Some laughed at Nigel Farage, but he’s got the Tories where he wants them and he could now be Prime Minister

NIGEL FARAGE famously told gawping members of the European Parliament after the Brexit vote: “Well, you’re not laughing at me now, are you?”. And while they were whipped to cackle and heckle when the Reform boss stood up at Prime Minister’s Questions last week, the wall of fake laughter from Labour MPs rang very hollow. While he is still getting used to the bear pit that is the Commons chamber, giving his opponents enough pauses to shout him down, it’s starting to look like Farage could have the last laugh yet again.

When he announced his shock un-retirement last June, people stifled giggles when Farage said he was coming back to take the keys to No10. But on both sides of the political aisle, Westminster is starting to panic. When I revealed here a few weeks ago that even the PM thinks there is a 25 per cent chance that Farage could replace him in Downing Street, ministers and MPs alike collared me in corridors to tell me that was nuts.

But with each week that passes and another batch of polls show Reform solidly in second, those same politicians are beginning to visibly cluck. Yesterday’s mega-poll from JL Partners — the British firm that humiliated the US polling industry with an astonishingly accurate prediction of Donald Trump’s margin of victory — makes for grim reading for both Sir Keir and floundering Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

It pointed to Labour losing 211 seats and slumping back to where they were on 200 before the 2024 election, while the Conservatives would only manage to recover to a 1997-level of 190 seats, with 69 gains. But bang in the middle on 102 seats would be Kingmaker Nige. It would be a deeply hung parliament, with Labour unable to form a government without the Liberal Democrats and toxic Scottish Nationalists.

If Reform continues to rise, those numbers are just going to get worse for the old parties. And the already clattering chatter of a pact to unite the right will become deafening. From dingy Westminster pubs, where so much of right-wing politics in Britain is carved up, to the grand clubs of Pall Mall, talk is getting very serious about what the shape of a Reform/Tory deal could look like — despite both sides’ strident denials.

But a pre-election pact is not in the Conservatives’ gift, while the price that I’m told Farage would extract after an election is enough to have senior Tories crying into their martinis: Nigel number one, the boss, the leader of whatever shape the new right would take and, potentially, the country. Despatching her henchmen to rubbish polls taken this far out from an election, as Badenoch did on Sunday, may make small comfort for senior Tories.

Yet without a significant decline in Farage’s soaring numbers, few doubt the struggling opposition leader will last beyond 2026. Badenoch is lucky the Tories are currently suffering from regicidal PTSD — loyalty bound from collective exhaustion. But while some Tory MPs fear the party may over-correct the mistakes of the past by clinging onto a bad leader for too long, others suspect its bloodlust is resting rather than dormant.

While stopping Reform appears to be a death-match for Kemi Badenoch personally, for Labour it’s wipe out territory across the board. A Labour majority delivered by Reform splitting the Tory vote, eaten by the very party that made it. Hence the wall of noise that the government benches put on last week. For months, Starmer has pivoted every attack slung his way from Reform back to the Tories and was noticeably handling the Clacton rabble rouser with kid gloves.

But it’s no more Mr Nice Keir when it comes to Nigel. A slightly tired playbook of attacks on his previous comments on the NHS have done very little to stop Farage’s advance so far, but I hear new attacks are planned on his alleged softness towards Putin. Reform insiders privately concede Farage’s comments about the Kremlin tyrant during last summer’s campaign deterred some wavering Tories. And a new toughness on immigration is aimed squarely at those Labour to Reform switchers.

No10 strategists insist the plan to “show and tell” what an almost 25 per cent uptick in deportations actually looks like with powerful videos from the planes has been long in the making as people did not believe the numbers, but the target of them is not in doubt. At Friday’s cabinet away day, the PM told his top team it was time to be bolder if they are to have something to show voters in 2029.

Warning that “caution is hardwired into the machine”, he said big changes require a harder edge from his team as they battle notoriously slow Whitehall. But with dire warnings of stagflation and the UK economy constantly downgraded, ministers may not have time to be bold before they are bust. Add to that a wholesale U-turn on Brexit, with talk that only AI and our services industry are off the negotiating table for closer alignment with Brussels, it’s going to take more than deportation videos and Cabinet pep talks for Labour to stem the Reform bleed.