CLACTON-ON-SEA, England—British parliamentary elections have not been kind to Nigel Farage. He’s previously failed in no fewer than seven attempts to win a seat in Westminster, one of which nearly killed him, but he remains undeterred. On Thursday, as U.K. voters head to the polls in the general election, the right-wing populist Reform U.K. leader—promising MAGA-style immigration crackdowns and a “patriotic” curriculum in schools—might just secure a place in the House of Commons for the first time.
He’ll be mounting his most recent effort at a moment when European voters appear to have developed something of a taste for more hard-core right-wing politics. The latest example came in France, where Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally won the largest vote share in the first round of the parliamentary election on Sunday. But whether Britain, a country that overwhelmingly views Donald Trump unfavorably, is ready to embrace a man who seems to be doing just about everything he can to emulate the Republican former president isn’t certain.
On Sunday, Farage held a U.S-style political rally—which is extremely rare in the U.K.—in which he attacked the media, referred to his political rivals with mocking nicknames, and complained about how the left had ruined Doctor Who. Reform’s chief executive Paul Oakden even vowed to “Make Britain Great Again” at the event. In the past week, in an interview with The Daily Beast, Farage said Biden is “a disaster” and that Trump’s “strength” would restore order to a chaotic world.
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The Fox News regular has also attacked the BBC on the grounds that a hostile TV studio audience was “rigged” against him, and has claimed that a Reform party canvasser who was secretly filmed using a racist slur to describe British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was a “set-up.” A Reform official has since made a complaint against the network which captured the remarks, accusing the channel of “election interference.”
Despite his national parliamentary election setbacks, he has been one of the most successful politicians since his arrival on the U.K.’s political scene 30 years ago. He was first elected as one of Britain’s representatives in the European Parliament—sent to deliver a stridently anti-European message—in 1999 and would go on to win another four EU races. After becoming the leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) in 2006, he led the party in the U.K.’s 2014 European elections to winning more seats than both the leading Labour and Conservative parties. Farage’s greatest achievement, depending on how you look at it, remains his advocacy for the campaign for the U.K. to leave the European Union in a historic referendum in 2016—a date which he described as Britain’s “independence day.”
In the years following the vote, Farage created the Brexit Party which advocated the most extreme exit from the EU available. He rebranded the party to Reform U.K. once Britain finally did ditch the union.
When the nation’s Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced a shock early general election in May, Farage initially said he wouldn’t seek a seat for himself. “Important though the general election is, the contest in the United States of America on November 5 has huge global significance,” he said in a statement at the time. By early June, he’d changed his mind and announced that he was taking over as leader of Reform and running for a seat himself in the July 4 election.
Of course, his track record shows he’s not guaranteed to win his own race, but he does have a few things going for him.
For one, as a regular on TV broadcasts, he has an unusually high profile for a British politician who’s never won a seat—by some measures, he’s the most famous and popular political figure in his homeland. While the center-left Labour Party is expected to win the national election and form the next government, Farage’s personal appeal coupled with a widespread desire to topple the Conservatives may help him unseat Giles Watling, the incumbent Tory lawmaker in the southeastern coastal district of Clacton, which Farage is hoping to represent. Some polls suggest he’s about to end his long losing streak.
Clacton, itself, offers a unique chance to Farage. The district recorded one of the most overwhelming votes in support of leaving the EU, with 73 percent of voters backing Brexit in 2016. It was also the district where UKIP got its first elected member of the British parliament in 2014 when Douglas Carswell, who was initially elected as a Conservative, defected to UKIP—led at the time by Farage—triggering a special election. Carswell was re-elected with his new UKIP affiliation, putting Clacton ahead of the curve in embracing Farage’s policies.
“It is often a part of the country that has been sneered at and derided and condescended,” Carswell, who is now the president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, tells The Daily Beast. “But actually, in political terms, it’s been a straw in the wind. It’s been a sort of harbinger of things to come.”
Carswell, who quit UKIP and ultimately parliament in 2017, says he thinks Farage may now finally get a seat. And Carswell specifically advised Farage about where to run after watching Sunak’s disastrous, rain-soaked election announcement in May. “One of the first things I did—after I picked myself up off the floor having laughed hysterically at the sight of it—was send Nigel a message saying: ‘You’ve got to run in Clacton, it would be hilarious,’” Carswell says.
He also believes that the “relentless muppetry” of the leaders of the Conservative Party, which has made “a series of catastrophic mistakes” while in power, means they are now facing something of a deserved reckoning. “Maybe this is just karma for 15 years, 20 years of moral cowardice and unprincipled opportunism,” Carswell explains. “Maybe what Farage is doing is making people realize their cowardice has consequences—most of all for them.”
The extent of those “consequences,” as Carswell puts it, remains to be seen. But if polls are accurate in indicating that the Tories may end up with their lowest number of parliamentary seats in the organization’s 200-year history, then there’s a chance that Britain’s right could look elsewhere for mass representation. Farage himself has expressed hopes that Reform will be able to seriously challenge the likely Labour government by the next election in 2029, using a TV interview last month to discuss the example of the 1993 Canadian federal election. (In that case, the leading conservative party was wiped out—with many previous supporters switching to an upstart populist party called Reform—and one of Reform’s new lawmakers, Stephen Harper, eventually became the prime minister of Canada leading a new Conservative Party.) “I don’t want to join the Conservative Party,” Farage said. “I think the better thing to do would be to take it over.”
