Even if Farage’s anger about media intrusion was real, his recorded video message still felt a little confected. And I’m not sure there’s much sympathy out there for a politician who’s not only telling us he’s enormously wealthy thanks to all sorts of second jobs but that he could be even more wealthy if he quit parliament. As for the nonsense about Britain being a “broken” – indeed a “communist” – country where “men can’t wear watches and women can’t wear jewellery” in the streets, that was presumably for an American audience. And the plug for his investment tips making people impressive returns was simply grifting of the highest order.
Although, there will be voters in Clacton who’ll see the whole thing for what it is (namely, an expensive sideshow which appears to be designed to distract from the allegations Farage is facing), I don’t doubt that he stands a good chance of winning this by-election. But the other main parties now seem likely not to stand candidates. Another option might have been to field a joint candidate – a 2026 version of Martin Bell, the former war correspondent who took on cash-for-questions MP Neil Hamilton in a 1997 by-election and won as an independent with the backing of Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
More importantly, none of this will help Farage wriggle out of the allegations he’s facing. As soon as he makes it back into parliament, the investigation will restart where it left off. He can run – but he can’t hide.
Nigel Farage has wasted no time in demanding that Andy Burnham call a general election as soon as he walks through the door of Downing Street. But given how poorly Reform UK performed in Makerfield – a third by-election loss in a row – its normally canny leader can’t really mean it.
Or can he?
It’s one thing for Farage to try turning defeat into victory by claiming that “Keir Starmer isn’t the first prime minister I’ve deposed, and he won’t be the last”. It’s also quite something to make the call having finally emerged from self-imposed purdah, following negative media coverage of a £5m gift that Farage quietly banked from cryptocurrency gazillionaire Christopher Harborne.
But it’s quite another thing to pretend that he and his party are genuinely ready to field a convincing list of quality candidates in more than 600 seats nationwide.
Or that they can rapidly put together a manifesto that doesn’t fall apart under the intense scrutiny of a general election campaign, raising the possibility that Farage, not for the first time, will end up disowning some of its key pledges. Which is easy to do when you’ve no chance of making it into No 10, but much, much harder when you are in with a shout or, indeed, once you’ve moved in.
For all the talk of Farage’s determination to professionalise his party – a commitment that has seen a significant increase in junior staffers joining Reform’s Milbank Tower HQ to cope with a huge influx of grassroots members – he knows that there is still a long way to go before it can compete, machine-wise, with the so-called legacy parties, particularly when it comes to candidate selection and ground campaigning.
Of those elected to councils after Reform’s big win in the local elections in May, far too many have already fallen by the wayside. Moreover, Makerfield was the second potentially winnable parliamentary seat, after Gorton and Denton, that Reform failed to win because Farage’s chosen candidate proved to be a dud. Even the candidate who did pull off a narrow by-election victory for Reform in Runcorn and Helsby in May 2025, Sarah Pochin, has managed to embarrass her leader on several occasions.
Farage is no fool. He knows full well that he has a serious salesforce problem, primarily because, as the recent run of by-election defeats amply demonstrates, the majority of Brits who aren’t Farage fans are increasingly willing to vote tactically to keep him out of power. It is a phenomenon that can only be offset by him winning over, not just the party’s hardcore supporters, but Reform-curious voters who might be prepared to give the party a go, as long as its candidate doesn’t look dodgy and its platform doesn’t seem too extreme.
The latter will be down to the two men who Farage has deputed to come up with policies (possibly unwisely, given their unrepresentatively hardline views on, say, abortion) – Tory defector Danny Kruger, and philosopher of religion (yes, really) James Orr.
But policy also throws up a second, equally serious question for Farage: what to do about the threat posed by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, especially when, given the bad blood between the two men, there is zero prospect of some kind of non-aggression pact?
Farage’s call for “pure, cold rage” in the wake of the tragic footage released of Henry Nowak’s dying words came across as a desperate attempt not to be outflanked on the right.
But after rioters attacked police in Southampton, it backfired badly, doing the one thing that Farage has always been incredibly careful to avoid – namely, getting himself and his party associated in the public mind with the kind of violence that turns off the vast majority of British voters.
The same, given the decline in Brits seeing national identity in explicitly ethnocentric terms, goes for Farage resorting to patently racialised language, suggesting that “Britain is a two-tier state – against white people”.
All this has reignited calls from some in the party to ditch, or at least demote, Reform’s controversial home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, who insiders accuse of encouraging Farage to adopt a harder line in order to see off Restore. Either they are genuinely convinced some red lines just should not be crossed, or because they’ve long had it in for an outspoken Muslim they don’t see as a team-player, with his less-than-subtle slap-down of Tory retread Robert Jenrick over deportation policy cited as the most recent example.
In fact, that was only the latest episode of beef between the two men – a situation that Farage (who must also be hoping Suella Braverman behaves better as a Reform MP than she did as a Tory) has to handle with care.
On the one hand, the fact that the crown princes are fighting each other, rather than trying to usurp the king, suits Farage fine. On the other, he and the lower-profile but crucial backstage staffers he relies on most – such as long-term aide, Dan Jukes, comms director Ed Sumner, operations guy Aaron Lobo and, more informally, Farage’s former chief of staff, “Posh” George Cottrell – are well aware that British voters dislike divided parties.
