Reform UK claims larger membership than Conservatives: what now?

Nigel Farage has pulled Reform UK a long way but the job is very far from done, and there are still enormous challenges facing him and the party

The moment had been anticipated for some time, to the extent that Reform UK had created a digital tracker on its website to keep the numbers up to date. On Boxing Day, the party called it: its membership had outgrown that of the Conservative Party, which earlier in the year had declared a total of 131,680 members. Nigel Farage, naturally, was cock-a-hoop.

This is a big, historic moment. The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world. Reform UK are now the real opposition.

Most of that is in some senses accurate, though the last is a nonsense. Reform has five MPs, while the Conservatives, who are at their lowest ebb in their 190-year history, still have 121 MPs, more than 20 times as many; further down the electoral scale, there is one Reform member of the London Assembly, Alex Wilson, and the party musters just 50 councillors out of 18,725. It is not currently represented in any of the devolved assemblies (or the House of Lords, for that matter) and has no directly elected mayors. But hyperbole and Nigel Farage are as closely associated as the pint and cigarette he so regularly enjoys.

Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the (actual, Official) Opposition, has disputed the veracity of Reform UK’s figures. She took to social media platform X (henceforth Twitter, because that’s what everyone calls it) and was characteristically withering:

Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel? It’s not real. It’s a fake coded to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days and can also see they’ve just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out.

She went on to argue that her own party had gained thousands of members since her election in November. Farage responded that he would “gladly invite one of the Big 4 firms in to audit our membership numbers as long as you do the same”, adding “It’s an open secret at CCHQ that your membership numbers are fake”.

I have no way of knowing whether Reform’s membership tally is genuine, a rough approximation or entirely fictitious. But let us suppose for a moment that it is broadly representative, and that the party’s membership is indeed larger, by a small margin, than the Conservatives’. Does it matter?

To some extent, yes, obviously it does. Political parties are a mechanism to corral the collective opinions and beliefs of voters and give them a means to implement those views, and membership fees are a significant source of income. However overwrought some of the reactions to the possibility of Elon Musk donating large sums to Reform have been—I sounded a cautious note before Christmas in The Spectator—there is clearly a link between the financial resources a party can deploy and its effectiveness in campaigning and electioneering.

More important, perhaps, is the fact that it demonstrates Reform continues to enjoy a substantial degree of momentum, nearly six months after the general election. There was always a possibility, I thought a reasonably strong one, that voters would lend Reform UK their support in despair and frustration at the mainstream parties and at the political system in general, but would then turn away from them having cast a straightforward protest vote. For a portion of the electorate, that has not been the case, and Farage must be credited with keeping his party relevant and in the public eye.

Whatever your opinion of the Reform leader, it is a mistake to dismiss or underestimate him. He has proved his durability, having first been elected to the European Parliament for the UK Independence Party in 1999; bear in mind that at that point Keir Starmer was a junior human rights barrister at Geoffrey Robertson’s Doughty Street Chambers, Kemi Adegoke was yet to start her undergraduate degree course at the University of Sussex and Ed Davey was the recently elected Liberal Democrat MP for Kingston and Surbiton. David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were yet to reach the House of Commons, and Rishi Sunak was an undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford. Yet Farage is still going.

I wrote in August in The i Paper that Farage may have made a mistake in seeking after so many unsuccessful attempts to be elected to the House of Commons, and suggested he was finding it boring. I stand by that judgement, insofar as I don’t think his parliamentary platform has been particularly significant: his regular slot on GB News is a far more effective outlet for him, and it is the bane of many a liberal’s life that he had no difficulty in seizing airtime or invitations to appear before he was entitled to append the letters “MP” to his name. There are also regular accusations that he spends very little time in his constituency of Clacton in Essex, which has the potential to cause difficulties further down the road, though there is no inevitability to that.

Let me be clear, then, that I am not minimising Reform’s achievement, Farage’s part in it nor the potential threat to the Conservative Party. The party is currently polling a level of support not very far behind Labour and the Conservatives, and is eagerly awaiting next May’s local elections. All the same, I don’t think it is automatically true that it will continue its upward trajectory, and I don’t believe there is a realistic short-term prospect of it supplanting the Conservatives as, to use Farage’s phrase, “the real opposition”.

There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that Reform UK is still barely a political party at all in any conventional sense. Its legal existence remains that of a private commercial company, Reform UK Party Limited, with three directors, Farage himself, Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, and Mehrtash A’zami, at one time Treasurer of the Brexit Party. Between them, Farage and Tice own the company, with Farage the dominant partner, though he has declared his intention to sell his shares as part of a transformation into a conventional party structure.

As well as the lack of a normal structure, Reform UK may have the 130,000+ members that it claims, but its activist base is an unknown. Its lack of elected officials at a local level is a handicap, because this is the source not only of dependable volunteers and canvassers but also candidates, and the party was dogged by adverse publicity during the general election campaign caused by candidates who had not been vetted properly. While Farage has proudly shown off high-profile recruits like the new party treasurer, billionaire properly developer Nick Candy, former Conservative MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns and founder of the Conservative Home website Tim Montgomerie, these are not a substitute for the “poor bloody infantry” of election campaigns.

As Katy Balls has pointed out in The Spectator, while membership is important in political and electoral success, it is necessary but not sufficient: the Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership (2015-20) saw booming membership, peaking at 564,443 in 2017 after being less than 200,000 for all of Ed Miliband’s tenure, and it declined consistently after Sir Keir Starmer took over as leader in 2020. Yet Corbyn twice failed to win a general election, while Starmer has become Prime Minister with the backing of a vast parliamentary majority.

Then there is Farage himself. He left the Conservative Party in 1992, and has passed through the Anti-Federalist League, the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party, leading the last two at various points. But his record is not one of easy and productive co-operation, and whether he can sustainably and successfully lead a major political party rather than a campaigning insurgency, with all the compromises that inevitably requires is by no means certain. The record of the last 20 years is littered with the careers of leading UKIP and Brexit Party politicians who have not endured: Roger Knapman, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Douglas Carswell, Mark Reckless, Diane James, Paul Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Steven Woolfe, Nathan Gill, Ben Habib… Farage is a formidable campaigner, but a politician in a conventional sense? That remains to be seen.

It is possible that Reform UK will permanently change the landscape of British party politics. That would be a rare achievement, something no organisation has achieved across the country really since the Labour Party muscled past the Liberals into second place at the 1922 general election, never to fall back again (though it can certainly be argued that the Scottish National Party has remade the electoral calculus north of the border over the past 30 years). But it is not inevitable, it is unlikely to happen quickly if at all, and there are several factors militating against it.

As 2024 draws to a close, Nigel Farage cannot be denied his bragging rights or acknowledgement of his political achievements over the past 12 months in particular. Nevertheless, Reform UK is not “the real opposition” in any sense, and has a new and challenging task to translate members into a sustainable electoral coalition. The unexpected haplessness and unpopularity of the government and the inevitable travails of the Conservative Party at an historically low ebb provide Farage and Reform UK with the most favourable circumstances possible, but 2025 will be just as important and revealing, in different ways, as 2024. This is very far from over.