If people are forced to choose, they are more likely to say that Nigel Farage is “for working people” than Keir Starmer is. This probably reflects the prime minister’s unpopularity more than it is a positive endorsement of the Reform leader, but opinion poll findings such as this encouraged Farage to make his pitch for Labour votes.
His starting point was that the Conservatives are “finished”, “done” and “have had a good 200 years”: he is now squaring up to Labour.
Farage said that Starmer was “terrified” of what Reform was doing to the Labour vote, and that was why the prime minister was aping him.
It was a typical Farage performance – except that there was no crowd of enthusiastic supporters to cheer his well-rehearsed applause lines. He is an energetic speaker, able to carry an imaginary mass rally, even if the only people there were Zia Yusuf, the Reform chair, and Sarah Pochin, the party’s newest MP, sitting mutely on stage facing a silent audience of mostly journalists.
Farage contrasted his “passion” with Starmer’s stiffness, noting that the prime minister, when he won the election and addressed the nation from the door of No 10, looked down at his notes 158 times when he might be expected to know what he wanted to say.
“What I bring to this now is experience, passion and courage,” Farage said modestly. But his is a pitch that suggests he has thought more deeply about how to fight Labour than some in Labour have thought about how to fight him.
Before Farage’s speech, the Labour Party line to take was that he is a privately educated stockbroker who should not be taken seriously. This is disastrously misjudged. No one cares what school he went to, or what his job was before politics – he was actually a metals trader in the City.
If Labour try to portray him as posh and out of touch, they will fail, because voters are more likely to see Starmer, with his knighthood, as a member of the establishment. If they make it about personality, they will fail.
That is why Farage said of Starmer, “This man doesn’t believe in anything.” Farage contrasted Starmer, who is in politics to “be something”, namely prime minister, with his own desire to “do something”, namely to “turn the country around”.
Many Labour supporters dislike Farage so much that they cannot see clearly how to fight him. They have no idea how effective his pitch is, and how unpopular Starmer is.
The centrepiece of today’s pitch for Labour votes was Farage’s counterintuitive call to lift the two-child limit on welfare benefits. On this, he is aligned with rebellious Labour MPs and – according to superficial polls, at least – on the wrong side of public opinion.
The popularity of the two-child limit, brought in by George Osborne, prompted a Farage digression: “I have never been a populist politician; I’ve nearly always spent my career pushing minority opinions and trying to make them majority opinions.”
It is a clever line, but the danger to Labour is that he and his policies are more popular than the government’s policies and the prime minister.
When scrapping the two-child limit is rephrased as backing the family and supporting low-paid workers on universal credit – “it would make having children a little bit easier for them”, Farage said – it is much more popular. Combined with a tax break for marriage, the “family, community and country” line is a threat to Labour.
The key to defeating Farage is to be found in another opinion poll published today, from YouGov, which found that when people are asked to choose between Starmer and Farage as prime minister, they prefer Starmer by a significant margin, 44 per cent to 29 per cent.
So, although Farage beats Starmer on important qualities – “strong”, “tells the truth”, “understands people like me” – people struggle to see him as prime minister. Labour needs to attack him on that. That is why Farage was stressing his “experience” today, even if his experience is mainly of blowing up one party after another.
Starmer needs to hammer Farage on his fantasy budgeting; journalists were not buying any of it today, and rightly so. Reform’s figures at the election last year did not add up, and now Farage has casually added to them the £3.5bn-a-year cost of lifting the two-child limit.
He does not believe the numbers he read out at his news conference, as the annual saving from abolishing net zero rose from £40bn to £45bn between his prepared notes and his answers to questions. His figures were, he said, “maybe I accept slightly optimistic”.
Labour needs to remind voters that Farage welcomed Liz Truss’s mini-Budget as the “best Conservative Budget since 1986”, and use that to set out what he really is, which is a Thatcherite. Paying benefits to families with three or more children is not really him: the real Farage thinks the state should do law and order, defence and nothing else.
He challenged Starmer to a debate in a working men’s club in the red wall: they should go to a former coal mining area and ask Farage what he thought of the miners' strike. Then we might find out what Farage means by being “for working people”.
Why would voters trust Nigel Farage’s claims?
Why Starmer is now in the crosshairs of the Kremlin
After the winter fuel decision, Labour is now openly at war with itself
This baffling Chagos deal will forever haunt Keir Starmer
The Liverpool parade crash has brought out the best in our police
The NHS is finally on the road to recovery – I urge doctors not to go on strike