They are similarly well aware that they don’t much like Donald Trump either, or his Iran adventure – which is why Farage isn’t as upset as he might once have been about the cooling of his supposed friendship with the US president.
But if Reform’s leader looks a little rattled right now, don’t write him off.
After all, he has come back from far bigger defeats than the one that his party suffered in Makerfield. And anyway, that wasn’t the by-election that may have worried him most. The Conservatives’ win in Aberdeen South was a reminder that this party isn’t yet dead and buried.
Farage believes Andy Burnham is beatable. But what really scares him right now is the prospect, unlikely though it may seem, of a Tory revival. Which is one reason why his demand for an early election might be more genuine than it first appears.
British politics – and I say this as someone who’s had a lifelong fascination with it – used to be a fairly predictable affair, even, some would say, a little dull. Brexit, however, has helped to change all that – and probably for good.
Until 2016, the center-left Labour Party and the center-right Conservatives alternated in power, while voting for other parties was seen as pretty much a waste of time. Now, however, we’ve entered an era of five- or six-party politics and – even more incredibly, perhaps – we’re about to see our seventh prime minister in 10 years.
Starmer’s resignation
After transforming Labour’s fortunes as opposition leader, Keir Starmer found governing the country far more difficult. A series of early missteps and his failure to effectively communicate an inspiring sense of direction saw his government lose votes to both its right and its left, causing Starmer’s personal ratings to fall below even those of his party. It was a situation that his colleagues could only put up with for so long. The dam finally broke after his longtime rival, Andy Burnham, returned to parliament this week and triggered Starmer’s resignation.
Brexit, of course, isn’t the only reason for Britain’s shift from comfortable to chaotic politics. The British party system has been fraying at the edges since the early 1970s when the Liberal Party began to attract more support and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales began to win seats at Westminster. The electorate has become steadily more volatile and less deferential. As a result, parties that used to be able to count on people’s votes now have to earn them – something that has simultaneously become increasingly difficult as fiscal constraints, slower economic growth, and the increased demand on public services imposed by a rapidly ageing population have made it much harder to deliver the often unrealistic pledges that British politicians, running scared of the electorate, still insist on making.
From comfortable to chaotic
One way they chose to try to square the circle was through mass migration – importing cheaper labor to keep the cost of social care and healthcare down, to fill skill shortages, while attracting plenty of overseas students in order to boost the finances of the UK’s burgeoning university sector.
That policy – not least because it was never advocated openly and honestly – triggered a backlash that helped bring about Brexit in the first place and has bedeviled British politics ever since.
Public concern about immigration rose steeply as people began pouring in from the Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 – an influx that, together with the migration crisis that hit Europe in 2015, was partly responsible for the Leave vote in 2016.
The second stage of that backlash followed the decision to liberalize the post-Brexit immigration regime by a Conservative government that had promised voters to “take back control” of the country’s borders. This was mainly in the wake of fears that the closure of the labor market during the Covid crisis would do severe short-term damage to the economy.
The third stage has centered on irregular (now labelled “illegal”) migrants, mainly from South Asia and the Near and Middle East, coming across the English Channel in small boats and claiming asylum, obliging the government to spend untold millions of pounds keeping them housed in hotels while their applications are decided.
The immigration backlash
The backlash has led to violent street protests in some places but has mainly led those voters uncomfortable with migration – primarily white, older, less educated voters living in small towns, nearly all of whom voted Leave in 2016 – to move away from both main parties (but in particular the Conservatives) and towards the populist radical right in the shape of Reform UK, the rebranded Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage.
Conversely, many “progressive” voters (the vast majority of whom voted Remain in 2016) quickly grew disillusioned and disappointed with Labour after it came to power in 2024 and, in a misguided attempt to win back voters lost to Reform, talked in performatively tough terms about immigration. Labour showed little initial sympathy with the plight of Gazans, showed little sign of wanting to significantly reverse Brexit, and insisted on sticking to ‘fiscal rules’ that have made it difficult to finance the degree of change that its voters were hoping for. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was turning the UK’s so-called ‘special relationship’ with the United States into a cruel joke.
Somewhat ironically, then, Brexit has made politics in Britain and the country’s ability to project its power internationally look much more, well, European than was the case before the country voted to leave the EU 10 years ago today. And yet there is no chance in the short term of a return to the bloc. True, opinion polls suggest a majority of Brits now regard Brexit as a mistake and claim they would now vote to rejoin. But they also suggest relatively few people have, in fact, changed their minds, as well as pointing to a marked reluctance to reopen such a painful and polarizing debate.
All of this leaves Britain in a profoundly unstable, even dysfunctional state – unable to come to terms with the fact that it has ambitions and pretensions way beyond both its means and the capacity of its politicians to match them in the real world. The biggest favor Andy Burnham, our next prime minister, could do the country would be to admit that this is the case. I don’t know about you, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Competition for the most overused word in media analyses of British politics is always tough, but “existential” has to be a frontrunner – particularly when paired with the word “threat” and particularly when applied to the relationship between the Conservatives and any of the parties led by Nigel Farage.
Hyperbole? Possibly. But possibly not. Either way, Farage’s pet project, Brexit, has brought the Conservative Party to the brink.
The Brexit referendum was meant to stop Farage, but instead it emboldened him
For more than a decade now, Farage’s parties have been eating away at Conservative support, beginning with close to four million people supporting Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at the general election of 2015, giving it nearly 13 per cent of the vote.
