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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was in a jubilant mood on Friday after he became an MP for the first time and his rightwing party ate into the Conservatives’ vote share.
The arch-Brexiter won the constituency of Clacton in Essex and was one of five Reform MPs to be elected in former Conservative seats, including party chair Richard Tice in Boston and Skegness, and Tory defector Lee Anderson in Ashfield.
Farage at a press conference in Westminster on Friday repeated his dismissal of former home secretary and possible Tory leadership contender Suella Braverman’s invitation to join the Conservatives.
“Let the Conservative party tear themselves apart as they are going to do in opposition. As they’ve frankly done in government,” he said. “We [Reform] frankly don’t want to intervene in their grief.”
Reform secured its first win of the night in Ashfield in the East Midlands with the re-election of Anderson, the former Tory deputy chair who defected in March. The party also come second in nearly 100 seats as of Friday morning.
Farage, who had previously run for parliament seven times unsuccessfully, earlier insisted “this will be a non-racist, nonsectarian party. Absolutely. And I give my word on that”.
He added that the party would “democratise itself” and enable members to vote on regional branch chairs, in a move that would increase participation in the party. Reform does not allow members to vote on its leadership or policies and is structured as a limited company.
“We have a structure. We do have a constitution, but to build a branch structure, you have to give people the ability to choose candidates to vote,” he said.
Farage said his first step in parliament would be to visit Strangers’ Bar — a haunt of MPs and staffers in the House of Commons.
Reform’s expected success at the ballot box came after it harnessed rightwing voters’ disillusionment with the Conservatives, notably with its record on immigration.
Rob Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, said Reform’s support was too evenly spread for the party to win many constituencies, but it had split the rightwing vote and cost the Tories seats.
The party focused its resources on a handful of seats during the campaign. It targeted second place in dozens of constituencies but fell slightly shy of the 120 seats in which the UK Independence party came second in the 2015 election. Reform on the night came second in 98 seats.
Reform secured about 600,000 more votes than the third-placed Liberal Democrats, who secured 71 seats on 3.5mn votes.
A quarter of 2019 Conservative voters switched to Reform, according to a poll conducted by Tory peer Lord Michael Ashcroft.
Ashcroft’s poll suggested the bulk of Reform’s support came from voters aged 45 and above, while it had the lowest vote share of any major party among those between 18 and 24 years old.
Reform has positioned itself as an anti-establishment party but this could become a “double-edged sword” now its members are in parliament, according to Paula Surridge, a politics professor at the University of Bristol.
“They will have to meet parliamentary finance scrutiny and will also be judged on key votes,” she said. “It’s harder to be an insurgent on the inside.”
Farage wants to use Reform’s results at the July 4 poll as a springboard for the next general election. He stole the limelight during this campaign: in the month following his announcement that he would contest Clacton, he engaged in a frenetic one-man tour of the country involving constituency visits and on-the-stump speeches.
But Reform’s campaign had been engulfed in scandal, after dozens of parliamentary candidates with a record of making racist, homophobic and sexist remarks were allowed to stand.
Blaming a vetting company for the failures, Reform suspended three candidates, two of whom had been supporters of the far-right British National party.
Two other candidates suspended their campaigns and defected to the Tories amid “reports of widespread racism and sexism”.
Farage dismissed these claims but insisted the party would professionalise and address concerns. “Those few bad apples who have crept in will be gone,” he said.
