Badenoch is thriving — but Farage is barely surviving

On Monday afternoon, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf excitedly took to X posting “Important new Reform policy” with a video of himself.

If he had done this a year ago, it would have made headlines and dominated the news agenda. But, this time, barely anyone covered the story.

For what it’s worth, the policy was a move to cancel citizenships granted by Labour as a result of home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s announcement on indefinite leave to remain (ILR).

It was a shocking policy, one which would have drawn strong condemnation previously. But, now, nobody really cared.

By Tuesday morning, we had a YouGov poll, which underlined exactly why nobody really cares what Reform UK wants to do.

According to the poll, Nigel Farage’s party was actually up one point, but is now a distant third place on 21 per cent. Meanwhile, two-party politics is back, with Kemi Badenoch’s Tories closing in on Andy Burnham’s Labour in the top two spots.

The Tories are up two to 24 per cent while Labour holds a narrow two point lead on 26 per cent.

As Mr Yusuf showed on Monday – and Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick showed last week – they can announce as many new policies as they want but nobody really believes the party will be in a position to enact them.

This is no longer a party with more than 30 per cent in the polls looking like the next inevitable government. They are in danger of becoming also-rans and are on a downward trajectory to nowhere.

It did not have to be like this. But the inability to capitalise properly on the period where they dominated the polls – by introducing serious policies, sorting out their candidate selection and building up a heavyweight team – has left Mr Farage’s party with nothing much to offer.

Instead they used that period to pursue a hardcore anti-immigration strategy – because they were more worried about Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain on their right flank than winning wavering voters in the centre on their left.

This meant that “Stop Reform” became the obsession of tactical voting as we saw in Caerphilly, Gorton and Denton and Makerfield. It also meant they were unable to build a winning coalition of voters. Relying on a core of very rightwing voters – with an appeal to innate racism – is not a winning strategy.

As The Independent highlighted at the weekend, Reform was also unable to give serious answers on massive issues like defence. Mr Farage has almost seemed allergic to discussing the future of defending this country facing the real prospect of war.

They only recently came up with something resembling an economic policy and, even then, bizarrely wanted to bail out Poundland this week having previously pushed for a low tax, low regulation state.

The incoherence and lack of policies on anything other than immigration just adds to the picture that this is not a serious party of government.

Now, with an early election still very much a possibility, voters are moving away from the Reform protest vote and thinking seriously about who they want running the country.

That choice is increasingly looking like Kemi Badenoch or Andy Burnham – while Mr Farage joins Sir Ed Davey and Zack Polanski in the irrelevant category.