Will Nigel Farage be PM by 2030?

Nigel Farage has set out a two-election strategy that he claims paves the way for him to be elected as prime minister after his Reform UK party becomes the main opposition to Labour.

Speaking yesterday before launching his party's manifesto, called "Our Contract With You", Farage said he hoped the upcoming 4 July election would result in Reform establishing a "bridgehead" in the House of Commons. He would then build a "big national campaigning movement around the country over the course of the next five years for genuine change".

The "real ambition", he said, was to clinch the top job at the next election, which must be held in 2029 at the latest.

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What did the commentators say?

The most obvious route to No. 10 for Farage would involve staging a "reverse takeover of the Conservatives", said the i news site. He has "made no bones about his desire to see the Conservatives 'destroyed' and for him to pick up the pieces to shape the remnants of whatever is left in his own image".

But the choice of Merthyr Tydfil for Monday's manifesto launch was telling, said UnHerd. Far from the fabled Red Wall, the South Wales town has been solidly Labour for more than a century. 

For Farage, "that seems to be the point". The former Ukip leader "barely bothered with the Tories in his remarks, but rather set out a two-election strategy to establish Reform as the true opposition to Labour" and then "storm to power in 2029".

That has a "fleetingly plausible ring to it", said The Independent's chief political commentator John Rentoul, "and sounds less like a snake-oil preacher predicting the Rapture" – unlike the two pages of "costings" at the end of the "contract" document, which "look like a ChatGPT version of something the Institute for Fiscal Studies might endorse".

For all the oxygen that Farage's return to front-line politics has taken up, debate continues about how popular his policies actually are with the wider public and if the manifesto is really a winning platform with the electorate.

"The mainstream elite in the media and in politics who claim to oppose Farage, and who pretend to stand as a bulwark against far-right politics, are again duly buying into the hype he has created for himself," said Aurelien Mondon, senior lecturer in politics at Bath University, on The Conversation.

What next?

Farage may be right when he said that UK politics was becoming more "presidential-style", with people voting for leaders rather than parties. But strong poll numbers do not necessarily translate into power in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. Even in a best-case scenario, Reform will enter the next Parliament with just a handful of MPs.

Should the Tories suffer a near-extinction level event, Farage will still "not be the leader of the opposition, and he will not be the 'real' leader of the opposition", said Rentoul. "He will be a lonely figure at the back of the far end of the opposition benches." And while "the 'What to do about Nigel' question may continue to split the Tory party", the "prospect of a reverse takeover, of the larger entity by the smaller, will remain distant".

If Farage is "serious about spearheading a movement, is Reform really the right vehicle for it", asked Sky News's deputy political editor Sam Coates. Or "is a broken Conservative Party a better host for his ambition", given that "there is a chance the membership could well elect him leader if he ever got into the last two candidates in a contest to run the party"?

Farage has repeatedly side-stepped questions about whether he would rejoin the Tories to lead them, probably because he "genuinely has not ruled out the possibility, depending on the success or otherwise of Reform UK and the makeup of the Conservative Parliamentary party after 5 July".

"He is clearly enjoying himself – the TikTok videos, the TV interviews, the campaign events… It's all part of his love of publicity and the airtime which Reform's position in the polls gives him right now," said Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC.

But questions remain about whether he genuinely wants to be PM – or even become an MP, with all the limits that entails.

"He's just a reality TV star," said a source quoted by Kuenssberg. "Going to the jungle wasn't leaving the political arena, it was coming home."