True, that result afforded UKIP just the one seat (Clacton, naturally!) in the House of Commons. But it was easily enough to terrify many Tories. After all, it came not before but after David Cameron’s pledge that, if re-elected, his government would hold an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. And that pledge had only been made in the first place in the hope that it would not only put an end to Conservative infighting over Europe but shoot Farage’s fox once and for all.
Sadly for the Tories, neither the 2016 referendum nor its outcome were to fulfil those hopes. In the early summer of 2019, at what were widely assumed to be the last European Parliament elections to be held in the UK, Farage’s Brexit Party won a 30.5 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Conservatives crashed to their lowest share ever, polling a mere 8.8 per cent, finishing in a humiliating fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Greens.
It wasn’t hard to see why. The Party had spent the previous three years tearing itself apart over precisely how, when and why to leave the European Union. Discipline had already begun to break down badly during the coalition years, and had been further undermined when Cameron had decided to allow his frontbenchers as well as his backbenchers to campaign against his recommendation that, following his less-than-impressive “renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Brussels“, the country should remain in the EU.
No preparation for a Leave victory meant chaos for the Party
Cameron’s decision not to allow any serious contingency planning in the event he was defeated, along with the Remain campaign’s crucial failure to force the advocates of Leave to specify exactly what kind of Brexit they were looking for, left his successor, the hapless former Home Secretary, Theresa May, fruitlessly thrashing around in search of a Withdrawal Agreement – a multi-dimensional deal that might simultaneously satisfy her party’s disappointed Remainers, its less-than-magnanimous but often-practically-clueless Leavers, and a European Union understandably determined to play hardball.
That extended parliamentary panic, coming on top of a snap general election in 2017 that had seen Jeremy Corbyn (by far the most left-wing leader Labour had elected since the Second World War) managing to deny their party a majority. It saw plenty of Tory MPs who should have known better to throw caution to the wind and their weight behind Boris Johnson’s eternal bid for the leadership.
Johnson’s elevation proved a stunning success in the short-term, netting their party an eighty seat majority on 43 per cent of the vote and supposedly putting the Brexit Party, which secured a measly 644,000 votes and a mere 2 per cent share, firmly back in its box.
In the long-term, however, Johnson’s promotion to Prime Minister proved utterly disastrous. Even before Johnson fatally mishandled the UK’s Covid-19 response and allowed “Partygate” to re-toxify the Tory brand, his (or was it Dominic Cummings’) “by any means necessary” determination to “Get Brexit Done” saw some of the Conservatives’ most forward-thinking, media-friendly MPs thrown out of the party.
That helped tip the party’s ideological balance toward the populist radical right, resulting, first, in the disastrous selection of impetuous zealot Liz Truss to replace Johnson and, second, in her replacement, the potentially more measured and moderate Rishi Sunak. This latter prime minister was unable to resist pressure to make promises he couldn’t possibly keep to “stop the boats” and make costly tax cuts when most voters were crying out for improvements to the country’s cash-starved and creaking public services.
At the 2024 general election, Farage’s party, now renamed Reform UK, won 14.3 per cent of the vote, less than 10 points behind the Tories, who, on 23.7 per cent, recorded their worst ever result in a general election. In no small part that was because around a quarter of voters (amounting to well over three million people), whom Boris Johnson had persuaded to back the Conservatives five years previously, felt badly betrayed by promises that, once the UK had left the EU, immigration would plummet, growth would go “gangbusters” and “levelling up” would be unleashed across the land. It was claimed this would allow potholes to be filled, windfarms to be torn down, the tide of “woke” to be turned back and long waits for GP and hospital treatment to become but a bad memory.
The long Brexit hangover continues for the Conservatives
Their disillusionment has not dissipated. Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that many right-wing commentators seem to have convinced themselves that Kemi Badenoch represents the way and the truth and the life, one would be hard pushed, given that the party has been stuck on under 20 per cent in the opinion polls since then, to argue that the Conservatives are well on the road to recovery.
In reality, however, both the 2025 and 2026 elections seem to confirm extensive survey research that suggests Leave and Remain identities continue to exercise an outsize influence on voting behaviour and that Leavers have, to an extent that has effectively beached if not broken the Conservative Party, decamped in overwhelming numbers to Reform UK. Indeed, they provide yet more evidence, if any were needed, that, in Western Europe at least, right wing voters (with the exception of a relatively affluent, liberal minority) are increasingly likely to plump for populist, radical alternatives to the more mainstream/centrist outfits which, for more than half a century after 1945, were effectively able to take their support for granted.
There may, of course, still be those who argue that, whatever else it did, Brexit did at least heal the open wound that internal arguments over Europe had created within Tory party. Even if they are right, however, they should ask themselves whether the price paid by the party – and indeed the country – for the stifling consensus thus achieved has been one worth paying.
Tragically, however, they are almost certainly wrong. Currently, the Conservatives are committed to withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), playing down the huge risks this poses for the Northern Ireland settlement and the already-thin Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU. If those risks can be brought home to the electorate by their opponents, then the Tories’ chances of emerging in good shape after the next election are slimmer than ever.
