What Reform needs to do before 2029

Building down, not up

I am going to lay my cards on the table. I voted for Reform at the last election, but have remained a member of the Conservative Party. If, however, the winner of the Conservative Party’s leadership contest is Kemi Badenoch, I will finally take the plunge: I will leave the Conservative Party, and become a member of Reform UK.

Of course, Robert Jenrick is not perfect. He isn’t an electrifying speaker, and may well disappoint me. However, this is still undoubtedly preferable to a continuation of the Gove-Smith-Mirza hydra, of which Badenoch is just the latest face. Above all, Jenrick is the only candidate who is visibly listening to the young, right-wing voters in this country — the people who, when Margaret and Jonathan from South Tippington-On-The-Mimms Conservative Association are too arthritic or dead to vote, will matter the most, lest our country go to ruin. Among younger members, it is very obvious that he is overwhelmingly preferred to Badenoch, and for good reason, even if most of them will not follow me in leaving the party if he does not win.

However, this is not an article about Jenrick or his policies, or why exactly Badenoch is so bad. Instead, what I want to focus on today is what Reform UK would need to do to maximise its chances of electoral success in 2029, and in the various elections in between.

Focus more on Holyrood and the Senedd elections in 2026, less on local elections in 2025

You may have expected the most important point to be something about ‘grassroots campaigning’ or ‘adopting the Lib Dem model’. While campaigning is important, I believe it’s been overemphasised, because giving a bunch of people at the pub leaflets and teaching them how to knock on a door is easier done than a lot of the truly necessary things. The first things that Reform need to get right are strategic and organisational.

Zia Yusuf is currently focusing on establishing constituency associations, attempting to build the party from the ground up. The strategy seems to be that if Reform can rapidly kick into gear on this organisational basis, they will be able to become a serious threat to both Labour and the Tories at the local elections next May. There are a number of problems with this approach.

Reform UK has about 90,000 members — just over half the number of members the Tories have. More than respectable for a very new party, but given that their members are dispersed rather than geographically concentrated, it isn’t yet enough for them to build a comprehensive operation at the local level, at least not nationally or at this speed. One problem here is that, among young people, support for Reform (contrary to the as-yet-unproven Farage Zoomer factor) is only barely higher than support for the Tories. Therefore, most of the members will probably be elderly. They may be angry at what is happening to our country, but they will achieve little. I speak from personal experience when I say that the average elderly canvasser is borderline useless, and that’s even before we consider their frequent mobility problems.

If we do some quick maths, we can see another problem Reform will face: every council candidate in the United Kingdom requires two people from the ward they are standing in to sign their nomination papers. There are about 17,000 councillors in the United Kingdom, and Farage has pledged to oppose every single one of them. This suggests that, unless non-members’ signatures are used — which, while sometimes okay, is unhelpful for ‘paper candidates’, requiring them to put in more work — we will (ideally) need 54,000 members nationwide to, at some point or another over the next five years, actually do something. This seems implausible. Of course, not all of these 17,000 councillors are up for re-election at once: in May 2025, there will be 2,658 councillors for Reform to oppose, bringing the minimum required number of ‘active’ members down to a more manageable 7,974. Unfortunately, this is still more people than attended Reform conference. Without the organisational experience of the main parties (something that is almost necessarily built up over many years), and adding in the obvious difficulties of finding and (important for Reform) vetting candidates, it will probably be difficult to organise for a full slate of Reform candidates next May.

And even if we do manage to get a nearly full slate of Reform candidates, we still need to campaign for as many of them as possible. The importance of campaigning may be overstated, but it does still matter, and this is even more true on the local level. One issue is figuring out where to campaign with almost no data to help us. But there are also manpower problems. I have been campaigning in a fairly average seat in the south of England, formerly a safe seat, for the last three years. The local Conservative Association there — an old institution with lots of history and at least a bit of human capital behind it — could, on a good day, get twenty-five people out. On an average day, you’re lucky to get five, all fairly immobile and geriatric. It’s all fun and games going drinking with Nigel and Friends at Party Conference, but are enough of these people going to step in when it’s pissing down with rain at eight o’clock in the morning? It seems unlikely.

So if not local elections, what then? Do we just twiddle our thumbs until 2029, with nothing to do but fight by-elections whenever a Mike Amesbury-type situation occurs? Cross our fingers, hoping that a scandal breaks out and an MP in a favourable seat is forced to resign? No. As Richard Tice himself has noted, Reform is polling well in Scotland and Wales ahead of the Hollyrood and Senedd Elections in 2026, which — and this is the key part — have an electoral system that incorporates proportional representation. This is far more advantageous to a new, insurgent party like Reform than the local elections. Scotland in particular is proving an attractive prospect, with a projected eight Reform MSPs elected if Scotland went to the polls today. A similar situation is also occurring in Wales, although the polling is rather patchier. What’s clear is that, even with little to no existing infrastructure (especially at the local level), Reform can do well enough here to win seats, thus gaining experience in government, obtaining funding, and opening up various new paid staff positions to grow their ranks. Although not nearly as lucrative as the European trough, this is the same tactic that helped UKIP grow and secure a foothold in various regions of the United Kingdom.

