Nigel Farage has the crowd, but not the plan - and the clock is ticking

3 May 2025, 07:39 | Updated: 3 May 2025, 07:45

The 'vibes' have got Reform UK leader Nigel Farage this far but now comes the hard part.

Nigel Farage doesn’t have a reputation for doing policy.  He’s more of a ‘vibes’ politician – all about the headlines rather than the small print. 

And when it looks like the small print might get him into trouble he simply denies knowing anything about it.  

Back in 2014, for example, when challenged in an interview about some of the battier ideas that had appeared in UKIP’s manifesto at the 2010 election, he said he’d not read it.

That’s going to have to change if he’s serious about driving his latest vehicle, Reform UK, through the gates of Downing Street. Being the toast of the town, as he is after his party’s stunning performance at elections this week, is great. But there’s a downside. From now on, its policy offer is going to come under a lot more scrutiny.

For a while, at least, Farage, like struggling Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, might be able to get away with hanging a big ‘Currently Under Construction’ sign over his platform. And he and his backers can also point to the setting up of a new think tank, Resolute 1850, reportedly linked to the party, as an indication that, as well as ‘professionalizing’, they are finally taking policy seriously.

But if that is the case, then it could have quite a job on its hands if it’s to resolve what some see as the fundamental inconsistency between, on the one hand, Reform’s essentially Thatcherite enthusiasm for a shrinking the state and cutting public spending and, on the other, the evident desire of many of its target voters for a state that saves and protect us when things go wrong.

It’s all very well, for example, to demand, as Farage did, that the government nationalise British Steel, but – as Thatcher (whose forced departure was what prompted him to leave the Conservative Party for UKIP all those years ago) would have told him and as he and his colleagues still believe  – government ought to be getting out of the way, not stepping in and interfering with the free market.

Farage is also playing with fire when he says we need to look again at how we deliver and fund healthcare.  A pledge to keep the NHS free at the point of use but somehow financed in a different way is going to have to be coherently and convincingly worked through if it’s not to fall to pieces under the pressure of a general election.

Right now, then, Farage seems to be seen by many of his jubilant supporters as the messiah. But on policy he’s always been more of a naughty boy. That needs to change – and perhaps more quickly than he’d like.

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Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation.

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