If, however, they somehow manage to survive beyond it and help Farage to form a government with a small majority, then the attempt to fulfil that pledge – a pledge that by no means all Tory MPs believe in their heart of hearts is feasible, let alone sensible – could well cause that government to implode sooner rather than later. The ensuing chaos, I suspect, really would be the final nail in the Conservative coffin.
Excitement among advocates of electoral reform has been building, buoyed up by the possibility that Andy Burnham may take over as UK prime minister. This is understandable — he’s an enthusiast too, and the fracturing of our party politics makes it look inevitable — but they shouldn’t get ahead of themselves. For good or ill, anyone hoping to see a shift from first past the post to proportional representation before the next general election, and without a referendum, is fooling themselves.
Burnham’s support for electoral reform is seemingly genuine. At last year’s Labour Party conference he told a rally: “There is nothing more unstoppable than an idea whose time has come — and PR’s time has come.” Last week, he confirmed that he was “committed to proportional representation”, being unable to see how “first past the post and the point-scoring inherent within it lifts Britain out of the doom loop it is in”.
So far, so promising, not least because he (like me) supports creating a national commission to promote an evidence-based UK-wide conversation on the issue. But the idea that this process would prompt the introduction of PR in time to elect the next crop of MPs — presuming a putative Burnham government holds off calling an election until 2029 — is outlandish.
It’s not just a question of logistics — though they would be formidable even if the government were to pursue a purely parliamentary path to legislating for the form of PR eventually agreed upon (various systems are already used in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will soon be reintroduced for mayoralties). The Commons, predictable Conservative opposition notwithstanding, might just wear it. But the House of Lords, packed with Conservative peers instinctively opposed and crossbenchers committed to detailed scrutiny? No chance.
It’s also the vibes. A rushed job would inevitably court accusations that change was motivated less by a concern to create an electoral system better suited to what looks increasingly like a permanent shift to five- or six-party politics than a desperate attempt to prevent Nigel Farage from entering Number 10. One could argue that Farage would not object: he has been arguing for PR longer than Burnham has. Now he seems to have cooled on the idea — with his Reform UK party currently winning locally under FPTP, it’s no longer his enemy but his friend.
It’s a pound to a penny, then, that if Labour and other parties in the UK’s left-liberal bloc (the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru) were to ram reform through parliament, Farage could argue yet again that “the establishment” was denying “the will of the people”.
These parties should instead make a manifesto commitment to whatever system a national commission might recommend. Then, should they manage to form a government from whatever crazy set of results FPTP produces next time, they could at least claim a collective mandate for change
It probably wouldn’t be enough. Britons might balk at the idea of another referendum, given how bitterly divisive the 2016 Brexit and 2014 Scottish independence votes turned out to be. But those exercises in direct democracy (along with the 2011 vote that rejected a far less comprehensive change to the electoral system) have set a precedent when deciding major constitutional issues — one that is difficult to override.
So, while reformers may welcome the possibility of Burnham becoming prime minister, celebration would be premature. Better, by far, to get real: step up efforts to set up a truly independent commission, agree to back the system it recommends, insert a commitment into as many party manifestos as possible and begin working out how best to win support in what is bound to be a hard-fought public vote.
Long seen as something of a beacon of political stability, the United Kingdom has, since 2016, become something of a basket case. In just ten years, the country has cycled through six prime ministers and may soon ditch its seventh, prompting agonized debate about whether the UK has become ‘ungovernable.’
The Labour Party won a massive parliamentary majority at the 2024 general election but on a mere 34 percent of the vote and largely due to the unpopularity of the outgoing Conservative government. Less than two years later it stands at under 20 percent in the opinion polls, while its leader, UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has some of the lowest approval ratings ever recorded for a British prime minister.
A fortnight ago, Labour saw thousands of its candidates brutally rejected by the voters at local elections in England, with the main beneficiaries being not the ‘official’ opposition, the Conservatives, who also lost large numbers of seats, but the populist radical right party, Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, and the left-wing ‘eco-populist’ Green Party, led by Zack Polanski.
Just as worryingly, Labour lost its century-old grip on Wales, where, in the contest for the principality’s parliament, it was pushed into third place behind the left-wing nationalists of Plaid Cymru and Reform UK. It also performed poorly (albeit not quite as poorly) in elections to the Scottish Parliament.
Beyond the two-party mould
Taken together, those results represent the latest acceleration of a trend that political scientists have been observing since the mid-1970s but which has sharpened since the Brexit referendum of June 2016 – namely the collapse of the UK’s traditional two-party system and the consequent emergence of multiparty politics. And all this in spite of the country continuing, at least for general elections, to operate under a first-past-the-post system routinely regarded as the guarantor of a stable duopoly.
The seemingly chronic inability of both the Conservatives and Labour to deliver economic growth, decent public services, and strong borders has seen voter dissatisfaction grow and party loyalty shrink in equal measure, helping to fuel interest in more radical alternatives that, in true populist fashion, claim to represent the people against the establishment and promise simple solutions to complex problems.
Partly as a result, members of parliament representing the two ‘legacy parties’ have become far less inclined than they once were to give the country’s prime ministers the benefit of the doubt, agitating for their replacement sooner rather than later in the desperate hope that whoever takes over can save their seats at Westminster.
