime minister, and, to a lesser extent, Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, who both had the ability to draw crowds. Neither Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, nor Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch have Farage’s ease in front of the camera.
“He’s very, very lucky in his opponents,” said Towler. In the 2024 election, “part of the reason we did so well is that the press were so thankful they had something fun to write about, instead of [Rishi] Sunak versus Starmer”.
Sluggish growth and rising immigration have broadened the audience for Farage’s radical message. His estrangement from the Tory party (of which he was a member under Margaret Thatcher) has allowed him to evade blame for the chaotic reality of Brexit.
One paradox of Britain’s party system today is that a large majority of voters say that Brexit was a mistake, but Farage’s pro-Brexit Reform leads the polls.
The changing media environment also benefits the fringes. For years, Farage’s critics bemoaned the attention paid to him by the BBC. But he now has other outlets: he is a primetime presenter on GB News, the upstart news channel that reaches 3mn viewers a month, and has a strong presence on TikTok, where his videos on immigration and grooming gangs can rack up more than 300,000 views.
After years of trying, Farage seems to have reconciled his political and financial ambitions. Since his election last July, he has declared £864,000 in payments for outside work — including £331,400 for presenting on GB News and £280,500 for promoting a gold dealing company.
Moderate politicians have found it difficult to portray Farage as an out-of-touch Thatcherite. With the fallout from Brexit and Trump, such critics at least have new material. Starmer has mocked Farage for travelling to the US so often that he should show up “on the immigration statistics”.
In the past, Farage has been alive to the risks of international allies. He did not, for instance, sit with France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the European parliament.
His current strategy is to disagree with Trump on foreign policy issues, such as Ukraine, but to embrace the domestic agenda, which may resonate with angry British voters. “Let’s have a British Doge!” he told Friday’s rally, referring to Musk’s cost-cutting team.
His rhetoric remains divisive. Recently he criticised politicians for celebrating Muslim festivals, but not Easter: “No one seems to want to stand up and say this is a Christian holiday. Well, I’m saying it.”
He remains among the most unpopular British politicians overall: 27 per cent of voters have a favourable opinion of him, and 65 per cent unfavourable, according to pollsters YouGov.
If the results of Thursday’s elections were extrapolated nationwide, Reform would have won about 30 per cent of the vote, compared with Labour on 20 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 17, Conservatives on 15 and Greens on 11, the BBC projected. At that level of support, the first-past-the-post voting system that has historically held Farage back could propel him into power.
Farage is a year younger than Starmer and a year older than Boris Johnson. If the next election were held in mid-2029, the latest possible date, Farage would be 65.
Should he win, he would be the oldest incoming prime minister since Winston Churchill in 1951. He would also been a member of the Westminster parliament for a shorter period than any prime minister in recent times. It would all be highly improbable — just like many other parts of Farage’s CV.