I am not saying councillors aren’t valuable, or that the grassroots machine isn’t relevant: far from it. What I am saying is that the return-on-investment from nearly two years of preparing for the Senedd and Holyrood elections in 2026 is going to be much greater than that from less than one year of preparing for local elections. Moreover, a strategy that presents the local elections as the ‘big test’ for Reform might result in embarrassment rather than additional momentum. The hard truth is that there’s most likely just not enough time for Reform to get the level of training, data collection, and discipline that would be needed for a respectable result up and down the country, which is what the media will be focusing on.

It is very telling that Farage’s rallying call for defections from the Tories has, so far, been received the best by Scottish councillors. Very rarely is it raised that the Conservative and Unionist Party is now overwhelmingly unpopular in the devolved nations, especially since the media is still so obsessed with Scotland voting for Remain in 2016 (which, they tell us, threatens the Union) that they simply cannot imagine a right-wing populist party performing well there. In the immediate term, then, it is not feasible for Reform to become the main right-wing opposition in England at the local level; however, the numbers and, perhaps more importantly, the electoral systems are much more favourable for them in Scotland and Wales.

Regional, not local, campaigning

There’s been a lot of discussion about the fabled ‘one-hundred new branches’ Nigel Farage will unveil at the end of November. I am personally not a fan of this approach. This is partly due to practical constraints on Reform as a new, insurgent party, as outlined above. But it is also because the current model favoured by the other main parties — centred around local constituency associations, which Farage wants to mirror — doesn’t actually work all that well. There’s no need to copy them just for ‘prestige’ reasons.

On average, Reform will have just 138 members per constituency, and of course, in many constituencies, they will have far less than that. This is much less than Labour Party’s average of 564 and the Conservative Party’s average of 265, but I can tell you that some constituency associations even for Labour and the Tories can still barely be said to actually exist. I couldn’t possibly calculate how many of these local Reform members will actually be active, but given the average constituency is made up of about 70,000 people, I’m not optimistic about the campaigning capability of 138 mostly older people only concerned with their own patch, as happens with most local Conservative Associations.

What will inevitably happen in elections is that communication between constituency associations will be subpar; there will be competing local interests; and there will be lots of infighting, most of it unproductive and almost all of it non-ideological. Indeed, this already happens with the Tories. And while Farage may be asking people to eschew ‘Tory infighting’, he’s playing to a similar demographic, and old habits die hard. The people who defect now are probably going to be opportunistic rather than particularly dedicated to the cause, and will likely just add to these problems. One of the most recent local defectors to Reform was even in the middle of disciplinary proceedings. While I obviously can’t comment on why (in this case, since I do not have any idea why), it doesn’t bode well for the first defection to basically be someone’s lifeline.

Setting up 650 (or, minus Northern Ireland, 632) associations would also require 650 different bank accounts and various constituency officers, election agents, and other bureaucrats that I can tell you from experience are hard to find and vet, difficult to train, and even harder to retain. If Reform want to succeed, then the smart thing for them to do is to gradually transition from the highly centralised campaigning we saw in the General Election of 2024, into regionalised campaigning, and only then into local campaigning. Trying some sort of ‘shock therapy’ where you transition immediately into fully local campaigning across the entire country is just asking to fail.

Fortunately, despite the apparent interest in establishing Reform organisationally on a constituency basis, Reform are also currently recruiting ‘regional organisers’ on £50,000 a year, plus expenses and remote working available — no small sum of money in British politics. It’s no surprise that several current and former employees of the Conservative Party have told me they’re tempted (whether you should take them on is another question entirely). This is a step in the right direction — especially salary wise — if they want to attract the right talent.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I have seen no evidence that Zia Yusuf was malicious in his firing of Gawain Towler, or in the new constitutional rewrite. A ‘tech’ founder fits well with the spirit of Reform, and their first round of adverts for jobs has made me cautiously optimistic that I was right. If we were to split the country into several regions managed by people who answer to Yusuf, with their own subordinates unsalaried but from the local community, you can have the benefit of efficiently issuing orders from the top, but also being informed on the local issues. Reform need to know about all the various council by-elections that happen almost monthly, which is difficult if they don’t have someone in that particular area. But they also need to be able to efficiently direct what resources they do have, and not have various constituency associations all shouting over one another (something even the Conservatives have always had trouble with). This model, in my view, would get the balance between the national and the local right.

A policy unit

Currently, there is a general perception that Reform is a protest party: that they aren’t serious and, due to their lack of experience, they don’t actually know how to get things done. This isn’t entirely inaccurate, and seriously limits their support among people who might otherwise be sympathetic. Nigel Farage has made a career out of complaining. Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe have never held elected office outside of the EU Parliament, where they were mostly elected to be a nuisance rather than to improve things. James McMurdock has never held elected office at all. Lee Anderson, to his credit, has plenty of experience, and is much more intelligent than SW1 hacks realise (you do not succeed in three parties, raise two sons alone for seventeen years, and get a better reception at the Reform UK conference than Farage himself without having something about you).

