Reform UK figures braced for electoral damage from Trump links

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Senior figures in Reform UK say they have “jitters” ahead of May elections, fearing that the party’s fledgling local organisation and its association with Donald Trump may prevent the breakthrough results forecast by Nigel Farage.

Reform officially launched its campaign for elections to the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and English councils at a rally in Sunderland on Thursday evening, after a rocky week in which several candidates quit or were suspended.

Earlier in the day, opposition parties called for a Welsh candidate to be suspended after a photo emerged of him smiling while apparently performing a Nazi salute.

“Considering where we were 16 months ago, the results in May will be historically extraordinary but expectations were set that they were going to be a steamroller,” said one senior figure in the party. “They haven’t controlled the messaging.”

The person added that they worried Reform could get below 25 per cent of vote share on May 7, which could undermine Farage’s message that the party is storming towards a general election victory.

Another party insider added that the timing of the US and Israeli-led offensive in Iran would damage the party, given Farage’s historic friendship with the US president.

“Who’s supposed to be the best buddy of the guy who started this war? The opposition is just going to hammer us on that,” they said.

Farage has claimed that after May, “the Conservative Party will cease to be a national party” because “they will be obliterated” by Reform, and has said his party intends to “come first” in Wales.

However, Reform’s selection process has been brought into question. On Tuesday, its mayoral candidate for Hampshire and Solent was suspended after he described members of a Jewish charity ambulance service that was victim of an arson attack as “Islamists on horseback”.

On Wednesday, the day Reform announced its slate of candidates for the Welsh parliamentary elections, one candidate pulled out amid a row about people being “parachuted in” to contest seats from outside the area.

Meanwhile, Reform’s former parliamentary candidate Matthew Goodwin, a former academic, came under fire after readers alleged he had fabricated quotes and misrepresented key statistics in his recently published book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity.

The FT was unable to locate the original source of quotations in the book by the Roman statesman Cicero, the Roman historian Livy or the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. Goodwin has publicly denied the claims.

Farage is aiming to win thousands of council seats across England, in target areas including Sunderland and south Tyneside in the north-east, Norfolk and Suffolk in the east, and outer London boroughs including Bexley, Bromley, Havering, and Barking and Dagenham.

The party is currently polling in second or third place for Scotland’s parliamentary elections, behind the governing SNP. In Wales, it is competing closely with Plaid Cymru for the top spot in the Senedd.

But Reform has slipped in British polls in recent weeks, and is now averaging about 26 per cent, down from highs of 31 per cent last October. Recent YouGov polling suggests that only 13 per cent of Britons see themselves as pro-Trump.

Luke Tryl, executive director of the More in Common think-tank, said that all of his polling showed that “the biggest barrier to people voting Reform is Trump”.

The senior Reform figure agreed that the Iran war was “not good” for the party.

While Farage has long been associated with Trump, the issue previously had low salience for the British public, but “when people are hit in their pockets they will start caring”, the person said.

The saving grace may be that the economic impact of the war is not fully felt by May, they added, but “come autumn the country will be down the swanny”.

Others say that the bigger problem for the party is a lack of local infrastructure.

“Not one person has mentioned the war to me on the doorstep,” said a prominent candidate. “There are jitters, but that’s because the campaigns have been chaotic — there aren’t enough candidates in place yet and the ability to produce literature is very limited.”

A spokesperson for Reform questioned how they could fall short of expectations when “no one knows our council seat targets”.

“Nigel has said [the Tories] will cease to be a national party and we stand by that,” he said, but did not comment on concerns about the link to Trump.