Farage cries foul after Reform slips to a tie with the Tories

LONDON — Nigel Farage is crying foul as pollsters place his struggling Reform UK behind right-wing rivals, the Conservative Party. A combination of scandal and a rejuvenated opposition has seen Reform slump to a second-place tie with the Conservatives for much of the last fortnight, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls . There are potentially years to run until the next U.K. general election — and British politics remains volatile. But it represents a steep fall from when Farage was being treated as Britain’s next prime minister and his right-wing outfit spent a year out in first place ahead of the governing Labour Party.

It’s a major test of Reform’s claim to be the best-placed right-wing vessel to stop another Labour victory. So what’s Farage’s answer? He is increasingly trying to remind voters how the Conservatives operated in government — and claiming the polls themselves are bogus. POLITICO spoke to half a dozen figures on Reform’s frontline to try and understand their gripes with the polling. All were granted anonymity, like others in this piece, because of the generally held convention in Westminster that parties don’t discuss polling.

Farage goes after the number-crunchers “The jiggery-pokery that is going on with polling is utterly astonishing,” Farage told journalists after a speech last week. “What you’ve seen from the polling industry is nonsense, and I mean that.” The Reform UK leader claimed that the “raw data” shows his party is really eight points clear of the Tories — and berated a “desperate push from the establishment” to get back to the “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” state of two-party politics.

Two senior Reform Party insiders challenged the methodology used by Britain’s pollsters. They argued that Reform’s polling is suppressed because of the way undecided voters are partially stacked with the party they voted for at the last election . Both insiders argued this would harm the party because it was a much more nascent outfit back in 2024. The party is also sharing alternative calculations that adjust for higher turnout than pollsters assume for Reform voters.

But that assessment is already being challenged by parts of the polling industry. Three polling experts denied the extent to which these factors would have a major influence on Reform’s polling. A fourth, the More in Common think tank, provided POLITICO with a detailed explainer of how its findings put Reform in third place on its own tracker regardless of how they crunch their data. From leaving the results raw to removing “don’t knows,” Reform UK remains behind the Tories in the research group’s findings.

In a bid to boost polling transparency, More in Common is preparing to publish a detailed explainer of how it arrives at its findings. YouGov’s Anthony Wells said turnout calculations don’t tend to hurt Reform because it’s assumed the party’s voters skew older, and therefore are more likely to actually vote than their left-wing rivals. “It’s wrong to assume all these things always work against Reform,” he added. Farage’s summer to forget Voting intention isn’t the only polling of concern to Reform.

A YouGov survey carried out last week has Tory Leader Badenoch far outpolling Farage on who would make the best prime minister. In the same study, she picks up far more Reform support in a head-to-head against Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham than Farage gets from Tory voters. Polling is central to one of the scandals that has dampened Reform’s performance in recent months. Two of Farage’s top advisers left their roles in the middle of the party’s conference in September after being caught in a sting alleging they were eliciting foreign donations to pay for “off-the-book” polling (an internal investigation has cleared them but a police probe is ongoing).

Many in Reform privately accept that their support has been harmed by their recent troubles — which also extend to undercover exposés broadcasting racism in the ranks. One senior official argued the party has been a “victim of our own success” in dislodging Labour’s Keir Starmer and then suffering under a polling “bounce” for his successor as prime minister, Andy Burnham. Others recognized a torrid season for Reform had been twinned with a genuine improvement by Badenoch at the helm of the Tories.

“Obviously it’s not been a good summer — that’s clear,” said a high-ranking Reform adviser. “A lot of it is because we’ve not a lot to say on a concentrated level whereas the Conservatives have very successfully organized their firepower in that regard.” No alarms and no surprises , please One of the senior Reform insiders cited above sought to argue that the polling now represents what would’ve been a sensible trajectory for the party from the 2024 general election to the next one, not due until summer 2029.

“The problem is there was an exaggerated, artificial burst that we as much as everybody else probably put too much faith in when Labour were clearly rubbish and the Tories were nowhere. So this feels more natural,” they said. “The problem is the direction of travel which we don’t like. But we think we are at a floor and the Tories are at a ceiling.” Many in Reform argue they still have a claim to being what Farage has called “ real opposition ” because the Conservatives are increasingly appealing to their former heartlands in southern England, while Reform gains support across Britain.

The same high-ranking adviser cited above expressed some optimism about plans to unveil more front-line figures, like the naming of a former Royal Air Force officer as armed forces spokesperson last week. Reform UK campaign material is seen around Clacton-on-Sea, England on Aug. 13, 2026. | Ben Montgomery/Getty Images “It would’ve caused undue alarm if we’d unveiled our whole team and a whole policy offering and then we were trailing,” they said of the polling.