While it is obviously impossible to fully remedy people’s concerns over Reform’s ‘lack of experience’, we can try to alleviate them. The easiest fix for this is to establish a genuine Policy Unit, headed by someone with experience with the SW1 environment alongside an academic background. The person who immediately springs to mind is Matt Goodwin, who has done a lot of work through his Substack and the media to give Reform the intellectual and policymaking dimension it currently lacks. He is also articulate and reputable enough to not be immediately dismissed by an overwhelmingly hostile media. If he’s too busy, then perhaps he can just be the formal front of the organisation, while leaving younger staff to do most of the actual work.

This body should be based primarily in London and be under the oversight of the Leader and Party Chairman. Location and hiring policies aren’t too relevant, but needless to say, it should recruit meritocratically, primarily from elite universities, and avoid being sucked down the populist, ‘anti-elitist’ rabbit hole. Finding suitable staff will not be easy, but should not be impossible. There is no faster way to find good candidates than by giving intelligent young people, with appropriate supervision, a genuine opportunity.

Nigel

What do we do about Nigel Farage? It seems unlikely that a Reform UK headed by Farage will be able to secure more than a fifth of the national vote. Farage has also seemed unable to commit to detailed policy platforms, and is difficult to work with. Now he’s in Parliament, his limitations have become more obvious than ever. Of course, he has his strong points — one of the most recognisable politicians of our age, an excellent orator, and an extremely authentic and personable figure. There is no denying that he was almost certainly necessary for Reform to get into Parliament in the first place. But whether Farage will have a positive influence on the future of Reform for years to come is a different question.

A recent article (‘The Right mustn’t give up on Yellow England’) drew attention to the competing interests and tastes, even beyond actual policy preferences, of the ‘Striding Forward’ versus the ‘Left Behind’. There is undoubtedly a lot of social, political, and cultural capital in the ‘Striding Forward’ which Reform could desperately do with. If Reform are serious about overtaking the Conservative Party — or at least forcing them into cutting a deal that is highly advantageous to Reform — they will need to start threatening them a lot more in these ‘Yellow England’ seats, even if only through vote-splitting. They also need to start threatening what remains of ‘Blue England’ — those seats where Tory voters remain more wedded to ideas of ‘respectability’, thus limiting Reform’s appeal — by moving westwards out of the populist heartlands of England’s east coast.

Unfortunately, many of these people just will not accept Farage, if only because they find him uncouth. Don’t get me wrong, I tend to find a lot of these people risible — and have also sometimes been a victim of a similar distaste from them — but you do have to play the game a bit. Yet while alienating these sorts of voters just because of who he is, which he obviously can’t really help at this point, he has also somehow managed to get repeatedly outflanked by Robert Jenrick on topics like immigration and crime. It’s not an ideal situation, to say the least.

Farage has given himself a time limit of five years, and I for one am glad he did. There’s two options here: the first is that some new spin doctor (maybe Towler’s replacement, Ed Sumpter) will succeed in completely transforming Farage’s image and way of doing business; the second is that he will eventually be replaced in favour of a new, younger, more palatable leader (something he has already been hinting at).

Everything points towards Zia Yusuf being the man who Farage is grooming for this role: Yusuf is young, rich, and — even better from the perspective of Farage, who is still terrified of being called ‘racist’ — an ethnic minority. What is not yet clear is whether Yusuf is being promoted on the basis that Farage will still be pulling the strings from behind the scenes for some time yet, or whether Farage is just letting Yusuf learn the ropes before he trots off to some boomer retirement home. Both are possible. However, given the restrictive nature of Reform’s constitution — the power to remove the Leader is only available once they have 100 MPs — I sense that Nigel will be hanging around for a fair bit longer.

At some point, Reform will need to move completely beyond Farage. I have no reason to believe that Yusuf is incompetent or malicious, as some have claimed, but personally, I think that bringing Richard Tice back into a more prominent role either shortly before or after 2029 may be electorally lucrative. Tice — and really all the new Reform MPs except Lee Anderson and Nigel Farage — are, despite their populism, fairly inoffensive types. In a different world, all except Farage could have ended up as Conservative MPs (and indeed, Anderson actually was a Conservative MP until very recently). Richard Tice is articulate, as respectable as one can be with his politics, and economically a bit more consistently ‘Thatcherite’ than Farage. Even the recently-fired Gawain Towler told The Spectator that Tice has changed enormously as a person since he first entered politics, and is great at working the local branches. Having met him on a number of occasions, I can also personally attest to this.

Of course, Reform didn’t perform especially well nationally with Tice as leader. He’s no Farage, but now Reform are in Parliament — even with as few MPs as they have — the job of the party leader is not quite the same as it once was. The leader doesn’t need to constantly be fighting for attention in the same way that they did before 2024. With the result in 2024 under their belt, everyone knows that they matter, and that we need to pay attention to them. Instead, the leader needs to build upon Reform’s existing strengths while breaking into new ‘respectable’ territory. For this job, I think Richard Tice is very well-suited.