When the grassroots pick the prime minister
If the selection of party leader and prime minister were left solely up to those MPs, then perhaps those picked for the top job might have the skills required to do it. Unfortunately, however, both Labour and the Conservatives decided some time ago to gift the final decision to the grassroots members of their parties – a well-meaning but demographically and ideologically unrepresentative minority whose choices in recent years, even when they haven’t been disastrous (Boris Johnson and Liz Truss), have proved less than impressive (Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer).
For the moment, Starmer remains prime minister – but probably not for much longer. There is a consensus – no longer unspoken – among his Labour colleagues that he lacks the communication skills, the sense of direction, and the man-management skills needed to persuade voters to give Labour a second term and to do whatever needs to be done to both fix and inspire the country.
Starmer, in spite of his government suffering a handful of resignations in the light of Labour’s drubbing at the polls a fortnight ago, remains in place largely because, right now anyway, his colleagues are unsure whether anyone among them who could do a better job could get themselves selected by the party’s grassroots – or whether anyone those ordinary party members might select could possibly make a good prime minister.
Waiting for Burnham
Instead, rather than moving against Starmer immediately, they are waiting on Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, making it back into parliament via a by-election to be held next month in the nearby smaller town of Makerfield, the assumption being that he would then trigger a leadership contest and become prime minister.
Whether Burnham will be able to do that, however, remains to be seen since, in the local elections, Makerfield swung heavily to Reform UK. Ironically, that result may allow Burnham to turn the tables on Farage and fight as the anti-establishment underdog. Moreover, given widespread disappointment with Brexit’s consequences, Reform’s leader might be wrong to assume, as he so clearly does, that hatred of ‘Brussels’ is still a trump card.
One thing, though, is certain: if Burnham can’t beat whoever Farage picks to fight the byelection for Reform, he would be no use to Labour anyway. Quite where that scenario would leave Starmer, his party and the country, however, is anyone’s guess.
eir Starmer’s not a great prime minister. He’s not even a good prime minister. The mess Labour’s in right now is, undeniably and in no small part, thanks to him.
The list is a long one: his allowing himself to be persuaded to adopt a counterproductively small (even tiny) target strategy in the run up to the 2024 election; his tin-eared acceptance of freebies from donors; his spectacularly ill-judged LBC interview on Gaza at Labour’s first post-election annual conference; his allowing Rachel Reeves to try to means test the winter fuel allowance only to backtrack on it when the going got tough, making him and his government look both mean and weak; and his “island of strangers” speech and appointment of a Home Secretary apparently hell-bent on alienating the government’s socially liberal supporters so as to keep on board the “hero voters” who contributed far less to its victory in 2024 that Blue Labour fans still insist on pretending.
And yet, and yet. Is replacing him right now really going to achieve the turn-around in Labour’s fortunes that many of his MPs, understandably bruised by the party’s catastrophic performance in last week’s election, are desperately looking for? Probably not.
If we look back through political history at the three replacements of a sitting prime minister that actually helped turn the electoral tide, they have one thing in common – namely that they simultaneously rid the party concerned (and yes, it was, in each and every case, the Conservative Party, which has always been more ruthless about these things) of a profoundly unpopular cause or policy inextricably associated with the incumbent.
Harold Macmillan replacing Anthony Eden allowed the Tories to put Suez behind them. John Major replacing Margaret Thatcher allowed them to kill the poll tax. And Boris Johnson replacing Theresa May allowed them to “get Brexit done” after three years of a painfully, polarising and fruitless search for a deal that simultaneously satisfied all its advocates as well as the EU.
Obviously, those policies weren’t the only reason Conservative MPs dumped the prime ministers in question. They were primarily motivated by the very same fear of being led to imminent election defeat that characterised some of the swap-outs that didn’t do the trick (like Home for Macmillan or Brown for Blair). But the fact that dumping them also meant dumping those policies provided both a catharsis and a rationale that could be sold to a sceptical public.
Before they act, then, Labour MPs need to ask themselves whether they have an equivalent. What is it about what their government has done or intends to do that can only be gotten rid of by getting rid of Keir Starmer? Unless they can answer that question, they should take a beat.
In reality, there is only one thing springs to mind – the government’s continued adherence to a Brexit that virtually every Labour MP and every Labour member, as well as a growing plurality of the public (and certainly those members of the public who might think of returning to Labour), thinks is deeply damaging, indeed borderline insane. But is there a contender out there who might replace Starmer with the courage to commit to reversing it?
Absent that, replacing Starmer – especially when the candidate for the succession seemingly most favoured by Labour’s MPs, its grassroots and its potential voters isn’t available to stand in any contest – brings to mind the words of one of the party’s all-time icons, Nye Bevan when he took on its unilateralist nuclear disarmers: “You call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.”
When is a U-turn not a U-turn? When it can be spun as a wise and skilful concession to electoral reality by the politician whom many of Britain’s right-wing media outlets would like to see become prime minister – especially when it concerns an issue dear to the hearts of their predominantly elderly audiences.
Having previously insisted that Reform UK could not “guarantee anything” to pensioners, saying they would have “to see what the economics of this are like nearer the next election”, party leader Nigel Farage has now turned tail, saying, if elected, he would keep the triple lock for state pensions – and fund it with the “biggest cuts to the benefits bill ever seen in this country”.
The pensions triple-lock, originally proposed by the Liberal Democrats as a solution to pensioner poverty, has long since become political hallowed ground.
