Farage is about to cause mayhem in Westminster and it's Sunak's fault

Something remarkable is happening in British politics. According to one bombshell poll this week, Nigel Farage and his Reform party are now only two points behind Rishi Sunak and the Tories.

Having officially returned as leader of Reform this week and announcing his plan to run for parliament in the Essex seat of Clacton, Farage is clearly boosting his party’s visibility and support.

In fact, across all polls this week his party has averaged close to 16 per cent, compared to only 11 per cent when Rishi Sunak called the election.

Support for the Conservatives, meanwhile, is down two points to just 21 per cent.

This is the opposite of what the Prime Minister and his party need and suggests Reform UK could soon draw level with, if not replace, the Conservatives, which would cause total mayhem in Westminster.

So what’s going on?

The answer is that Nigel Farage and Reform UK are quickly becoming the main inheritors of the post-Brexit “realignment” which propelled Boris Johnson into power in 2019, but which the Tories then completely squandered.

How did they lose this unique opportunity?

By presiding over the acceleration of mass immigration.

By losing control of the borders.

By failing to “level-up” the left-behind regions.

By refusing to take on the woke warriors.

By staying far too focused on London’s liberal middle-class.

Over the last four years Rishi Sunak and his party have angered and alienated all those voters who took a punt on Brexit and then Boris, but who today, increasingly, feel like strangers in their own country.

The Tory elite might loathe Farage, but the reality is many voters are furious with what the Tories have done to the country.

In 2019 they were promised lower, controlled immigration.

But since then they have been given the very opposite.

And now Nigel Farage is tapping directly into this deeper shift, talking over and over again about only three issues – immigration, immigration, and immigration.

You might not agree with Farage. You might find him inflammatory. You might find him divisive.

But the fact remains, many people in this country quietly nod their heads in agreement when he sets out his core messages:

We need to reduce immigration so we can prioritise the British people.

We need to take on radical Islam and push back against people who hate Britain.

We need to spend more time feeling proud, not ashamed, of who we are.

This is especially true for all those 2019 Conservative voters, who are now Farage’s main source of support.

About one in three who voted for Boris four years ago have now jumped ship to Farage, no doubt hoping that unlike Johnson he will actually do what he says.

Tory elites should not underestimate the scale of this support.

This week, more than half of these voters said they want to see Farage elected to parliament.

This looks likely given Clacton’s long history of supporting Farage and his earlier party UKIP. But this isn’t only about Clacton. Across the country, Farage is now recruiting support from all those groups that have been pushed to the margins over the last few decades – the skilled working-class, people who went to work rather than university, older voters who can remember a better time, and all those small towners and rural folk who live outside the big cities.

Their anger and frustration with the dire state of the country, with how people like them have been treated, is now bubbling over and looks set to propel Nigel Farage back into the very forefront of British politics.

Elites might complain about all this. They might blame Farage. They might criticise Reform UK.

But the blunt reality is they only have themselves to blame.

It was the Tories who created Nigel Farage, who have become the architects of their own demise, by promising voters one thing but doing the very opposite. And now they look set to pay the price.

● Matthew Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent