Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage has been in Davos, putting the “global elites on notice”.

Unfortunately for him, it’s not the Illuminati bug salesmen Europe is worried about right now, but Donald Trump. It’s therefore doubly unfortunate that Farage took to the stage in the “USA House” — a privately-sponsored, but officially sanctioned, venue for the American delegation at this year’s World Economic Forum. Unfortunately, the timing has only reinforced the Reform leader’s image as being too closely aligned with King Donald.

Nigel Farage has said Reform UK’s “dominance” on social media has won it a “rapidly growing” following among the under-18s who could boost the party’s chances at the 2029 election.

The Reform leader said his party’s surge in popularity with young people — Gen Z — had yet to convert into votes as many were too young to go to cast ballots on Thursday. However, with Reform now in parliament with five MPs, Farage said the trend showed “what this party is going to be capable of doing over the next six months, over the next five years”.

Mainstream politicians and pundits have barely been able to contain themselves since Nigel Farage argued that Western powers ‘provoked’ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Here it was, another opportunity for our political and media classes to stigmatise the Reform UK leader, this time as a ‘Putin apologist’. Another chance to draw up a cordon sanitaire around the UK’s most prominent populist.

“Something remarkable is happening out there” among the youngest voter cohort of Generation Z, Nigel Farage said, hailing the surge in support for his anti-political establishment Reform Party.

A Tory government rules over a discontented nation: the polls show it is headed for catastrophic defeat. As the hapless Prime Minister stumbles into one public-relations blunder after another, commentators say that the race has been all but won by the centre-left opposition. Meanwhile, a maverick populist force under the banner of “Reform” emerges to challenge the Tories from the Right: its leader is a quirky character who nonetheless speaks compellingly about issues practically ignored by the political elite. The fledgling party’s sudden rise threatens not to just upend the dynamics of the race but to permanently realign the country’s politics in one way or another. 

Over the weekend, I spent a day shadowing Nigel Farage with an entourage of fellow snoopers and milling busybodies. As he walked down Frinton high street, ducking into more or less every establishment he passed along the way, there was a genuine buzz, a non-confected enthusiasm. Women spilled out of Superdrug to request selfies with the man himself. Car horns were honked in solidarity. Most encouragingly of all, a sizeable number of zoomers stopped Farage to inform him of their resolve to cast a vote—for many, their first ever—in favour of Reform on July 4.

I once wrote that Nigel Farage is staying away from leading a populist revolt for reasons known only to himself. Well, we’re no longer guessing: he has come out all guns blazing to do exactly this, lead a ‘revolt,’ even using that provocative word.