The man claiming he will be the next prime minister of Great Britain stood up to address a vast half-empty arena in Birmingham on Friday evening.
Nigel Farage was in ebullient mood as he launched Reform’s local election campaign ahead of polling day on May 1, when the party is hoping to pick up hundreds of seats across Durham, Doncaster, Lancashire, Kent and Lincolnshire.
“This is the most ambitious launch of any election campaign in history,” he beamed as he entered on a JCB crane loaned to him by the billionaire Conservative megadonor Anthony Bamford.
“I came back out of retirement to do this, I’m not mucking about, I’ve got one goal, and that is that Reform wins the next general election.”
His big announcement of the night was that another millionaire businessman, Arron Banks — the divisive Brexiter and former UK Independence Party donor — would be standing as Reform’s mayoral candidate in the west of England.
Banks himself conceded he was not very popular in the area he is running in, where the main city is left-leaning Bristol. But he said he hoped there was enough division between the main parties in the city that he could come through the middle to win.
Reform has surged in the polls since the general election and is now at around 24 per cent, neck and neck with Labour, with the Conservatives slightly lower.
Many party members at the Birmingham rally said they were life-long Conservatives who had become so disillusioned that they had turned to Reform, which they felt spoke for “the people”.
Peter Young, a 65-year-old former Tory voter who travelled up from Wiltshire, said he had been concerned about voicing his true political beliefs at dinner parties for years. But over the past few months he had told friends proudly that he was a Reform member and had found that many shared his sympathies. “The tide is turning,” he said.
Farage is adamant that the party’s appeal has spread beyond disgruntled Tories, attracting new voters that none of his previous parties such as Ukip were able to galvanise, including women, the young, minority ethnic groups and former Labour voters.
But at the event on Friday, older white men made up the bulk of the crowd, although there was a reasonable showing of younger men. A smattering wore caps with slogans such as “Let’s Save Britain” and “Make Britain Great Again”.
Alexander, a 26-year-old man sitting patiently waiting for the rally to start, said he had first heard about Farage online. He said he had been attacked at university for having views that “are common sense, are just telling the truth” and felt that Reform opened up a space for men everywhere to be “honest” about who they were.
Farage has 1.2mn followers on TikTok which he credits with helping him reach younger people where other party leaders have struggled.
Speaking to journalists at a lunch on Thursday, Farage denied claims swirling around Westminster that there would be a pact between Reform and the Tories ahead of the next general election. “There is no pact, there is no deal,” he said. “We’re not the Conservative party. We’re not Tory lite.”
Over the course of Friday evening’s speeches, there was more venom directed at the Tories than any other party. There were dozens of mentions of the Conservatives’ failed promises to bring down migration and stop migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats. Banks said gleefully of the Tory party: “I want to destroy them.”
The stage backdrop was a mocked-up town centre with a shuttered pub, a betting shop listing Farage as odds-on winner of the next general election, a barber’s shop and bins overflowing on the side of the road — a nod to the pile-up of trash around Birmingham as a result of weeks of strike action by waste workers.
Like many councils in England, Birmingham — the largest local authority in Europe — has been beset by severe financial difficulties, declaring itself bankrupt in late 2023.
Farage vowed Reform councillors would clean up waste across British local authorities. If the party sweeps to power in the next general election, which is not expected to be held before 2029, he said they would reindustrialise Britain, eradicate taxes for those earning less than £20,000 and deport every single person who came to Britain illegally.
He slightly lost the crowd when he mentioned that steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal was planning to leave the UK because of Labour’s non-dom tax regime, which received a smattering of shouts of “good” and “good riddance”.
Farage interjected to explain that the ultra-wealthy leaving Britain was bad for UK investment, to a muted response from the audience.
There was no mention in any of the speeches of Rupert Lowe, who had been Reform’s fifth MP and a darling of US tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Reform’s momentum stalled this month after Farage’s public bust-up with Lowe, who had accused him of behaving like a messiah. Farage in turn accused Lowe of aggressive and bullying behaviour and reported him to the police before suspending him from the party.
Although Farage claimed that few people outside of Westminster knew or cared about his spat with Lowe, several Reform members mentioned it without prompting.
Jack, a 26-year-old man from Nottingham, said Farage has a “track record of getting rid of people who get too popular” and he “needs to put his ego to the side for the good of the country”.
But he said he was still “willing to listen to what [Farage] has to say”. “Looking around the world, around Europe, a rightwing revolution is coming, whether you agree with it or not,” he added.
