Nigel Farage Reforms the election

One of the few benefits Rishi Sunak was hoping to gain by calling an early general election was blindsiding Nigel Farage and ensuring he wouldn’t run. 

Reform’s newly-promoted leader has up-ended those plans, announcing he will stand in Clacton, in Essex, and take the lead in outflanking the Tories from the right. 

Farage, who has taken the helm from Richard Tice, said the election was “the dullest, most boring election campaign we have ever seen in our lives,” rubbishing Sunak and the Labour leader Keir Starmer in the same breath. 

By announcing an early election Farage said Sunak had tried to “cheat” him out of standing, but he announced: “I’ve changed my mind… I’m coming back, for the next five years.”

Having initially said he would not stand, the Farage premium – how much he will personally boost Reform’s chances on election day, eroding the Tory vote share in the process  – has not been tested for a few months. 

But is undoubtedly real: in a YouGov poll from late November, Reform took an 11 point vote share with Richard Tice as party leader. With Farage at the helm, it grew to 14. 

With Farage back in play, Reform becomes a real threat to the Tories. Already, a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll has put the governing party on 20 percent, just six points above its right-wing challenger. Labour meanwhile is riding high on 46 per cent. 

Positioning his demotion as his decision, a somewhat hesitant Tice insisted Farage’s return would “energise this election” and “turn on the rocket boosters”. 

Both men called it “the immigration election”. 

Indeed, Farage said he believed Reform could get more votes than the Conservatives. 

Until this announcement, Reform’s candidate for Clacton was Tony Mack. On Monday, Tortoise revealed he had shared Islamophobic and antisemitic content online. 

Mack wrote that Muslims were “backward” and “maladjusted”, shared images featuring antisemitic tropes, and said Reform was the only way to save Britain from a “globalist agenda”. It’s unclear whether Mack will be redeployed to another seat. 

Farage has never won a parliamentary seat, but the Conservatives have long feared what would happen if he did return to frontline politics, and in particular what would happen to their fragile 2019 voter base. 

Farage is trying to win a Commons seat at the eighth time of asking. Clacton, previously held by UKIP’s Douglas Carswell, isn’t a surefire winner but it’s the shrewdest choice. Survation polling from January suggested that if Farage ran against Giles Watling, the Tory candidate, he would win by 10 points. 

With Reform having failed to translate its low-double-figure poll rating into a by-election win, one MP told Tortoise: “It’s clear Farage is the man that they need.”

Judging by today’s announcement, Farage agrees.