Farage: I get up early to work — Reform voters are people with alarm clocks

Telegraph

2 days ago

Nigel Farage spent part of his Monday standing in a brick factory in a high-vis jacket on the outskirts of Glasgow.
It is not a scene anyone – including Mr Farage – would have expected a year ago.
Taking retirement in March 2021 after Boris Johnson's EU trade deal was signed, the veteran Eurosceptic told The Telegraph at the time: 'I've knocked on my last door.'
The stunts, interviews and campaigns were over. But now they are back – and Reform UK is doing better than ever.
A year to the day since he re-entered British politics with a bang, taking the helm of his insurgent Right-wing party and fighting a successful four and a half-week campaign to become an MP, Mr Farage is on the trail once again.
'I knew it would be the last big decision of my life,' he says, reflecting on the last 365 days, which have seen Reform win its first MPs at a general election and take control of 10 English councils.
He also fulfilled his lifelong ambition of sitting in the Commons.
At 61, Mr Farage has spent the last quarter of a century in the headlines, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as leader of Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform.
He has announced his retirement from politics twice – after the Brexit referendum in 2016, and again in 2021. Both times, he has been tempted back for more.
'I could be lecturing at American universities, I could be making a fortune,' he says. 'So it had to be worthwhile.'
His latest reincarnation is as the MP for Clacton and running Reform, the party with the most momentum in British politics. It is polling at 31 per cent of the vote – far higher than Ukip ever managed – and Mr Farage is busier than ever.
'Are there days when I think, 'God, what am I doing?'' he asks himself after a day on the campaign trail in Scotland. 'The workload is tough, but then you get days like today, which you certainly couldn't call boring.'
He says his 'remarkable stamina and energy' began in his youth, when he was not a sprinter but 'always a distance sort of person… never needed to sleep much'.
Throughout the day, Mr Farage refers constantly to the importance of getting up early. At the factory, he tells the owner that, as a young commodities trader, he would be at his desk by 7am and either stay there until 7pm or be in the pub by lunchtime.
'I started work at 4 o'clock yesterday morning,' he says later. 'Just spent hours going through my messages.' Reform voters, he says, are 'people who have got alarms, or have had alarms'.
His day on Monday involved four visits across Scotland, including a press conference, the visit to the factory, a 20-minute check-in with a local campaign office, and a pint of Tennent's Lager on the outskirts of Glasgow.
A walk along the high street in Larkhall, where a crunch Scottish Parliament by-election will take place on Thursday, yielded several political chats with passers-by ('They [the SNP] haven't got a bloody clue') and some grocery shopping ('Under-ripe bananas?! I like them almost black.')
Mr Farage admits the frantic pace of his campaigning (and, perhaps, his refusal to retire) is partly an acceptance of his own mortality.
The Reform leader has had a remarkable number of close escapes, having survived being hit by a car, a testicular cancer diagnosis that was initially ignored by the NHS, a wheel coming off his car on a French motorway and a plane crash.
'The idea of a morning lie in is horrible, absolutely horrible,' he says. 'I want to do stuff, I want to pack as much as I can in. I think maybe that is a result of the accidents I had, the brushes I have had [with death].
'We're not here forever, and I want to do as much as I can in the time that I have.'
The latest challenge is turning Reform, which ran a motley crew of candidates at last year's election and has since descended into a bitter row with one of its former MPs, into a credible party of government.
The five turquoise MPs in Parliament are barely enough for a dinner party – let alone close to forming a full shadow cabinet.
Mr Farage plans to rectify that by appointing some high-profile spokespeople for various policy issues, drawn from outside Westminster, to serve as prospective Cabinet ministers under a Reform government.
He is tight-lipped about who the new recruits will be, but hints that they will probably come from business backgrounds.
Unlike Ukip and the Brexit Party, Reform is not a single-issue campaign group but an attempt to 'challenge the existing parties on a very broad range of issues', he says.
Mr Farage describes making an impact as a 'game of chess' with the major parties, which he hopes to win by shattering political consensus on voter-friendly topics. The top priorities are mass migration – which he describes as an 'absolute scandal' – and net zero, which is 'so farcical it's almost funny'.
At his press conference in Aberdeen on Monday, Mr Farage told the Scottish media that net zero has become 'the new Brexit'.
