Nigel Farage is signing football shirts when I arrive at Reform’s campaign headquarters in Millbank Tower, the building where New Labour prepared for power before 1997. The black shirts are emblazoned with ‘Farage 10’ in gold. ‘Someone called them Nazi colours,’ the leader complains. ‘This always happens when we do well.’

As favourite to be the next prime minister, Farage is sanguine. ‘They’re a special edition, £350 each.’ How many is he signing? ‘—king hundreds,’ he says, pulling his punches on the profanity. Seven hundred to be precise, a cool £245,000 for party coffers. This is the same week the party registers a £9 million donation from the crypto millionaire Christopher Harborne, the largest single donation in British political history.

‘When you see the Q3 returns, you’ll see a massive uptick in money raised,’ Farage says. ‘Fundraising was slower than we hoped it would be to begin with, but people wanted to see us prove ourselves. 1 May was just the beginning of that.’ That was when Reform won ten councils in the local elections. 

Now his focus is on 7 May 2026, the date Farage believes is his moment of destiny. He expects to make huge strides in Scotland, to top the polls in Wales and, in England, his goal is to render the Conservatives extinct as the major party of the right. ‘This is it,’ he says. ‘All my time is spent on 7 May. Nothing else matters.’

Farage shows me round the office, proud of what he has built from nothing. Reform has 259,000 members, pushing half a million registered supporters, while the Tories are struggling to keep their membership in six figures. He also knows they have a long way to go if Reform is to form the next government. ‘We’ve set up 470 branches in 16 months and some are good and some are not, but those that are good are getting really good.’ The office includes a TV studio from where Farage delivered a near-live response to Keir Starmer’s party conference speech. ‘We’re going to open our own podcast channel very soon,’ he adds.

The centrepiece of the war room is a giant whiteboard listing every contest in the May elections in England, Scotland and Wales. There are green asterisks next to Reform’s targets. Some are classic Red Wall seats, such as Barnsley and Gateshead where, he says ‘we will be having a serious crack’. In London they’re the outer ‘doughnut’ of boroughs where the Tories used to be strong – Bromley and Bexley – but also Barking, Dagenham and parts of Croydon. Farage believes the rise of the Greens and Lutfur Rahman’s supporters in east London mean ‘Labour could be in more trouble than you can imagine.’ Farage thinks neither Starmer nor Rachel Reeves will be leading Labour by 2029. ‘It might be Angela Rayner,’ he adds. ‘At least she’s got a personality.’

‘You do wonder why
the others didn’t copy
me years ago’

Zack Polanski, the new Green party leader, he pronounces ‘a maniac’, with policies on ‘no borders’ and drug legalisation that Farage thinks are ‘absolutely crackers’. But there is also respect for a fellow populist. ‘You do wonder why the others didn’t copy me years ago,’ he says. ‘He poses a massive problem for Starmer and he’s eaten [Jeremy] Corbyn’s lunch.’ Corbyn, he says ‘couldn’t organise a piss-up in a........

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