When Nigel Farage kicked off the party conference season for Reform in Birmingham, he joked to party members: “It’s not all about me.”
He pointed to a line of 11 Reform UK football shirts with the names of leading party members on them, insisting “we are not a one-man band, we are a full team”. Except when it came to buying one of those shirts, the only one available was the one with Farage’s name on the back.
But with Farage propelling Reform to new heights in the polls, the traditional main political parties have taken it all to heart and decided that their conferences should be about them too.
In Manchester for a sparse Tory conference drawing little interest, it appears that Kemi Badenoch has decided to do her personal Reform tribute act by aping Farage’s policies.
The Tories – if they ever get into power, which most people doubt – would now ditch the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), ditch climate change policies and apparently deport 500 people a day (150,000 a year). Although she claimed in her first conference address that her party is bringing a plan for those policies, unlike Farage.
The move hard to the right is undoubtedly a response to Reform announcing similar policies and seeing Tory voters and even current and former MPs defect to them.
But Badenoch is far from alone in making her party’s conference purely about Farage.
Keir Starmer decided to make the entire Labour conference about Farage and Reform. He and all the cabinet ministers were focused on one thing and one thing only, calling Farage and his crew immoral. Painting them as the real enemy.
In some ways, this is a little surprising considering that Reform is a party that has struggled to maintain its tally of five MPs. But the polls (and constant stream of council by-election victories) do not lie.
And the Lib Dems got in on the act too. In his keynote conference speech, the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey mentioned Farage by name at least 30 times. Extraordinary given that the Lib Dems have 72 seats, but they are obviously looking at the data and panicking too.
However, the problem with this strategy is that the negative attacks often only persuade those who already do not like Reform. They also risk suggesting that everyone who votes Reform is immoral or worse.
And by filling the space with attacks, very little positive comes out about what they are doing. In the Tories’ case, they are trying to be positive at least, but just look like they are doing pale imitations of Reform policies. Farage would deport 600,000 a year, Badenoch 150,000.
The results, though, are inevitable. Constant talk about Farage and Reform is basically giving him and his party free advertising.
The first poll after the all-out attack on Reform at the Labour conference told its own story. Opinium had Reform up two percentage points on 34 per cent and Labour 13 points behind, down one on 21 per cent.
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