Introduced in 2010 as a flagship policy by George Osborne and David Cameron, who were understandably concerned to protect some of the Conservative Party’s core supporters from the impact of their austerity programme, it is something of a “third rail” – a policy no party with hopes of getting into government dare touch for fear of being punished by voters.
And not least by retirees who, unlike their younger counterparts, can be pretty much relied upon to actually cast their ballots on polling day.
Until now, Reform UK looked like it might be braver. In keeping with its much-trumpeted iconoclasm and its Doge-like enthusiasm for cutting “unsustainable” spending, it had refused to join the other parties in pledging to up-rate pensions annually by inflation or average earnings growth, or by at least 2.5 per cent, whichever is the greatest.
But that was when businessmen Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf were vying to become Farage’s finance guy. Now that they’ve been beaten to the post of “shadow-shadow chancellor” by Tory re-tread Robert Jenrick, things have changed.
To a professional politician like Jenrick, polls are always going to trump the public finances. It’s all very well promising to balance the budget by making savings – but public opinion inevitably determines where you’re going to look for them.
In a country where turnout varies so much according to age, and where, to be fair, even many younger and middle-aged people don’t want to see people all too easily portrayed as little old ladies and gents struggling to heat their homes and put food on the table, democracy is almost bound to shade into gerontocracy – rule, if not by, then at least on behalf of, senior citizens.
Never mind the terrifying forecasts that, given the seemingly inexorable decline in Britain’s birth rate and the associated rise in its dependency ratio, the costs of all that support are going to get harder and harder to afford.
Never mind, either, that recently, Farage and co have, in many other ways, been reverting to Thatcherite type. Among the most obvious barnacles that have been scraped off Reform’s boat is Farage’s pledge to part-nationalise the water industry. Presumably, his promise to nationalise the steel industry won’t be far behind either.
But the Iron Lady – very much along with Enoch Powell, one of Farage’s icons – was always a far cannier, less hopelessly ideological politician than many now recall. Until it deserted her toward the end of her third term, she had a keen sense of where the voters she needed most were, and she made damn sure never to cross them. With the odd, glaring exception (his cringeing attachment to Donald Trump, for instance – or his depressing admiration for Vladimir Putin, whom until recently he “admired“, before deciding he is a “very bad dude”), Reform’s leader is no different.
Whenever Keir Starmer has made the slightest course correction on policy, it has instantly been derided as a U-turn – a self-evidently damaging surrender either to his supposedly militant backbenchers. To his many supporters in the country and in the media, Farage is still flavour of the month. But if he keeps dramatically changing course, as with pensions, he risks “doing a Starmer” once too often to remain it.
Barely 2 per cent of Britons belong to a political party. Yet this tiny, unrepresentative minority helps decide who gets selected to stand for Parliament, who gets to lead our parties and, ultimately, who gets to govern the country. With Britain’s politics fragmenting and in flux, members matter more than is often assumed – one of many reasons why we should learn as much as possible about who they are, what they believe, what they do and (more important than ever given the so-called presidentialisation of British politics) what they want from the leaders they follow.
True, party membership may have fallen from the giddy heights it reached in the 1950s. But it remains crucial to the health of our representative democracy, as well as to its composition. And, as we have seen with the surge of new members – first into the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and, more recently, into Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Zack Polanski’s Greens – people still want to join, and parties still want them to.
That should come as no surprise. Growing membership conveys legitimacy and momentum. Members contribute significantly to election campaigns and to party finances. They are the people who pick party leaders. They constitute the pool from which parties choose their candidates. They help anchor parties to the principles and people they came into politics to promote and protect. And they may even have a say on whether a party goes into government, at least in the event that an election fails to produce a majority for any one party – a distinct possibility given the fragmentation of Britain’s party system.
Beginning just after the 2015 General Election, and with funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the ESRC and, latterly, Research England, we – the Party Members Project, run out of Queen Mary University of London and the University of Sussex – have, with the help of YouGov, been continuing to survey the members of the country’s political parties.
The surveys we conducted in 2015, 2017 and 2019, gave us a unique insight into the country’s party members, many of which were summed up in our book Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century. We have now published findings from fieldwork conducted just after the 2024 General Election in Britain’s Party Members, which this time covers five parties (from right to left: Reform UK, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Greens), as well as a representative sample of the adult population.
Who members are
Given that so few people belong to a political party these days, anyone who has made the decision to join one is, almost by definition, unusual. That does not necessarily mean they are strange, but it does mean they are not very representative of the country as a whole.
For instance, more men than women belong to Britain’s political parties (Figure 1), and that is especially true of those who belong to right-wing rather than left-wing parties. Only the Greens can claim to be truly gender-balanced and, with Labour a partial exception, parties to their right skew significantly male.
Figure 1: Party Memberships by Gender
As for age (Figure 2), there are not many Gen Z-ers – or even that many millennials – in the membership of the five parties we focused on. In none of them does the proportion of 18-24-year-olds rise above 4 per cent, compared to 10 per cent in the adult population as a whole.
Figure 2: Party Members by Age
As well as being overwhelmingly white British (we found that fewer – and, in the case of the Conservatives and Reform, far fewer – than 10 per cent are from an ethnic minority background), members are also overwhelmingly middle rather than working class (Figure 3). Indeed, the only party that matches the class profile (strictly speaking, the ‘social grade’ profile) of the country as a whole is Reform UK – something that will doubtless please one of Farage’s recent recruits from the Conservatives, Robert Jenrick, who has declared that “the divide in British politics has become Reform’s workers party versus the Tory posh party”.
