LONDON — Nigel Farage is the man of the moment in the British press. Whether his moment will extend to a year or two before another election for parliament — and the chance to boot out the Labour Party prime minister, Keir Starmer — is another matter, but he and his Reform UK party are riding a publicity wave like none other in the left-to-right spectrum of British politics.
“As Labour support has continued to rise, Reform has picked up the slack,” a report in the conservative Daily Telegraph says. “Hence experts are watching next May’s local elections to see where we’re headed.”
The Telegraph accompanied that analysis with a front-page interview with Mr. Farage, the most compelling point of which was the headline, “Farage: Musk will help us to beat Tories,” using the historic name for members of the Conservative Party.
Just how much support the American mogul Elon Musk is ready and willing to fork over for Mr. Farage’s campaign is not clear, but Mr. Farage in the interview seems confident he has the world’s richest man on his side.
Already, he told the Telegraph, Mr. Musk has been “a huge help” in winning over the young people who might in years past have gone for Labour but now are looking at Reform UK as the way out of Britain’s financial difficulties.
No, Mr. Farage didn’t know how much Mr. Musk might care to donate — reports indicate it could be a cool $100 million or so — but he was confident the multi-billionaire’s generosity would be “reasonable sized.” To head off the inevitable sniping of detractors, he added that everything would be “legal and above board” — meaning nothing sub rosa, all properly declared.
The image projected by the relationship with Mr. Musk counted most, as Mr. Farage indicated in his gushing description of the man whom he met recently at Mar-a-Lago.
“The shades, the bomber jacket, the whole vibe,” the Telegraph quoted Mr. Farage as saying. “Elon makes us cool. Elon is a huge help to us with the young generation and that will be the case going on and, frankly, that’s only just starting.”
The Telegraph had a reporter with Mr. Farage and his exultant supporters as he interrupted a fox hunt in the Kent countryside to join in the triumphant news that his party has more members than the Conservatives.
“We were watching the Reform membership tracker to see if it would hit the magic number of 131,680 — at which point Mr. Farage would be bigger than the Conservative Party,” the Telegraph’s on-scene report said. “When that line was crossed … he waved his beer triumphantly and cheered. …”
Mr. Farage’s populist appeal is such that the Telegraph’s rival, the Sunday Times, put on its front page a poll showing his Reform UK “could take 67 seats from Labour” in parliamentary elections. Assuming the Conservative Party made up for some of its losses, the paper figured, “Labour would lose its majority and nearly 200 of the seats it won in July’s landslide victory.”
If an election were held now, Labour “would have barely a third of the total of 650 seats and a lead of just six over the Conservatives,” according to the poll by a think tank called More in Common.
The ultimate dream is that Mr. Farage as leader of the upstart Reform UK could forge an alliance in parliament with the Conservatives and get elected prime minister.
As of now, though, relations between Tories and Reformers are bathed in bad blood. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, accused Reform UK of perpetrating “fake news” by rigging its website to hype the numbers.
Mr. Farage is now threatening to sue Ms. Badenoch for libel. “An absolutely outrageous thing for her to have said,” the tabloid Sun quoted him as saying. “I know she’s got a very bad temper. I know she’s well known for lashing out at people, but I am not at all happy.”
A veteran Conservative Party figure and long-time member of parliament, Jacob Rees-Mogg, urged the two to stop “throwing brickbats at each other,” according to the Sun. “The Right needs to unite to defeat this catastrophic hard-Left government.”