“That’s why there’s not a sense of panic or disaster about it — it’s because we’ve got plenty in the kitbag ready to bring out.” But those on the peripheries of the party put it more bluntly. One Westminster lobbyist in regular discussion with Reform staff reported that the mood among them has “taken a real knock” over the past six months. The prospect of the Conservatives regaining credibility as the main party of the right, they said, remains a particularly “sensitive subject” that officials are focused on knocking down.

As the senior Reform insider quoted above put it: “Clearly we are in a battle for the narrative, and it’s tough when the entirety of the media is determined to try and present the Tories as resurgent when actually still they’re doing no better than they did in 2024.” Painting a thousand words Amid the focus on perception, one recent own goal was particularly awkward for the party. A set-piece press conference in Westminster that Farage threw with his would-be chancellor Robert Jenrick was half-empty .

For a party that prides itself on its ability to draw big crowds, this gave the appearance that the fans had stopped flocking. Farage — with his back to the supporters who did turn up (they were rearranged behind him to ensure the TV cameras weren’t broadcasting the empty chairs) — sharply blamed “staff incompetence” for the poor turnout. One angered aide attributed the unforced error to an “email mess-up.” Rather than a policy reset, inside Reform they are now mounting a fightback centered on reminding voters of the Conservatives’ track record.

They aim to paint the Tories as a party that misruled Britain for 14 years until Labour’s landslide victory. Farage tried this appeal to the public in response to a question from POLITICO at a press conference last week, urging voters to “remember what they are — who they are. They will tell any lie they have to.” “Yes, Kemi is a new face, but it’s all the same people running it,” he added. “The same cynical, nasty people who spend their lives tearing chunks out of each other, doing their best to do down their opposition.”

A reconciliation of the two right-wing parties to combat Labour does not seem to be on the cards . There may be (more) trouble ahead Reform is meanwhile braced for more negative headlines over donations. Farage suggested to the BBC over the weekend that he expects to fall foul of the ongoing parliamentary investigation into an undisclosed £5 million donation from a crypto billionaire. That may leave him facing another by-election in his Clacton constituency if he wishes to remain an MP.

Zia Yusuf speaks to the media in Gosport, England on Oct. 5, 2026. | Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images Farage continues to give the impression he’s up for the fight, trying to visibly campaign around the country twice a week. But observers of Reform have noted how Jenrick and Zia Yusuf, Farage’s combative home affairs spokesperson , are making themselves — and their divergent approaches to politics — look available in case a vacancy arises.

Behind the scenes, the allegations that prompted the departures of senior Farage aides Dan Jukes and James Orr have also necessitated a rejig. Jenrick’s spinner Tom Milford will become the party’s head of press , while Amar Johal, a former government lawyer who’s widely respected in Reform circles, has been formally promoted to succeed Orr as policy chief, two people with knowledge of the appointment told POLITICO. Keep calm and Kemi on In the ornate tearooms of parliament, shadow cabinet ministers are careful to disguise their joy at encroaching on Reform’s territory in the polls.

“Do we look like a party that celebrates being second place? We are winners. We are winners,” as one Conservative frontbencher strained to tell POLITICO. But a senior Tory with a keen eye on strategy said achieving “crossover” in the polls “was definitely an objective we had.” The same shadow cabinet minister cited earlier argued that a lot of Reform’s support is “transactional” and that many voters on the right will “support any party to defeat the left.”

“We do think we’ve got a big opportunity now to build on that. If we can convince people we are the party that can defeat Labour a lot of people will come over to support us,” they added. At Tory high command, they reckon Badenoch’s relative personal popularity is finally starting to rub off on the rest of the party. “It was only a matter of time before the party started to catch up with Kemi,” a senior Conservative adviser said. “Obviously, the party still has a long, long way to go, so I don’t want to sound complacent, but we are starting to see the sense that this is a different party than the one voters rejected in 2024.

That is starting to percolate.” At the same time, they argued, Reform has “increasingly looked like they embody all of the worst parts of Westminster after claiming they were going to be an antidote to it.” More in Common on Wednesday will publish fresh research that will go down well in Conservative Campaign Headquarters. Since May, there has been a sharp drop in voters who believe Reform is the main party of the right. Down from 43%, Reform is now tied at 30% with the “don’t knows.”

The Conservatives are now just behind Reform on 28%, up from 17%. “To be honest, uniting the right is now very tricky because two parties are now on the same amount,” the senior Reform official conceded. As for Labour, Burnham insists he won’t be calling an election any time in the next year — and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that holding off is the right move. But the prime minister will hope that the deep split on the right of British politics stays entrenched until after polling day.

Esther Webber and Noah Keate contributed reporting.