Later, he tells The Telegraph that the similarity between the issues is that there is 'total disconnect' between the 'political classes, most of the mainstream media, business, the unions' and the public.
'I think my strength is that people say, 'You know what, whether we agree with him or not, at least we know what he stands for. He makes it pretty clear that he believes in what he's doing',' he adds. 'I think that has helped a lot over the last year.'
Reform has pledged to scrap the commitment to reach net zero by 2050 entirely, which Mr Farage claimed last week would save £40 billion a year. That money would be used for tax cuts, including for married couples – a policy he hopes would boost the birth rate.
The figure was immediately disputed by economists and both Labour and the Conservatives, who accused Mr Farage of 'fantasy economics'.
So, with Reform hoping to pitch seriously for Downing Street in four years' time, does the party have a numbers problem?
'With the big numbers out there, the cost of climate change, the cost of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], at least it's starting a debate,' he replies. 'If we have to revise those numbers a bit, we'll revise them. Any numbers you produce in politics will be questioned.'
So far, the strategy appears to be working. Reform has a credible chance of beating Labour in Thursday's Scottish Parliament by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, although Mr Farage says it is unlikely his party can unseat the SNP.
But active campaigning in Scotland is a recent strategy for Reform, having only fielded paper candidates at last year's election. Many still beat the Conservatives, who were routed both north and south of the border.
Now it has almost 11,000 members in Scotland, which may make it the second-largest party by membership behind the SNP (the Conservatives and Labour are both cagey about revealing their figures).
The 'hotbed' of Reform Scotland support is around the central belt of constituencies between Edinburgh and Glasgow, rather than in the less well-connected areas like the rural north of England, where Mr Farage's political projects have usually thrived.
Nationally, there is also growing support among women – who now make up half of prospective Reform voters – and ethnic minorities.
Mr Farage says the party's staff 'try not to look at' demographic data, not believing that it should matter, but points out there is 'a lot of warmth' from some black voters, especially those from Caribbean countries, and 'elements of the Asian community'.
The other major growth area is among young people, of whom around 10 per cent would vote for Reform if an election was held tomorrow.
Mr Farage ascribes much of that success to TikTok, on which he has become an unlikely star despite not downloading the app to his own phone over security concerns. His return to politics was marked with a social media video overlaid with Eminem's Without Me – 'Guess who's back? Back again.'
😎😎😎 pic.twitter.com/cS13Gmk4FH
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) June 3, 2024
Walking through Heathrow Airport recently, he says he was accosted by a young fan, who pointed out to his father: 'Dad, it's the Brexit means Brexit guy!'
Dozens of accounts have posted Mr Farage's 2010 speech in the European Parliament, in which he called Herman Van Rompuy a man with the 'charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk'.
With a grin, he admits he would be 'shut down immediately' by Sir Lindsay Hoyle if he tried such a stunt in Westminster.
As the campaign moves relentlessly across the UK, next month Mr Farage will travel to Wales, where constituency-level polling shows Reform's support is high ahead of the Welsh Senedd elections next year.
'I think there is a very widespread belief that Britain is broken,' Mr Farage says. 'There's the paradox of our support, in that our supporters are the most pessimistic about the state our country is in, and yet the most optimistic that we are going to solve it.'
The next four years present an interesting challenge for Mr Farage, who has always campaigned as an underdog, not a front-runner. But a pitch for No 10 is a different game to the anti-establishment, pro-Britain politics that have underpinned his last 25 years in Brussels and Westminster.
Shifting gears to a plausible general election campaign has required a new way of thinking about politics, and the Reform leader has come to see it not as a political party but as a business venture.
The press conferences, by-elections and endless media coverage are something like seed capital, while the promises of billions in savings under a Reform government are pitched as an opening figure from which to enter into a negotiation with the public.
Candidates – many of whom Mr Farage admits were 'bad' last year – are Reform's workforce, and he is the executive who returned from retirement for one last deal.
'At 60 years old, having just won news presenter of the year [on GB News], with a couple of grandkids on the way, I wasn't going to come back to this for the sake of it,' he says.
So why risk it all again? The trademark grin returns. 'I could see the gap in the market was enormous. Absolutely enormous.'