Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is threatening to rewrite the rules of British politics. Not since Labour’s breakthrough in the 1923 general election has an insurgent force been able to break a long-standing two-party dominance to form a government. The SDP came close in 1983. But in our two-party system close is nowhere.
There is unlikely to be a UK general election until after the next US presidential election. But Reform has now led in every published public poll since April 2025, and the most recent major MRP polls put the party just short of an outright Commons majority.
The speed of Reform’s rise has been impressive. It took Labour nearly 18 years to go from its first parliamentary breakthrough in 1906 to winning power in 1924. Reform believe that they could be on track to do it in a single parliament.
But there’s a reason this hasn’t been done for so long: challenger parties face huge hurdles in taking on the old incumbents, not least a natural scepticism among voters about handing over power to outfits that are untested and still might be a work in progress.
For all its impact on the polls, Reform’s level of support is relatively low compared with poll-leading parties in the past. The splintering of votes from Labour on both left and right have allowed Reform to enjoy strong poll leads while commanding much lower levels of support than is usually required to win an election.
Part of this is due to the ongoing difficulties faced by Keir Starmer’s administration. But even more of it is the result of the fracturing of voters away from the two traditional major parties. Some commentators are now arguing that at the start of 2026 UK politics resembles a European-style multi-party contest. However, there’s one very significantdifference which is our voting system.
Reform will be pleased that many seats are expected to see five or even six-way contests at the next general election, the threshold the party will need to clear to win a chance to form a government is likely to be lower than in the past.
They will be worried that their average support across the public polls has dropped back slightly in the last few weeks as economic issues dominated the media coverage. A fall in the number of small-boat crossings and the new Home Secretary’s tough actions has reduced the salience of immigration, the issue that more than any other has driven Reform’s rise.
To win the next election, Reform will need to reassure voters who are open to the idea of supporting them but worried about taking the risk of electing a challenger party for the first time. There are genuine uncertainties about their fiscal, NHS, and Putin policies.
There are some signs that Farage and his team know this and are running a deliberate political strategy to de-risk themselves and to “scrape the barnacles off the boat” byclearing away policies likely to be unpopular with the voters they need to attract.
We saw this in early November with Reform’s decision to drop its manifesto plan for massive tax cuts, attempting to close off the accusation that they present a risk to the economy. We saw it in a recent interview with Farage where he hardened his line on Vladimir Putin, who he referred to as a “very bad dude” to try to reassure voters who see the Reform leader as soft on Russia and insufficiently committed to supporting Ukraine. We’ve also seen it with the recent recruitment of the cerebral former Conservative MP Danny Kruger and plans to reform the state, designed to reassure voters that the party is thinking deeply about how to things done in government and take on what they expect to be a hostile civil service.
At the centre of Reform’s populist political appeal is a sense that Britain is broken and no longer working for hard working people. The argument the party wants to make is that it’s time for voters to roll the dice and give someone else a go after decades of power alternating between the Conservatives and sometimes Labour.
Reform strategists know that argument becomes more persuasive if they can reduce the perceived risk and cost of taking a chance on them. Much of the party’s success in 2026 and beyond will rest on how well they are able to do this.
Labour and Conservative strategists will take confidence that the election isn’t for another three years, and that Reform are currently near their ceiling in support while they are both close to their floor of support.
Reform will do well to remember the SDP’s glorious near-miss in 1983 as well as studying Labour’s unexpected breakthrough of 1923.
