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.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nigel-farage-reform-makerfield-election-burnham-b3003724.html