Has Nigel Farage peaked too soon?
Whisper it but Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s ascendancy appears to be over, and the next election could be a straight Labour vs Conservatives fight, says Tom Harwood
In May last year, when Keir Starmer dragged the nation’s political press along to a glass manufacturing centre in Warrington, everyone was a little baffled. While some expected a grand new announcement, a new policy, perhaps even a new direction for the government – new policy came there none.
Instead, the then Prime Minister had orchestrated the whole jaunt in order to devote his speech in its entirety to one Mr. Nigel Farage. By this point, Labour had been consistently behind in the polls for a month, following an unrelenting downwards trend since the general election ten months earlier.
But at this point, Labour wasn’t that far behind. Starmer didn’t just make the speech to warn of what he saw as the dangers of the rise of the Reform Party. He also very deliberately framed the debate as Labour vs Reform. He declared Nigel Farage the Leader of the Opposition.
At the time, it was obvious to many why Sir Keir chose this risky gambit. He thought that given a straight fight Labour was likely to beat Reform. He knew that at the time his personal ratings held up best against Nigel Farage. Not that this would last long.
Arguably rather than boosting his own party, all the gambit served to do was to boost Farage’s ratings up higher still. When the then Prime Minister made his speech, Reform was polling in the mid-20s. In the months after, the party rose above the 30 per cent threshold.
Andy Burnham has taken the opposite approach. This week he invited the leaders of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party to engage in cross party talks in his bid to create a new consensus on public funding of social care. Left out of those talks? The man who had led more than 350 opinion polls in a row.
Out in the cold
Instead of bigging up Nigel Farage and Reform, as Keir Starmer once did, Andy Burnham is leaving them out in the cold. It doesn’t help Farage’s case that he has taken himself off the pitch by calling an unnecessary by election, effectively banishing himself from our television screens and radio sets thanks to Britain’s anachronistic broadcasting rules around elections. Yet, Burnham is clearly operating as if the Farage ascendency is not inevitable.
And just as the new Number 10 has taken this new approach to the Reform party, something else has changed. For the first time since April 2025 there are now polls that show Reform knocked off its first place spot in the polls. Suddenly everything looks a lot more competitive. And not just in one direction.
There has been much commentary of Labour’s polling advance – the Burnham bounce – yet that isn’t the only shift we are seeing. This week’s latest Yougov poll put not just Labour and Reform, but the top three parties in a statistical tie. 22-22-21 for Reform, Labour, and the Tories (remember them), respectively.
The research agency More In Common has for some time been tracking the rise in Kemi Badenoch’s personal approval ratings. And it is true to say the Tory Party has now risen beyond its nadir or 15-16 per cent in the polls some months ago.
Indeed in the three latest polls (from YouGov, Survation, and More In Common) the Conservatives are now just one, two, and three points behind the Reform Party.
Britain has had history of an insurgent third party looking ascendant – practically all dominating – as the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaked at over 50 per cent in some polls in 1981. But the Gang of Four peaked too early. By 1983, the party came third in both vote share and seat share, and the same old two party politics – once declared dead – was back with a vengeance.
This Parliament could still run for another three years yet. Whisper it, could the next election yet become a traditional Labour-Tory affair once again? Don’t rule it out.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GBNews