Two polls in a row put Reform UK third. Will Nigel Farage lead it until New Year?
A YouGov poll on 27 October put Reform UK on 20%, behind Labour and the Conservatives. An Ipsos poll two days earlier also had it third.
What happened
A YouGov poll put Reform UK on 20% and in third place, the second poll in a row to put Nigel Farage’s party behind Labour and the Conservatives.
Reform UK is on 20% in a YouGov poll published on . Labour has 27% and the Conservatives 22%. Two days earlier an Ipsos poll also put Reform third, on 20%. A year ago Reform had more than 30%, and Nigel Farage was the favourite to become prime minister.
For almost 18 months, from to , Reform was the most popular party in Britain. Since then Labour has gained under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, and the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch.
Farage is under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, the official who checks that MPs follow the rules. The case is about a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Commissioner Daniel Greenberg spoke to Farage in September, and the party expects the verdict “at any time“. Reform insiders say they expect it to go against him and plan to appeal.
If Parliament agrees to suspend Farage as an MP for more than 10 days, voters in his Clacton seat could sign a recall petition. If 10% of them sign within six weeks, Clacton holds a new election for the seat.
In September two close aides of Farage, Dan Jukes and James Orr, were suspended after an undercover TV report about foreign donations, and police are investigating. On Farage told supporters in Doncaster that “today is when our general election campaign starts“.
Sources: independent.co.uk
The Pattern
We looked for cases where a British party in opposition fell in national polls, losing its place or at least 5 points from its best level of the past year. We then checked if its leader was still in the job 61 days later. We found four such times, from 2019 to 2025. Three of them came in 2019, and one of the leaders was Nigel Farage himself.
Show the other 2 cases
The Read
Three of the four leaders were still in the job 61 days after their party fell in the polls, and none was pushed out by a vote or by senior figures of the party. Jo Swinson left, and Jeremy Corbyn said he would leave, right after the 2019 general election result. Andy Burnham said on that “There is no election coming anytime soon“. In 2019 Farage stayed after the Brexit Party’s fall and left 541 days later by his own choice.
There are reasons for doubt. Three of the four times came in 2019, the year of one general election, and one of the four leaders is Farage himself. None of the four parties had led the polls for a long time before it fell, and none of the leaders was under an official inquiry. In Conservative MPs removed their leader, Iain Duncan Smith, in a vote of confidence, 90 to 75, while the standards watchdog looked into his wife’s pay as his secretary. Farage’s verdict could come at any time, but an appeal could take months.
Disclaimer
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