Its claim to have eclipsed the Conservative Party’s 131,680 members by Boxing Day sparked a public row with the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch over the veracity of the figure that only seems to have put rocket boosters under Reform’s recruitment drive.
The i Paper understands that Reform’s own projections are a little more cautious, but they still expect a membership twice as big as the Conservatives’ last recorded total in time for the May local elections. Internally, there is even a belief that Reform could eclipse Labour’s 366,000 members by the next general election.
And Reform deputy leader Richard Tice claims that a legion of activists willing to knock on doors and deliver leaflets will transform Reform’s “ground game” for the local elections.
According to a survey by Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University – shared with The i Paper – Reform members are less willing to pound the pavements during election campaigns than those in other parties.
Farage says the recruitment blitz is part of a wider effort to build an election-winning machine in time for local council and mayoral contests in less than four months’ time. “On the first of May, there is a big set of elections out there and we’ve got to get ready for them,” he told The i Paper.
Nigel Farage puts on a Reform UK hat at Westpoint Arena during the party’s South West conference in November (Photo: Finnbarr Webster/Getty)The regional conferences begin today in Leicester and continue into next weekend. The party claims that all 4,000 of the £10 members’ tickets for the events have been snapped up, despite them only being announced in the week before Christmas.
Reform wants to improve its ‘ground game’
Such canvassing data can tell a party where its highest concentration of potential voters are, allowing it to pool resources to get out the vote on polling day and to target waverers who could be persuaded to come over to its side.
Meanwhile, Tice, who was elected MP for Boston and Skegness in July’s general election, told The i Paper this week: “We’ve consistently been saying that we’ve got to open lots of branches and build a ground game. And that’s what kicking off the new year in election mode is doing.
Richard Tice deputy leader of Reform UK speaks at the party’s annual conference at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham in September (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA Wire)But political analysts say that the usefulness of Reform’s rising membership as an electoral asset will depend in large part on what members are willing to do for the party.
Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, said that a rising membership brought a party “a bit of legitimacy and momentum”, money and prospective foot soldiers who can “actually do stuff for you at elections”.
A woman carries electoral leaflets for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in Clacton (Photo: Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)
A survey after the July general election from the Party Members Project run out of QMUL and Sussex University found that Reform members were very active in campaigning for their party on social media but less so in their local community.
And just 21 per cent of Reform members took part in canvassing, compared to 29 per cent for the Tories, 30 per cent for Labour and 31 per cent for the Liberal Democrats.
The academic said it was not possible to know for sure whether members who had joined Reform after the election would exhibit the same behaviour, but he added: “I would suggest that, if anything, those who were members in July were, if anything, more likely to do the offline [doorstep campaigning] stuff than those who’ve signed up since – on the grounds that fewer of them were simply jumping on a rolling bandwagon.”
‘Our members are ready to knock on doors’
Jaymey McIvor, an Essex councillor who defected from the Tories to Reform in the autumn, told The i Paper that members in his local branch were highly active. He said they turned up in such large numbers to an inaugural meeting he organised before Christmas that there were “queues out the door”.
McIvor – who joined Reform in October – claimed it was now the “natural home” of “conservative minded people” and would continue to grow.
He added: “I think a lot of people have been shopping around over Christmas and have bought Reform.”
It found that 71 per cent of Reform members said they had “shared or liked something which promoted the party and/or its policies on social media” – a higher figure than for the Conservatives (45 per cent), Labour (57 per cent), Liberal Democrats (48 per cent) and the Greens (67 per cent).
Burns said there was mixed evidence on the importance of activists campaigning on social media.
But he said the experience of Donald Trump beating Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, despite a Democrat ground-game which was widely seen as superior, showed it was not to be discounted altogether.
US Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump (Photo: Charly Triballeau and Mandel Ngan/AFP)“The Harris campaign by many measures had better ground operations and direct voter contact… but in the end it didn’t matter.
“The online stuff might be good at growing their membership but it may be harder for them to convert that into votes.”
‘We’re coming after Labour now’
Andrea Jenkyns, the former Conservative MP, who after losing her seat in July has defected to Reform to stand as its candidate in the newly created mayoralty of Greater Lincolnshire, is even more bullish.
