“Always bet on self-interest, it’s the only horse that’s trying,” is one of my late dad’s lines, and I first heard it from him aged six or so. By that logic, Nigel Farage (leader of Reform UK) and Ed Davey (leader of the Liberal Democrats) are the only triers—respectively leading and running third in the horserace of UK politics—and the only two ponies gaining ground.

Reform has now achieved—or bettered—30 percent in national polls and the most recent round of local council elections, held on May 1. It also squeaked a by-election win over Labour in Runcorn & Helmsby—by a mere six votes—on the same day. The Liberal Democrats, for their part, have beaten the Conservatives into fourth place both at the local elections and in more recent polling. Labour continues to run a (sickly) second, meanwhile, with 20 percent of the vote at the locals and an average of 22 percent in subsequent polls.

If this pattern—it first emerged at last year’s general election, despite Keir Starmer’s “loveless landslide,” of which more below—persists and grows until the 2029 poll, Nigel Farage will be Prime Minister and Ed Davey Leader of the Opposition. The traditional parties of British governance, Labour and Conservative, may be reduced to bit players.

Thirty percent—given the vagaries of British political geography—is what you need to be a serious party here. It’s easiest to explain the significance of breaking the 30 percent pain barrier by telling you what happens when parties miss it. Falling below 30 percent did in the Liberals in 1924 and 1929. It also did in the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1983, where the combined parties got 25 percent of the vote but only 12 seats. And, last year, it gave the Conservatives what genuinely can be described as a “near death experience,” with the party only saved (23.7 percent vote share for 121 MPs) because some of its core support is geographically concentrated. 2024 was the worst result in the party’s history, and given the Tories are the oldest and most successful political party in the world, Kemi Badenoch, the party’s new leader, has been handed the most poisoned of chalices.

This also explains why there’s no chance Starmer will go to the King and call an early election. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, would have to die for that to happen.

Why Are We Here?

On July 4, 2024, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide.

As ever in first-past-the-post parliamentary systems, the devil is in the detail. For US readers, it’s easiest to draw comparisons if I tell you that any UK political party winning the same vote share as Donald Trump did in November (49.9 percent) would consider itself to have won the electoral Olympics, to have landed on the political equivalent of “Free Parking” in Monopoly. The last time a British political party came anywhere near that was in 1951, with Labour’s all-conquering Clement Attlee winning 48.8 percent.

By contrast, Labour’s 2024 landslide—nearly two-thirds of Commons seats for a total of 411—discloses little affection, based as it is on less than 60 percent turnout and just over a third of total votes. This is only a little more than Labour won in 2019—with Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, then a genuinely unpopular leader of the opposition—and considerably less than Corbyn’s 2017 achievement (40 percent). Labour’s eventual 2024 vote share—33.8 percent—was lower than any opinion poll.

The only parties that gained ground in terms of vote share were Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats.

Since the election, Labour has shown itself to be afflicted by a sort of Midas Touch in reverse: everything it lays its hands on turns to shit. Britain’s energy bills—both for households and industrial consumption—are the highest in the developed world. The police routinely arrest people for mean tweets while knife crime in London balloons. Facing a budgetary crisis, Chancellor Rachel Reeves cut access to winter fuel payments for ten million pensioners; the policy was so unpopular that Starmer was forced into a humiliating U-turn. Paedophiles get powder-puff sentences while, despite the UK’s reputation as “TERF Island,” a Scottish nurse is forced to undress in a mixed changing room. Until Elon Musk pressed the issue, there was widespread “nothing to see here” behaviour in response to Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs.

The problem for Badenoch is that Labour’s travails were preceded by 14 years of inept Tory governance.

