Matthew Levine is a PhD student in history at Stanford University. He lives in Buckinghamshire.
When Nigel Farage announced he was angling for the position of Prime Minister in 2029, the response from across the political spectrum seemed to be nervous derision.
Michael Gove, the departing Tory MP and Cabinet Minister, called the idea “ridiculous”, whilst an episode of ITV News’ Talking Politics gently tore apart the idea of a Farage premiership by pointing to his limited popular appeal and controversial persona.
A YouGov poll conducted the following day showed these views resonated with the general public, with only 23 per cent of respondents describing a Farage premiership in the next ten years as “fairly likely” or “very likely”. One Twitter user responded to Farage’s announcement, rather poetically, by saying there were “LSD addicts with a firmer grasp on reality!”
There is a certain level of comfort that comes from believing that Farage could never take the post once occupied by William Gladstone and Winston Churchill. But dismissing the possibility that he might one day inhabit Number 10 is an instinctive reflex belonging to a long-gone political era.
The two routes by which Farage might carry the hard right to power – a take-over of the Conservatives or a breakthrough into the two-party system – are both plausible and globally well-trodden. So what do these two alternate futures look like?
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“They are the model”. At a campaign event in Clacton, Farage made clear which political party he hoped to emulate.
He was referring to Canada’s Reform Party which in 1993, amidst a national landslide for the centre-left Liberal Party, aided the annihilation of the ruling Progressive Conservatives by winning over socially conservative and disaffected voters angry at a ruling class they felt was letting them down.
After a decade of a split vote, the shattered fragments of the centre-right were hoovered into a new Conservative Party of Canada, dominated by the much more stridently right-wing Canadian Alliance, a successor to the populist Reform Party which Farage so strongly admires.
Before the election, political analysts like Dr Zain Mohyuddin of UK in a Changing Europe have been quick to downplay the similarities between 1993 and 2024. “The Conservatives will suffer a cataclysmic defeat on 4 July”, Mohyuddin writes, but the Tories are “unlikely to suffer an electoral rout on the same scale” as that of the Canadian Conservatives in 1993.
Both Britain and Canada use the First-Past-the-Post system, but support for the British Conservatives is far more concentrated than that of the old Progressive Conservatives, limiting their vulnerability to a full-scale rout.
Similarly Reform UK’s support, in contrast to that of their Canadian heroes, tends to be thinly spread. It picked up only five seats, trailing far behind both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, and the 98 where it came second are overwhelmingly Labour-facing.
The dire situation for the Conservatives, however, remains, and gives it plenty of reason to consider a formal merger with Reform.
Analysts have recognised that the Tories avoided total annihilation in part due to the strong partisan identification of Conservative voters, for many of whom ticking a box next to a Conservative logo in an election is as instinctive as breathing.
To a savvy Tory strategist, however, this stability may actually make welcoming Reform into the party a good way to revive the electoral coalition that carried Boris Johnson to victory in 2019. A Conservative label next to Farage would help detoxify his image and unite Reform voters with “‘til I die” Tories into a powerful electoral bloc.
Tantamount to an electoral Armageddon for the Conservatives, the other route to a Nigel Farage premiership seems less likely, but cannot be ruled out. This Parliament is the most marginal since 1945, with many of even the rump Tory parliamentary party sitting on relatively narrow majorities.
As such, and accepting that Labour is in a similar position and could lose plenty of ground too, there is plenty of scope for the Conservative Party to go backwards at the next election. A humiliation of that scale would make it hard for the Conservatives to accept any alternative other than a formal merger with Reform – especially if they also continued to lose seats to the Lib Dems.
A party system with the Liberal Democrats in opposition and Labour in government would force the Conservatives and Reform into an unholy electoral marriage – and in such circumstances, it’s hard to see anyone but Farage leading this new alliance of the right.
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So Farage may lead a coalition of the right. But, so what? Maybe… maybe he leads the Official Opposition, at some point. But surely he cannot be Prime Minister.
Well… maybe. By 2029, the results of the 2024 election may have been taken by many as evidence that the politics of the centre-right is a dead end.
Furthermore, on the off-chance that Sir Keir Starmer’s watered-down, “change-but-not-really-that-much-change” approach has not fixed Britain’s enormous housing crisis, its ailing public services, and its structural economic problems, Farage’s argument that only he can break Britain away from its downward tailspin may become particularly potent.
Young people in particular are the most likely to buy into this rhetoric. Across Europe and North America, right-wing politicians are performing remarkably well among young people. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is backed by a third of French voters under the age of 34, whilst Donald Trump was steadily eroding Joe Biden’s lead among young people before the President announced he would not contest the election.
Young people are the most frustrated voters and the most likely to embrace radical views. Even now, Reform UK has been making inroads into the youth vote, and Farage’s TikTok account has effortlessly outperformed even that of the Labour Party on a per-video basis.
If a Labour government performs as dismally as did the Conservatives on the issues that matter most to the young, they will be politically homeless, and there is no telling where they may go.
In Italy, France, Germany, and the United States, the window of political acceptability is shifting. To assume that the United Kingdom is impervious to this trend would be wishful thinking.
Anyone who remains sceptical would do well to recall their incredulity when another funny-looking outsider descended an elevator in a New York hotel, and announced he was running for President of the United States.