Andrea Jenkyns speaks next to Britain’s Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage (Photo: Hollie Adams/Reuters)“After overtaking the Conservatives, we’re coming after Labour now,” Jenkyns told The i Paper. “I know they’ve got quite a big membership, and they always do because of the trade union element, but the amazing thing that I found about Reform since I joined them, is its ability to pull from both parties. Dream big and dare to fail, as my late father used to say.”
Bucking the trend
Reform has been able to rapidly expand its membership numbers against the backdrop of a long-term decline for UK political parties.
The heyday for party membership was in the 50s, when there were around 2.8m in the Conservative Party and one million in the Labour Party.
Today, membership of the Tories has fallen to a historic low. Unlike most other parties, the Conservatives do not routinely publish their membership figures in annual accounts submitted to the Electoral Commission.
However, the 2024 Tory leadership election revealed the number to be 131,680 – down by 40,000 on the 172,437 who were members at the time of the 2022 leadership contest between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
Reform projected its predicted membership numbers on to the Conservative Party headquarters on Christmas Day (Photo: Reform UK)Labour remains the largest party. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour was able to temporarily buck the trend in falling membership. Numbers hit a peak of 532,046 at the end of 2019 – the highest since the 70s – but have since fallen to a reported figure of 366,604. Numbers declined when Sir Keir Starmer took over the party in 2020. They were dealt a further blow last year, when Labour’s stance on the conflict in Gaza was blamed for the loss of more than 20,000 members.
In its last set of party accounts, the Liberal Democrats saw their membership fall by around 11,000 to 86,599, though the party has said it had seen a rise in new members since its gains in July’s general election.
“With four million votes at the general elections, there’s still a lot of people to sign up, clearly,” he said.
“Just do the maths, 160,000 members paying £25 each, with some younger ones paying £10,” Farage said. “That’s a lot of money.” And that is before a potential funding injection from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who the Reform leader said “may well help us”.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Party treasurer Nick Candy meet Elon Musk at Mar-A-Lago, the Florida home of US president-elect Donald Trump (Photo: Stuart Mitchell/Reform UK/PA Wire)That job was of course made far easier by Badenoch’s decision to start a row with Reform by accusing the party of “fakery” over its membership figures.
Membership surges don’t guarantee success
Burns said: “If you look at other parties that have had big rises in membership, the Labour Party under Corbyn is the most recent example.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 (Photo: Getty)
“There’s not a direct kind of correlation between membership growth and electability,” he added.
“Highly engaged, highly ideological members who are highly motivated to join a political party can make the party more out of step with public opinion, and it can make it harder to get elected,” he said. As well as Labour’s experience with Corbyn, he pointed to Liz Truss‘s popularity among Tory members and subsequent political implosion.
“With an increase in membership comes an increase in risk, in the sense that these could be people who end up embarrassing you quite badly,” the academic said.
“It only takes a few of those people to say some outrageous things, and that could be a problem.”
Farage’s iron grip on Reform UK
The growth in Reform’s membership is unlikely to dilute Nigel Farage’s grip on the party, The i Paper has been told.
Earlier this year, Farage claimed he was “relinquishing” control of Reform, which had previously taken the form of a registered company, of which he was the majority shareholder.
At Reform’s conference in September, this novel legal form was changed into a more conventional structure, with Farage saying it would be the “members of Reform that will own this party”.
However, a new constitution passed at the conference leaves Farage with most of the levers of power. While the document introduced the ability to trigger a motion of no confidence in the leader, the hurdles for achieving this are exceptionally high.
A vote can be triggered if 50 per cent of all members write to the chairman within a 60 day period requesting a motion of no confidence, or if 50 per cent of MPs write to the chairman asking for one – but the latter only applies if there are more than 100 Reform MPs in Parliament (currently there are five). The actual vote of no confidence is then taken by the party board, which is partly appointed by Farage himself. While there will be votes by the membership on Reform’s policy prospectus at conference, these will also only be “advisory”.
Professor Tim Bale said: “I think they’re trying to have their cake and eat it to be honest. You know, they want to put on the numbers, but they don’t want to give people very many rights, in terms candidate selection, leadership selection, or indeed, policy influence. It’s more of a kind of rally.
“I think [Farage] wants cheering crowds, but he doesn’t want members who are actually going to tell him what to do.”
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