Why Reform’s new haul of recruits might end up disappointing Nigel Farage ...Middle East

Reform UK’s online membership ticker does not stand still for long at the moment.

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.

In the following seven days Nigel Farage’s party apparently put on more than extra 33,000 members to achieve a total that had passed 165,000 by Thursday evening. If the current ticker rate continued it would double the Tory total well before the end of January.

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.

Publicly, Reform’s top brass are reluctant to set such ambitious goals. But Farage is already boasting about how much his new recruits are swelling party coffers, telling The i Paper that it shows the party is not solely reliant on billionaires for its funding.

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.

However, independent research suggests that rather than acquiring new boots on the ground, Farage could instead be amassing an army of keyboard warriors.

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.

If the same holds true for its new recruits – and an academic behind the research thinks it will – then it could mute the impact of Reform’s membership surge in terms of conventional campaign techniques.

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)

“We’ve got four big sold-out regional events coming up in the next few days, and that will be again, the process of consolidating branches, asking people to come forward, to stand as candidates and to go through the vetting process, which is pretty strict.”

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’

Farage thinks the new members could help Reform with a key weakness. Unlike their more established rivals, his party does not have the data that can guide campaigners in working out which doors they should knock on at election time.

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.

“It’s about getting as many people as we can organised, physically helping us, because we have one massive disadvantage compared to everybody else, and that’s called data,” the leader said.

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.

“If you’ve got 155,000-plus members, you’re in a much better position than when you had 30,40, 50 thousand. So, we’ve got to hit the ground running in 2025.”

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.

Conleth Burns, associate director for strategy and development at the More in Common think-tank, told The i Paper: “Members, if they are active, knock doors, deliver leaflets, help you build up a ground game, and that can make Reform competitive across the country… it can kind of broaden Reform’s appeal across the country.”

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”.

However, he said that his research made him question how active Reform’s members will be when it comes to traditional campaigning.

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.

After excluding members who said they did nothing for their party at election time or responded “don’t know” when asked how they had helped, the study found that 34 per cent of Reform members delivered party leaflets compared to 47 per cent of Tory members, 50 per cent of Labour members and 59 per cent of Liberal Democrat members.

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.

“Reform members weren’t particularly active on the ground,” said Bale, who questions how effective this will make them at helping to win elections. “If you still think that it’s in part about people going out on a wet Wednesday evening, delivering leaflets, knocking on the doors, then they might be less useful, perhaps, than the members of the more traditional parties who are more used to doing that kind of thing.”

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’

But Reform disputes Bale’s characterisation of its members. A party spokesman said: “Reform UK branch meetings have seen as many as 100 people turn up to get involved locally. Our members are engaged and ready to deliver leaflets, knock on doors and help Reform win elections.”

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”.

“People are not joining Reform just for the sake of it,” he said. “They’re joining because they want to be active.”

McIvor – who joined Reform in October – claimed it was now the “natural home” of “conservative minded people” and would continue to grow.

“For many people when their membership comes up for renewal in the Conservative Party, I think a lot of them are going to think, firstly, is there any point renewing? Secondly, maybe I should change my provider – a bit like when your contract comes up for other things. Should I shop around a bit?”

He added: “I think a lot of people have been shopping around over Christmas and have bought Reform.”

Even if Bale’s research is correct in finding that Reform’s members are less likely to be prepared to pound pavements for their party, it does also uncover what could be a key strength in an age where elections are increasingly fought online.

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).

“If one believes that elections are won these days by sharing things on TikTok or sharing things on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, then perhaps [the new members] can give Reform a bit of a boost,” Bale said.

Burns said there was mixed evidence on the importance of activists campaigning on social media.

“Corbyn’s supporters were very active online, particularly on Twitter,” he said. “That didn’t help [Labour’s] electability.”

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)

“There is an interesting question around, as voters become less trusting about politics generally, whether direct voter contact in terms of knocking doors, leafletting is more effective or less effective than digital advertising and communications,” he said.

“The Harris campaign by many measures had better ground operations and direct voter contact… but in the end it didn’t matter.

“The reality is that to win elections you probably need a bit of both of those things. You can over-rely on one of them. And the danger of Reform’s members only being online is that they over-rely on reaching an ever smaller group of people, rather than a broad-based coalition.”

“The online stuff might be good at growing their membership but it may be harder for them to convert that into votes.”

But Tice claims that the extra members show “something extraordinary going on”. “People are joining, lots of young people too, because there is a strong sense that something’s got to change,” he said.

‘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.

“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.

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.

Robin Jackson, a member who stood for Reform in Slough in the general election, also said that rather than focusing on increasing their lead in membership over the Tories, the next target should be to overtake Labour by becoming the party with the biggest membership.

“With four million votes at the general elections, there’s still a lot of people to sign up, clearly,” he said.

And while the willingness of activists to pitch in might be key, a ballooning membership does confer other benefits, such as funding.

“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)

Reform has also used its membership surge to garner significant media attention. This in itself has revealed the “increasing professionalisation of Reform”, according to Burns, with the party able to “dominate the media cycle” over the quiet festive period.

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.

But while Reform’s recruitment surge has given it momentum going into 2025, Burns and Bale agree that an impressive membership total is not enough in itself to transform the electoral prospects of a party.

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.”

Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s membership hit more than 530,000 in 2019, but in the same year they had their “worst ever electoral results since 1935”.

“There’s not a direct kind of correlation between membership growth and electability,” he added.

Burns – who also described Reform supporters as “very online” – said that a membership surge could actually take a party further away from power.

“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.

Bale said that the influx of Reform members could also see a recurrence of issues experienced during the general election campaign, when Farage was forced to drop parliamentary candidates who had made offensive or racist comments.

“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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