Nigel Farage emerged from the Three Jays pub in Jaywick halfway through England’s lacklustre showing against Slovenia on Tuesday.
He had come outside, with a cigarette and a glass of gin in hand, to discuss the sometimes-faltering performance of his own team, the populist Reform UK party.
Volunteers are stretched wafer thin, candidates are forced to fundraise online, and its bootstrap campaign has been hobbled by a series of racist or misogynist remarks by candidates and a legal furore involving a vetting company.
“Am I cocky and overconfident? No,” the veteran anti-EU campaigner told the Financial Times. “I’m 60. I’ll take whatever comes.”
The arch-Brexiter is the party’s majority owner, but only returned to the helm four weeks ago. He blamed the party’s former management for a candidate roster that includes people who previously praised elements of Hitler’s leadership, or endorsed the British National Party.
“Those candidates were there months before,” he insisted. “I inherited that.”
He has also has blamed and threatened to sue a vetting company that was supposed to scrutinise its candidates. Yet the revelations have led to a sense of a campaign that, despite momentum, lacks control.
Paula Surridge, politics professor at the University of Bristol, said the party’s organisation could undermine its efforts to win any seats. “They end up fighting a national campaign in the media, because they lack local organisation,” she said.
Reform is performing better than the ruling Conservatives in some polls, buoyed by its role as a sponge for Tory discontent.
It has leapt from 11 per cent in the first week of the campaign to roughly 16 per cent following Farage’s decision to stand, and could deny the Conservatives roughly 60 seats by splitting the right-wing vote, according to the FT’s analysis of polling data.
That Reform climbed in the polls so sharply after Farage took the helm shows how integral the former stockbroker is to its wider appeal.
Farage is predicted to win Clacton, which had a 24,000 Tory majority at the last election, FT modelling suggests.
If elected as an MP, Farage said he hoped to build a “mass movement” and reshape the right wing of British politics. There are even some within the Conservatives who believe he could one day lead their party.
“The next parliament is going to be quite devoid of real debate and real issues. And I think I’ve got something to add,” he said.
With less than a week until polling day, Farage admitted he felt stretched. The party’s campaign has seen him ping pong between dozens of campaign spots across the country and Clacton.
“I do feel a bit weary, but I’m trying,” he admitted. “I’m out there.”
Farage was on the English channel in a fishing boat at 4am that morning to film a dingy filled with asylum seekers — he pronounced the navy should escort them back to France. He has made immigration a central plank of his campaign.
Clacton resident Samantha, a 56-year-old police administrator, said Farage met voters where they were. “He speaks his mind, he tells people what they want to hear,” she said. “I think immigration is the main topic for him at this election and I think he’s right.”
In the pub, Farage mingled freely with residents, watched closely by two security guards. He took photos with children in their England football kits, as he wore a Union Jack-adorned waistcoat.
But his handshaking bonhomie melds with a more abrasive attitude that has seen him labelled a Putin apologist.
In an interview with the BBC last week, he echoed remarks he made in 2014 suggesting the EU and Nato’s expansion “provoked” the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although he later said his comments had been misrepresented, it was not before they had appeared on the front page of the rightwing Daily Mail newspaper.
Luke Tryl, director of consultancy More in Common, said the remarks were a “problem for Farage” and lowered the party’s ceiling of potential voters by reinforcing concerns about the brand.
More than a quarter of 2019 Conservative voters said they thought Farage backed Russia rather than Ukraine, according to a survey this week by More in Common.
Farage’s entourage for the evening in Jaywick included Raheem Kassam, his former aide and an associate of Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Like Trump, Farage instinctively shifts responsibility for faults within his party on to others.
The Reform leader criticised the party’s vetting company, which said it could not complete checks because of missing information. Although saying it was part of a wider “stitch-up”, he eventually conceded that the affair was more likely a “breach of contract” than outright fraud.
While large donors have returned to the party, it has still only raised roughly £860,000 in large donations in the first two weeks of this year’s campaign, in comparison with the £2.3mn in 2019.
Party candidates said they had been left to launch crowdfunding pages to fund their efforts and did not receive resource from the central party. At least 140 are raising this way, taking roughly £87,000 across four platforms.
But Farage feels he can still reshape the entire right wing in Britain within five years of taking office, a timetable accelerated by TikTok that allows clips of him to spread rapidly online.
“My political career didn’t really take off until 2007-08 with YouTube” — when extracts of him berating members of the European parliament fuelled his notoriety — he admitted. “I did a lot to the European parliament and all. Hell of a lot. I made them all famous.”
Farage’s entrance into parliament risks the Conservatives lurching to the right into electoral oblivion, according to some commentators.
Yet potential Tory leadership contenders Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel have reportedly dismissed any attempt by the Reform leader to join the party and fulfil his promise of a “reverse takeover” of the party.
Farage could even face his own internal leadership challenge. At the moment he is “the right person” to lead Reform, he said, but is prepared to step aside in time. “I’m not this sort of mega narcissist that people think. If somebody comes along who’s better, fantastic,” he said.
Farage believed someone in their 40s could succeed him, but past actions indicate stepping aside gracefully is not in his playbook.
Tony Mack — Reform’s initial candidate in Clacton before he was displaced by Farage — was sat in the corner of the same pub, his local, when the party leader arrived to watch the England match.
Mack said he was only phoned moments before Farage announced to the press he was replacing him in Clacton. “I don’t believe it’s fair, open and honest. I don’t think it melds with his rhetoric,” he said.
Farage painted a different picture of the decision. “I spent an inordinate amount of time talking to him, making him promises that I would deliver,” he said. “And I think there were personality clashes with other people, not me.”
He said people did not fall out with him, but “choose their own routes”, and a dedicated set of allies had stood by him for decades.
“People who think they are bigger than me, more important to me. That’s fine. Let them think that . . . That doesn’t generally turn out very well [for them].”
However the party polls, the reliance on one individual — even one on whose days stretch from dawn to the last orders bell at the pub — remains a critical weakness.
One senior Reform official admitted the party needed to “broaden out”. “The future for Reform will very much depend on how many MPs it manages to get and, equally, who they are,” they said.
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