Starmer, meanwhile, has discovered the country’s sclerotic civil service has booby-trapped the British state against any future Governments, including Labour ones. It was long believed that the go-slow, work-to-rule behaviour was something it only did to Tories. Not so. Starmer is now confronted with a set of levers that, no matter how hard or how often he pulls them, engage no gears and move nothing, let alone worlds. This has translated into an inability to build anything, not even wind farms—which Starmer’s loopy Energy Secretary, Ed “Net Zero” Miliband, actually wants.

Labour’s support was thus a mile wide and an inch deep: it won a House of Commons landslide, but not an electoral one. Many of Starmer’s MPs—including Cabinet ministers like the (competent) Health Secretary Wes Streeting—sit on wafer-thin margins, making them even more vulnerable than usual in the event of by-elections and internal party conflicts. Talk of US-style “supermajorities” in the UK is silly—you don’t have a different kind of power with a big majority in parliamentary systems. If anything, First Past the Post (FPTP) gave Labour’s fractious, divided electoral coalition a spurious patina of unity. A divided electoral coalition, of course, helped do for the Tories when they had a large majority.

Why Are Farage and Davey Growing in Popularity?

The problem for Badenoch is that Labour’s travails (sometimes over the same issues Conservatives struggled with, like immigration) were preceded by 14 years of inept Tory governance. Apart from talking right and governing left in the last five years of its time in office, it was David Cameron who accepted Blair’s hiving off much of parliament’s power to unelected quangos. Quangos, translated into American, are akin to “non-departmental public bodies,” or “government-sponsored enterprises or even “independent executive agencies.” The quangocracy is at the heart of Britain’s “Blob” and is a significant reason neither Labour nor Conservative governments can do anything. Meanwhile, the civil service busies itself with ever more baroquely colourful lanyards (all the better to wear while evincing what used to be called “workshy behaviour”).

Farage, of course, is helped here precisely because he’s never been in government. Being an MEP, as he was for many years, is not being in government. That was always a significant issue for anyone elected to the European Parliament. This seems a strange thing to say—given how familiar he is to Americans because of his personal friendship with Trump and role in bringing about Brexit—but he only became a sitting MP (for Clacton, in Essex) last year. In that sense, he shares a background with Trump, who, prior to 2016, also had never been in government (or opposition, for that matter).

Labour, perhaps inevitably, provides Farage and Reform with endless political fodder. This ranges from paying Mauritius to take the strategically important Chagos Islands—over the heads of the Chagossians, note—off Britain’s hands or replacing Admiral Nelson’s portrait in Parliament with this simultaneously insipid and hubristic attempt to make a sitting Cabinet Minister look like a cross between the late Queen and a Roman Empress. This, in a country where it was once considered vulgar to have portraits of any living person other than the King hanging in official buildings or on postage stamps. The rationale for the custom was that it prevented Britain from looking like a tin-pot dictatorship, something that clearly worries Labour not a bit.

Yes, the Tories are also able to make hay with this sort of nonsense—and people do laugh at Badenoch’s jokes, she has natural comic timing—but this benefits her party not at all because everyone can remember what they did in (very) recent times. If a week is a long time in politics, 14 years is an eternity.

Ed Davey, for his part, has perfected what can best be described as NOTICE ME politics. He understood early how hard it would be to suck any media oxygen away from the major parties, so changed the Liberal Democrats’ approach for the 2024 general election. This means we’ve been treated to Davey bungee jumping, falling into Lake Windermere while paddle-boarding, wheelbarrow racing, swing dancing with a local club, and—ahem—attempting to surf.

People in the Westminster Village often ridicule him for these publicity stunts, so I’m going to say it because someone must: he’s funny. He even makes me laugh, and I’m not a LibDem voter. The stunts—of which there are many—also lend themselves to the sort of amusing listicles that once made it look like Buzzfeed was going to conquer the global media landscape.

