Welcome to The i Paper’s new opinion series exploring the extraordinary ascent of a growing power in British politics: the Rise of Reform.

• Nigel Farage is supremely effective. But he’s not done yet
• Prime Minister Farage would probably make you worse off – and this is why
• ‘I’m sick of being lectured to by clowns’: Three writers reveal why they turned to Reform
• Farage thinks Reform’s success is all about him. It’s not

Nigel Farage has been the dominant force on Britain’s populist right for more than 20 years. He finally won a parliamentary seat in 2024, yet his influence never depended on such victories. It came from something larger: his ability to channel public frustration into a national movement. The question now is whether that movement, Reform UK, could survive without him.

I remember covering his 2015 South Thanet campaign. Foreign journalists descended on the Kent coast as if he were running for global office. Japanese crews followed him into pubs. Spanish reporters from El País treated the race like political theatre. Farage, the former commodities broker with a taste for rhetorical confrontation, had become a spectacle in his own right.

And yet he lost. Craig Mackinlay, a former Ukip figure himself, beat him and later told me it was “an idiotic decision” for Farage to stand against a candidate who was as Brexit-minded as he was, with almost identical views on immigration. Thurrock, he said, with its more pro-European Conservative incumbent, would have made far more sense strategically.

Farage resigned as Ukip leader after that defeat, only to un-resign days later when the party’s national executive refused to let him go. It was an early glimpse of a now-familiar pattern: without Farage, the party felt unanchored. When he eventually stepped away after the Brexit referendum, Ukip collapsed into irrelevance.

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