THE PAST few months have largely been good ones for Nigel Farage and Reform UK, the right-wing party he leads. Having won 14% of the vote, and five seats, in the general election last July, the party has since flourished as Labour has dithered in government and the Conservatives have floundered in opposition.

According to The Economist’s average of opinion polls, Reform UK sits on 25%, just two points behind Labour and four ahead of the Tories (see chart). Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s chairman, boasts of winning 350-400 seats—a majority—at the next election, due by 2029. Mr Farage has declared he wants to be prime minister that year, and has talked a lot about growing and professionalising his party. Nervous Tories have been musing about an electoral pact, or even an outright merger to consolidate the right of British politics.

Lately, however, the merger chatter has been stifled and the party’s grand claims about making itself fit for office have been ringing hollow. A bust-up within Reform UK has revived old questions: of whether Mr Farage can build a party with a leadership broader than just himself, and whether Reform UK’s flaws put a hard limit on its rise.

Reform UK has accused Rupert Lowe, one of its MPs, of threatening Mr Yusuf, and has reported him to the police, who say they are investigating. The party has also appointed a senior lawyer to look into claims of bullying in his office. Reform UK has also suspended Mr Lowe, reducing its parliamentary strength to just four.

Mr Lowe denies all the allegations. In his telling, his only crime is to have crossed Mr Farage. His suspension followed an interview with the Daily Mail in which Mr Lowe had mockingly referred to Reform UK as a “protest party led by the Messiah”. He later claimed to have been “entirely frozen out” of the party machinery. Mr Lowe is also a favourite of Elon Musk, the proprietor of X and confidant of Donald Trump, for his hardline views on immigration and grooming gangs.

The falling-out fits a familiar pattern. Reviews of Mr Farage by some ex-colleagues in the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Brexit Party, forerunners of Reform UK, have been less flattering than Mr Lowe’s. Those leaving Reform UK in recent months include Ben Habib, its former co-deputy leader, and Howard Cox, its candidate for mayor of London last year.

Another factor that may limit Reform UK’s advance is Mr Farage’s view that the West “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the eastward spread of NATO. He criticised Volodymyr Zelensky for not wearing a suit in his ill-starred meeting at the White House with Donald Trump on February 28th. Such talk is unpopular: 77% of voters believe that Russia is wholly or mostly responsible for the war, according to YouGov, a pollster.

Yet the furore over Mr Lowe may not be the calamity for Mr Farage that it appears. Reform UK’s rise in the polls suggests that the party is becoming an entrenched force on the British right. Reform’s surge took a quarter of the Conservatives’ vote between the general elections of 2019 and 2024; since then, the Tories have lost a further 20%, again according to YouGov.

A paper by Oliver Heath, of Royal Holloway, University of London, and his colleagues shows a “remarkable continuity” between the places that voted most heavily for UKIP in 2015, Brexit in 2016 and Reform UK last year. The paper suggests that as this succession of parties headed by Mr Farage has continued to improve its showing at the polls, support for them has deepened rather than widened. It has grown most in older, white, working-class and Eurosceptic towns.

The next test of Reform UK’s potential—and of whether recent events have made any difference to voters—will come in a few weeks, in Runcorn and Helsby, in north-west England. On March 10th the local MP, Mike Amesbury, elected for Labour in 2024, said he would resign, having being convicted of assault after a late-night street brawl. Reform UK finished a distant second last July; it might hope to come close to winning the by-election.

The past few days have been a reminder of why Mr Farage will struggle to convince the electorate that he is a prime minister in waiting. But his record warns against writing off his capacity for disruption. ■

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