All this silliness, however, has been combined with a ruthless approach to campaigning under the hood. Long known as proponents of electoral reform—precisely because FPTP so often cruelled their chances—under Davey’s direction, the LibDems took a different tack. While maintaining headline support for changes to the UK’s electoral system in their manifesto, their ground game was entirely focused on seats where they’d come second to Conservatives or Labour in 2019—mainly the former. This meant, in 2024, they won 72 seats, only coming second in 27. “More clinical than Erling Haaland,” quipped one Man City fan.

And to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Davey and his party did it again at the locals in May this year.

Prediction is Difficult, Especially About the Future

What does this portend, then, remembering the above aphorism? No doubt, come 2029—and regardless of the result—people will find this piece and take delight in pointing out all the mistakes I’ve made. Hey ho, needs must.

And if Farage does win power, will he be like the dog that caught the car—or his own tail?

Worth noting here is that Reform’s 30 percent vote share came first from two very different polling outfits and lined up with the local elections result. Survation is famously accurate and scrupulous. Years ago, it won fame for revealing just how unpopular the political ideology of feminism really is in these Islands. Political pundits often joke that they’ll be “waiting for Survation” before forming a final view on any set of numbers. More in Common, by contrast, is far less storied than Survation, but well-regarded for its focus groups. Reform has also consistently underperformed in its polls. When More in Common trips over the same line as Survation, one should take note.

That said, Farage needs to continue to grow his support. A major effect of the fragmentation of the UK two-party system—something so visible it can be expressed mathematically—is that you can win big with a much lower vote share. If Reform wins the 2029 general election on a low thirties vote share, it will have the same problem Labour has now: FPTP will have delivered it a loveless landslide, a Commons majority but not an electoral one. However, there’s evidence Reform hasn’t yet reached its electoral ceiling because it’s getting non-voters to the polls. This was visible even in the low-turnout local elections—and it means higher turnout won’t defeat Reform, at least not anytime soon.

The LibDems, by contrast, probably are close to their upper limit. The strange death of Liberal England was a real thing that happened, and which no amount of clever hijinks and ruthlessly focused campaigning can undo. The party is also vulnerable to what I now suspect will be an incoming Conservative-Reform electoral pact.

Reform can’t win in the posh southern constituencies the LibDems took from the Conservatives in 2024 but can take enough votes from the Tories to stop them winning (as indeed happened). Meanwhile, the Conservatives are probably done for in much of the North and Midlands. All they will do if they run candidates is take seats from Reform and allow Labour—or even worse, a Gaza Independent—to come up on the inside and overtake both. Centre-right politics in the UK now exists in two distinct forms and is strongest in different geographical areas.

I raise electoral pacts here because, in 2011, both Labour and Conservative foolishly campaigned against the opportunity to change the UK’s voting system to a form of preferential voting used in some Australian states. (This series of observations from one of Australia’s famed electoral systems nerds explains just how foolish it was.) The Australian system exists as it does in part because centre-right politics there is geographically split between two distinct groups with different policy preferences. It has been so for roughly 100 years.

In endorsing FPTP, both the majors, but especially the Conservatives, condemned their future selves to pervasive tactical voting—where electors deliberately vote for a candidate they do not support to keep another candidate they like even less from winning the constituency—or formal electoral pacts. I say “formal” because deciding which party will stand down in what seats is a matter of delicate negotiation that must be sorted some time before any general election is held. The normal rule would be that where one of either Reform or Tories ran second to Labour or LibDems in 2024, that second-place getter should get a clear run at the seat. There are, however, situations where this will not apply, so rapid is Reform’s advance.

At the time of writing, both Farage and Badenoch are assuring all and sundry there will be no electoral pact, giving Starmer breathing room neither he nor Labour deserve. Will tub-thumping purity win over easing the path to power? For the Tories, an electoral pact could guarantee their long-term political survival—but also give Reform valuable policy heft. The question for Farage is more complex. Just how toxic is any association with the Tory brand for his current and future voters? And if he does win power, will he be like the dog that caught the car—or his own tail?

What are you going to do with it, PM Farage, now you’ve got it?