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What does Reform’s failure in Makerfield mean for Nigel Farage’s No. 10 hopes?
Reform UK leader ‘beaten at his own game’ by Restore Britain
The question of whether Keir Starmer would resign in the wake of Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield has been answered. But the “slower-burning question”, said David Aaronovitch in The Independent, is whether Nigel Farage’s grin can really “grace the doorstep of No. 10” after four by-election defeats in a row.
The “solidity of the anti-Reform tactical vote” in last week’s by-election has shown that people “don’t want” him as prime minister. Reform UK appears to be “on a downward slope”, and the expected arrival of a “doe-eyed” Andy Burnham in Downing Street could make life trickier yet for Farage.
What did the commentators say?
This latest by-election “exposed many of Reform’s weaknesses”, several of which “stem from serious flaws in Farage’s character”, said veteran by-election reporter Michael Crick in The Times. He runs the party “as a personal dictatorship”; he alone picked the out-of-depth Robert Kenyon as Reform’s candidate. “No serious democratic party” can be run that way.
In Makerfield, as in Gorton & Denton, there are those who so “detest him”, they were “breaking habits of a lifetime” to vote “ABF – Anyone But Farage”. He looked “fed up and exhausted” after it was over, and “it wouldn’t surprise me if he quits” before the general election, “perhaps claiming illness”.
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He was also “beaten at his own game” by “Reform’s yet more evil twin”, Restore Britain, said Jonn Elledge in The New Statesman. Farage “now faces the same dilemma he once posed to the Tories: stand firm and lose votes” to the right, or “move right and alienate those closer to the centre”. Watching him “flail” is “extremely funny”.
Rupert Lowe’s “ultra-right splinter group” succeeded in mobilising “disaffected white working-class people” in a constituency where there was “support for the British National Party” 20 years ago, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Their “desire to give the Establishment – which now apparently includes Farage – a kicking seemingly knows no bounds”.
If Restore’s current polling holds up, “it could cost Farage victory in other constituencies” in a general election, political scientist Rob Ford told Politics Home. Reform would “really would like to be able to say X and Y seats are in the bag” but now there’s “this additional element of uncertainty”.
Makerfield was clearly “a setback” for Farage’s “ambitions of winning power”, said Nick Gutteridge in The Telegraph. But “there is no sign” within Reform’s ranks that “fatalism has set in”. One party source told me it’s like “the scene in the movie that comes just before the end, when it looks like the bad guy is resurgent and the hero has taken a knock” but “you’re actually just before the glorious victory”.
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What next?
The morning after Reform’s Makerfield defeat, Farage appealed directly to those who switched from his party to Restore: “What do you want? We are the challenger party to the left in this country, and I would urge you to think again.”
But a new threat could emerge from within his own party ranks, said Aaronovitch in The Independent. If Farage’s waning popularity and “diminishing energy” mean he’s no longer up to “making a serious bid for power”, then “that quintessence of pushiness”, Robert Jenrick, will “have to do something about it”.
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