The idea of Farage leading whatever remains of the Tories is a disturbing prospect for some. “There is absolutely no way that the Conservative Party should ever accept Farage as a member,” one former Conservative minister tells The Daily Beast. “The only way for the Conservative Party to recover is to re-establish its intellectual credibility in the mid-right of British politics without the bigoted nastiness of much of Reform’s thinking.”
The senior ex-lawmaker nevertheless accepts there are “of course” some in the organization who would welcome Farage aboard. “And they’re as bad as he is,” the former minister said. “If the Conservative Party becomes Reform under a different name, it’ll be dead forever.”
Farage himself has been at the center of controversy during the campaign. He was widely condemned for saying that, while Russia’s war in Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s fault, “we provoked this war” with EU and NATO expansion. He’s subsequently faced questions about previous comments in which called Putin the leader he most admired, and a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported that a network of Facebook pages pushing Kremlin talking points had also posted messages supporting Reform UK. The U.K.’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, described the alleged election interference as “gravely concerning”—concerns which Farage dismissed as “the Russia hoax.”
The Trumpian language isn’t an accident—Farage continues to support the MAGA leader as vital for the world. “I think in terms of where the world is, and in terms of worries about war etc, I think he’s a very important figure,” Farage told The Daily Beast last week outside The Three Jays pub in Jaywick, a village outside Clacton-on-Sea (Farage was visiting the venue for a campaign event to watch the England soccer team playing Slovenia in the European Championship).
“We’re in the worst situation since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Farage elaborated. “We’ve got war in the Middle East, a war in Ukraine, and who knows what’s going to happen in Taiwan? The world is not in a good place. And, you know, history teaches us that peace comes through strength, not weakness—and Biden, I’m afraid, ever since Kabul, has been a bit of a disaster.”
Exactly how Trump would secure peace in Ukraine remains unclear, despite the former president’s vow that he would rapidly end the conflict if he returns to the White House. A pair of his advisers have presented him with a plan which would see the U.S. cut off arms shipments to Kyiv unless it begins peace talks with Moscow while simultaneously pressuring the Kremlin to negotiate by threatening to ramp up support for Ukraine.
“He has to have leverage over both, doesn’t he?” Farage says of the Trump advisers’ proposal. “If he has leverage over both, there might be a negotiation. That might be a good thing. Well, that would be a good thing—whether it concludes anything is another matter.”
Farage was speaking on the day he’d won a Television and Radio Industries Club award, for the second year running, for his work hosting on the right-wing GB News network. Not everyone at the ceremony in London was happy, with some booing him as he gave his acceptance speech. “Jealousy, obviously,” Farage told The Daily Beast. “It’s the second year that I’ve won, so there’s a little bit of jealousy.”
Winding up the media, however, isn’t necessarily what the people of Clacton—who Farage is hoping to represent in Westminster—really want or need. “He won’t be representing the constituency of Clacton,” says David, a volunteer supporting the campaign of the district’s Labour candidate, Jovan Owusu-Nepaul. “He won’t be here, he’ll be gone. He’ll be around on his bus doing things, maybe visiting America, visiting a future president there, depending on how that goes.”
Some voters are less concerned about Farage’s ties to the U.S. “I think he’s great,” Tony, a 57-year-old support worker, tells The Daily Beast. “I think he’s a strong leader that this country needs.” Tony described himself as a working-class person who’d grown up in a family supporting Labour. “But then when they start putting the focus on Palestine and things like that, you start thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, you need to focus on this country, sorting out our own problems here as opposed to anywhere else first.’”
Bob Brace, who was at the pub where Farage watched the England game, is even more effusive. “The man has integrity, first of all,” he said of Farage. “That’s most important. He has charm. He has charisma, and I honestly believe that he will do what he says.” Brace thinks Farage is the “nearest thing we have to a panacea” for the problems facing Britain, and sees a potential victory in Clacton as a “springboard” for Reform to go after bigger successes. “I think he’s playing the long game,” Brace says. “We know that Labour are going to win the next election. But that’s only because most people either can’t remember how bad the last Labour government were 14 years ago, or they weren’t old enough to vote.”
Farage himself isn’t particularly moved by the argument that Reform, in the near term, is merely helping to make a Labour landslide more likely by drawing right-wing voters away from the Tories. “The Conservatives killed themselves already, completely killed themselves already,” he told The Daily Beast.
If he does win his own personal race, it may prove to be something of an opportunity cost for a man who has built a successful media career and bragged about job offers in the U.S. “He will want to lead a party,” one former senior UKIP politician who worked closely with Farage told The Daily Beast. “But he’s very famous now and he can earn a lot of money. And I’m not sure he’s going to like milkshakes chucked at him every time goes out.”
Of course if he loses his eighth race for the British parliament, he may well find another race across the Atlantic ready to welcome his support. So will he be hitting the trail for Trump if Clacton voters don’t elect him on July 4th? With a smile, Farage answers: “Ask me on July the 5th.”
