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“I want you to take a moment to picture the day when, in just a few years’ time, prime minister Nigel Farage triumphantly arrives at No 10 Downing Street, puts his briefcase down on the desk and takes a seat,” Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf tells a rapt audience of party members. “Change is coming. We will turn this country around and restore the United Kingdom to its rightful position as one of the greatest countries in the world.”
The speech is met with rapturous applause and a standing ovation at Reform’s East of England conference, held in Kemi Badenoch’s rural North West Essex constituency on Saturday.
About 1,000 people have packed into the unseasonally named “summer marquee” at Chelmsford City Racecourse for the event, which is one of four party gatherings being held across England in the space of a fortnight.
The mood is jubilant, with a series of speakers hailing Reform’s buoyant poll ratings and what they see as political victories from an ongoing spat with Conservative leader Badenoch over its membership figures.
Momentum is the word of the day. “Reform has all of the momentum in British politics, but make no mistake – we still have a vast amount of work to do,” Yusuf tells the crowd, before appealing for members to volunteer as candidates and canvassers in local elections.
Reform is no longer aiming to merely disrupt British politics: it is organising. Branches are springing up across the country, and electoral machinery is being slowly but surely built up. Lee Anderson, one of five Reform MPs, used his speech as a call to action, after arriving on stage as the speaker system blasted the “here we go” football chant.
“We have a mountain to climb, but we have all the momentum,” he told members. “We’ve got local elections this year, and Scottish and Welsh elections next year, and we must take the fight to every single ballot box in our great country.”
While the audience are clearly up for the fight, not everyone shares the leadership’s optimism. Nick, 67, thinks British voters are looking for “something different”, but adds: “The electoral system might let us down but I think the will is there.”
Fellow Reform member, Mark, 61, who is sporting a union jack T-shirt, was a member of Reform’s previous incarnation, the Brexit party, and is familiar with its struggle to convert support into electoral seats. He says: “We’ve got momentum at the moment but there’s no doubt that when we become more of a threat the knives will be out politically and in the mainstream media.”
Other Reform members fear the party’s membership is currently too narrow to compete against the main parties’ broad supporter bases. The vast majority of attendees are male and over 50, and almost all are white.
Maria, 65, acknowledges that the “demographic here is very mature”. She fears that Reform supporters in her generation may revert to the main parties or vote tactically at the next general election.
“They are sheep, they’re not independent thinkers,” she adds. “It’s time for change, but we need to attract a much wider range of people.”
Asked if she can picture Farage as the next prime minister, Maria says the party is “not ready” for power now, but may be by 2029, adding: “If there was an election tomorrow there are too many sheeple [sheep people] but in a few years’ time I think Reform will be far more ready and if the money comes in from the likes of Elon [Musk] that would help a lot.”
The rumoured potential of a serious funding injection by the tech billionaire is the subject of frequent conference chatter, despite Farage’s public rejection on Friday of Elon Musk’s vocal support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Robinson himself is not mentioned in any of the speeches, although Anderson makes a point of saying that Reform’s supporters are “true British patriots, but they’re not far-right”.
Standing at the marquee bar, Mark says Robinson is “not somebody that we want associated with the party”, adding: “With Musk, why can’t we have a disagreement?”
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Nick concurs, saying Farage and Musk should “agree to disagree”, adding: “But it does seem unusual that both Trump and Musk take such a big interest in UK politics.”
Several Reform speakers hail Trump’s electoral victory as an example of what could be achieved by the party in the UK, and some praise Musk as a “hero” and visionary. Most of the focus, however, was closer to home. Immigration, small boats, crime, the economy, and opposition to green energy policies were core topics.
Yusuf announced that, if in power, Reform would launch an independent inquiry into grooming gangs, with Farage later calling for a “full, open, national inquiry” so that everyone in the country “knows the truth”.
Badenoch called for a national inquiry on Friday, after a series of posts by Musk on X about the issue, in which he accused Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute grooming gangs, and called for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed.
In fact, there were independent inquiries into the Rotherham scandal in 2014 – the Jay Report – and Telford, which concluded in 2022. As director of public prosecutions in 2013, Starmer initiated legal action against the Rochdale gangs and launched reforms to the Crown Prosecution Service.
Farage linked sexual exploitation with “mass open-door immigration without assimilation”, which he called a “disaster”, to widespread applause.
His speech, which closed the conference, was the main event. He arrived walking down the aisle of what is, on other occasions, a wedding venue, as delegates mobbed him for handshakes and selfies.
In his element on stage, at times interacting directly with the crowd and at others looking down the camera to address people watching the live stream, Farage leapfrogged between jokes at Labour’s expense and angry tirades. “We can win the next general election,” he insisted. “This is only the very beginning.”