Figure 3: Members by ‘Social Grade’
When it comes to education, what really stands out is how few Reform members, relatively speaking, are graduates (Figure 4). That said, since this is now one of the most obvious differentiators between those who vote Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat, on the one hand, and those who vote for Reform (and, to a lesser extent, the Conservatives), on the other, it should probably come as no surprise that the same pattern appears among party members.
Figure 4: Proportion of Graduates
Those members, then, are – across a whole range of demographic characteristics – profoundly unrepresentative. Yet we allow them significant influence, both actual and potential, over the make-up of some of our most important political institutions. Just because that influence largely flies below the radar does not mean we should ignore it.
What members do
One thing we should get straight, however – especially given journalists’ tendency to use the terms interchangeably – is that being a party member does not necessarily mean being an activist. Even at election time, when they could be most useful, an awful lot of members do nothing – absolutely nothing – for their party (Figure 5). The Conservatives, it would seem, have most to worry about on this score, although if we use those who said they devoted more than 40 hours to helping out in 2024 as a proxy for hard-core activists, then the Tories did not fare quite as badly as we might suppose.
Figure 5: Hours Spent Helping their Party at the 2024 Election
Still, the fact that most British party members are not the leaflet-delivering, door-knocking, meeting-attending obsessives of legend does at least provide a modicum of reassurance. However different they are demographically from the bulk of the country’s population, we do not need to worry quite as much as we might about the outsize influence they have on our democracy.
What members think
So much for who they are and what they do (or do not do) for their parties at election time. What about their political views? The answer is both predictable and revealing. Like the electorate as a whole, party members reflect a system that appears fragmented but in reality is increasingly structured around two blocs: on the right, voters choose between the Conservatives and Reform; on the more ‘progressive’ side, they divide between the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Among party members, this pattern is especially clear on a hot-button issue such as immigration (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Views on Immigration
There are also obvious differences when it comes to a more traditional issue such as tax and spend (Figure 7). True, a bigger proportion of Conservative members than might be expected were inclined to think things were ‘about right’ – probably because we ran the survey just after their party had left government. Even so, tax-cutting remained their most popular preference. It is also worth noting that, for all the accusations (often from Conservative politicians trying to persuade their erstwhile voters not to follow Farage) that Reform is somehow left-leaning on economics, many of its members are clearly no less Thatcherite than he himself is.
Figure 7: Views on Tax and Spend
Broadly speaking, most parties’ members are reasonably like their voters – only more so. In some ways, that may be how it should be. Even so, for anyone concerned about the ongoing polarisation of British politics, it could be troubling. And if we look at their views on leadership and explore what has come to be known as ‘negative partisanship’, that concern may be justified.
When it comes to leadership, the two-bloc pattern re-emerges. Members (and voters) in the right bloc are significantly more likely than their ‘progressive’ counterparts to agree that the country needs a strong leader prepared to break the rules (Figure 8).
Figure 8: Agreement with the Idea that the Country Needs a Strong Leader Prepared to Break the Rules
This two-bloc pattern is only partially reflected, however, in party members’ views on which parties they most dislike (Figure 9). Members of the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats single out Reform for particular ire, while appearing less exercised about the Conservatives. That said, if we were running the survey now – a year and a half into the Starmer government – we suspect that Green and Liberal Democrat members might feel rather more negative towards Labour than they did straight after the election, when they were perhaps more willing to give the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt.
Figure 9: Negative Partisanship
On the other side, Labour was already by some distance the principal villain for Conservative and Reform members. It is noticeable, however, that members of the country’s two right-wing parties seem relatively well disposed towards each other – something that might make a pre- or post-election pact (or even, dare one say it, a full-blown merger) easier to negotiate in two or three years’ time.
Joining a political party, then, is not for most Britons. But we should not see those who do as some kind of alien species, utterly unlike the rest of us. For the most part, they are simply people with a stronger interest in – and faith in – politics than the average citizen, and with somewhat more pronounced (though not necessarily extreme) views.
That does not mean we should ignore how demographically unrepresentative party members are, how clearly they are separating into two increasingly polarised blocs, and how some appear relatively relaxed about rule-breaking leaders – especially given that they are the ones who select our party leaders and candidates.
Given that role, and given the effort at least some of them put into campaigning, they remain a vital part of Britain’s political landscape. If, as currently looks entirely possible, we are heading towards a hung Parliament in 2028 or 2029, their importance may become even more visible. While not every party is obliged to ask its members formally to approve participation in a coalition or a confidence-and-supply arrangement, even those that do not will need to take their memberships with them. Watch this space.
We may never know for sure whether Wes Streeting, as some of his clearly unimpressed colleagues claimed, had a role in persuading Scottish Labour leader Anas Sawar to call for Keir Starmer’s resignation – supposedly as a prelude to the Health Secretary launching a bid for the leadership.
If that was indeed the plan, then it seems to have backfired. Barely had Sawar finished speaking before the Cabinet (including Streeting himself) began circling the wagons around their beleaguered boss, and by the evening Starmer looked safe – at least for the moment.
