Farage is the 'F-word' who is tearing the parties apart

Ahead of next week’s by-elections, Badenoch and Starmer are bracing themselves for Reform gains

- Andrew Grice

“I suspect there’s going to be a big, seismic shock in British politics,” Nigel Farage said at a party at London’s Ritz hotel to mark his 25 years in politics. That was in 2016 – five months after the initial shock of the Brexit referendum.

Farage has waited a long time for his seismic moment in party politics. It might have come at last year’s general election, when his Reform UK won 14 per cent of the vote. But it landed only five seats, and its breakthrough was eclipsed by Keir Starmer’s landslide.

Farage hopes the political tectonic plates will shift next Thursday, when Reform hopes to seize the safe Labour seat of Runcorn and Helsby in a parliamentary by-election, and make gains in council and metro mayoral elections in England. Farage’s party is ahead in the opinion polls, but now needs to translate that to the ballot box to maintain the momentum it needs like oxygen.

My other memory of the 2016 party is the display of giant photographs of Farage and Donald Trump in the golden lift in Trump Tower in New York. Farage had just visited Trump, one of the first politicians to do so since his first presidential election victory that month.

Today, Farage is less keen to play up his Trump links amid the fallout from his damaging tariffs and his stance on the UkraineRussia war. Indeed, rival parties tell me that Farage’s Trump links are playing badly on the doorsteps. “It is hurting him,” one senior Labour figure claimed. Pollsters have picked up the same in focus groups.

Significantly, Farage has distanced himself from the US president, saying the tariffs were “too much, too soon”, that Trump risked turning Vladimir Putin into a winner and the US peace plan for Ukraine is unacceptable.

The Tories could easily lose half of the almost 1,000 seats they are defending