The idea that Streeting, despite his denials, “came for the king and missed” is not entirely far-fetched. True, the assumption that replacing an unpopular leader will magically improve a government’s fortunes tends to represent the triumph of hope over experience. But the fact that it does occasionally do the trick means that politicians – especially ambitious politicians like Streeting – are often prepared to give it a go. And if that sees them accused of stabbing their leader in the back, or even the front, then so be it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that.
It should come as no surprise, then, that postwar political history is replete with instances of betrayal, some botched, others brutally successful, but all of them ultimately triggered by a sense that the occupant of Number Ten has either gone gaga or else passed their electoral sell-by date – or sometimes both.
Parliamentary parties, in this respect at least, are like the Normans, who, to quote William the Conqueror, were, unless “disciplined under a just and firm rule”, inherently inclined to “tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves, for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition and are ready for treachery.”
What, then, might an errant knight determined to grab the crown from his or her ailing monarch learn from those who’ve tried it before? The overriding lesson, surely, is to grab the opportunity when it arises since it may never come around again. In June 2009, Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell resigned from Gordon Brown’s government, supposedly paving the way for Foreign Secretary David Miliband to mount a challenge, only for the Blairite young pretender to pull out at the last minute and lose his chance forever.
Similarly, Michael Portillo was given just seconds to decide what to do when John Major asked whether he would back him to stay on when he put himself up for re-election in June 1995. Portillo said yes, helping Major to beat John Redwood only to take the Tories down to a defeat so bad that it would cost Portillo his safe seat in parliament. Sadly, by the time he’d bagged another one and put himself forward to fill the vacancy left by William Hague’s departure as Leader of the Opposition in 2001, his time to shine had passed – so much so that he lost out not just to the irredeemably Europhile Ken Clarke but to the woefully ill-equipped Iain Duncan Smith.
Hague, it is worth recalling, got the leadership gig in the first place because he had proved a good deal more ruthless. Just like Michael Gove in 2016, he surprised everybody in 2001 by reneging on an apparently firm commitment to support a colleague for the leadership, opting, after agreeing to serve as Michael Howard’s running-mate, to stand in his own right instead.
It is also worth recalling, of course, that the hard-hearted opportunism that paid off for Hague did not pay off for Gove. Moreover, it is easy to see why those who have hesitated and lost opted to hesitate when the crunch-point arrived. Michael Heseltine’s faux-Shakespearian warning that “He who wields the dagger never wears the crown” has long given potential assassins pause.
Actually, of course, the experience of the woman Heseltine sought unsuccessfully to replace proves otherwise: Thatcher, after all, directly challenged Heath in 1975 after serving him loyally (albeit through gritted teeth) in Cabinet for four years. Nevertheless, he had a point. Sometimes a slightly more indirect approach to betrayal beats open confrontation.
Thatcher’s own defenestration in November 1990 – later dubbed by her as “treachery with a smile on its face” – provides perhaps the paradigmatic example. The fact that she was badly wounded by her erstwhile deputy, Geoffrey Howe, before being brought down by her failure to squash Heseltine by a sufficient margin in the first round of voting, offered her eventual successor, John Major, plenty of plausible deniability.
He was also absent (owing to his convalescing at home after a painful dental procedure) from the face-to-face meetings with Cabinet colleagues which helped persuade her to call it a day. Further,Sir John agreed to sign his boss’s nomination papers for a second round (despite knowing she was unlikely to enter and whilst discreetly preparing to throw his own hat in the ring).
This oblique-yet-opportunist approach has worked for other politicians who have aspired to lead the party aptly characterised by the late historian John Ramsden as “an autocracy tempered by assassination”. Boris Johnson, for instance, took the chance to resign on a supposed point of principle after Theresa May’s Cabinet meeting at Chequers in July 2018, leaving him free to continually undermine her authority until she had little alternative but to throw in the towel a year later – at which point he was able to turn his tacit campaign for the top job into something more explicit.
Even more Machiavellian, though, was Harold Macmillan. In the summer of 1956, he had, if anything, been keener than Prime Minister Anthony Eden to teach Egypt’s President Nasser a lesson and snatch back the Suez Canal by military means. Yet once it became clear to him, as chancellor, that the Americans were prepared to do whatever it took on the financial front to halt the operation, he called for withdrawal. As Labour leader Harold Wilson waspishly put it, he was “first in and first out”.
Then, knowing full well that the escapade’s bathetic outcome was all but certain to end Eden’s tenure in Downing Street, Macmillan devoted himself to outmanoeuvring the PM’s preferred candidate, Rab Butler, so as to secure himself the succession a couple of months later. Not only that, but when the time came for Macmillan to pass on the premiership to someone else in October 1963, he engineered the ensuing contest to ensure he was replaced not by Butler (who was once again expected to take over) but by the far less gifted Alec Home.
Arguably, however, Butler only had himself to blame. Home – concerned he might not be able to form a government should Butler refuse to serve – asked the Queen to delay appointing him until he could be sure his rival would do the decent thing. Butler’s friends urged him, as one of them put it, to use the loaded revolver he’d effectively been handed. But Butler, ever the gentleman and always inclined to indecision, declined to do so. The government in which he agreed to serve was subsequently kicked out of office a year later, dashing forever his hopes of making it to Number Ten. Wes Streeting (and Angela Rayer) take note.
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