When Nigel Farage returned from talks in Florida with Elon Musk last week he said he had “copious notes” on how Donald Trump’s Republicans had run their successful election campaign. “All of this I intend to implement as part of the professionalisation of our party,” said Farage.
It wasn’t just because of Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign that Farage sought his advice. The billionaire is said to be considering a donation of up to $100m (£78m) to “save” Britain. Farage confirmed that “the issue of money was discussed and there will be ongoing negotiations on that score.”
But what does Reform need to do to turn an insurgent political campaign into a mainstream party millions of people would trust with the responsibility of government? When and on what does it need to spend its money over the next four years in the build up to a general election?
Farage’s stated ambition to “professionalise” Reform is a tacit admission that much of the party’s infrastructure, expertise and campaigning needs serious attention and investment. Reform will want to reach every potential voter via social media and advertising and they will want to hire new, more experienced staff. In the broadest sense, that is where new money would go and the drive to attract more donors will not stop at the world’s richest man (notwithstanding a move by the Labour government to prevent such a large donation by a non-British citizen).
The first milestone will be the local elections in May. If professionalisation is the priority then there will have to be a significant investment in due diligence and scrutiny of their candidates and activists to ensure, as far as possible, they have impeccable credentials.
“One of the things that has dragged them down in the past has been they attracted – to be polite – non-mainstream people,” says James Frayne, founding partner of the policy research agency Public First. “They need to make sure they don’t have lunatics as candidates. Farage is clearly aware of this and they will get more scrutiny from opponents and the media. That’s a difficult thing to get right and requires large numbers of people doing laborious work trawling through people’s social media activity to make sure they have not said offensive or embarrassing things for example.”
In June the party threatened to take legal action against a vetting company it had commissioned, after it was discovered to have put up candidates who had previously praised Adolf Hitler’s leadership or endorsed the British National Party.
“The local elections and the Scottish [Parliamentary] elections in 2026 are opportunities for Reform to disrupt the status quo,” says a former No10 adviser. “That would provide opportunities to hire new strategists to help them.”
Hiring experienced strategists is, however, likely to come with difficulties for a party that has prided itself on operating outside of the Westminster bubble – the stomping ground of the most experienced political advisers.
One former senior Liberal Democrat adviser says: “A potential chicken and egg problem is that, beyond the immediate leadership, Reform have far less institutionalised political expertise who can call on years of experience as advisers. They could, of course, throw money at the problem but it will need to be addressed as the party moves from an insurgency movement into the mainstream.”
The local elections will be a useful exercise for Reform, providing information about where the party is strong and where it could focus in order to maximise its success at the next general election, which will take place no later than August 2029.
High levels of spending on social media campaigns and other types of advertising will be critical. Even Farage’s opponents acknowledge that the pro-Brexit movement has used social media effectively, not least during the 2016 referendum campaign. With more money, Reform could flood social media with highly targeted advertising.
“They can go after voters who haven’t voted,” says Frayne, in a nod to Trump’s strategy in the US. “It’s one thing going after disgruntled Tories, but Reform have the ability – in a way other parties haven’t – to go after people who have never voted. If you have serious amounts of money you can start going after these people. That would be through TikTok – Farage is personally very good at this – and they can use other platforms to get to people who might not be interested in politics but might be watching a DIY video and then suddenly there is an advert for Reform. They can make people ‘bump into them’ as they trawl through social media if they have a bigger budget.”
While Reform is only five years old, having been founded in 2018 as The Brexit Party, it has an advantage over other smaller parties similarly disadvantaged by the UK’s two-party system: its leader, Farage, is well known to the public. According to a YouGov poll in October, 98 per cent of voters have heard of the former Ukip leader – a similar proportion to those who had heard of Sir Keir Starmer.
By contrast, 77 per cent of people were familiar with Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Lib Dems and only 63 per cent of respondents had heard of Kemi Badenoch, who was chosen as Conservative leader the following month.
The former Lib Dem adviser says that traditionally, outside the period of an election campaign, when spending restrictions kick in, “resource would be spent on getting your candidate recognised.” Reform can immediately focus their attention elsewhere.
During the local elections, more money will help Reform fund research to identify the issues that particular groups of voters most care about, down to highly granular levels. That can change between even one council ward and the next, and spending more on this enables parties to target voters with hyper-local messages.
With sufficient funding and expertise Reform will also be able to apply this approach to a range of demographic data as well, giving them clarity on specific groups that they could win over, for example, single men in rented accommodation who have precarious job security. The more polling and focus groups the party can do, the more effective its targeted ads will be.
An increasingly professionalised Reform would also be able to equip its candidates with the briefings needed to stay on message and be able to answer searching questions from voters about the issues of the day. Other parties have a “campaign bible”, which helps new candidates answer questions raised by voters. This “bible” contains the party’s position on every issue, but to make this coherent and error-free requires the input of genuine political professionals. It can prevent problems of inconsistent messaging, or candidates saying something embarrassing, while making the party look more united and disciplined.
Local elections also help parties gain a community presence, through the recruitment of local volunteers and council candidates, some of whom will go on to become candidates for Westminster elections. Reform’s base is relatively shallow, so investment in local networks during the first half of 2025 will sow seeds for potential success later.
One key focus is likely to be setting up offices in individual constituencies in target seats, staffed by professional campaigners. In 2018, as part of the Tories’ plan to take on Jeremy Corbyn, the party hired scores of paid campaign managers to help build a strong group of dedicated volunteers in every constituency. Reform, which lacks a presence on the ground in many seats it needs to win, is likely to need a similar approach to achieve a dramatic shift in gear between now and 2029.
Branded offices would also give the party a visible foothold in town centres, and venues for activists to work from and gather leaflets. Campaign literature can also be of better quality and distributed in bigger quantities. The potential importance of this investment in professionalisation becomes clear when one considers that Reform came second in 98 constituencies in the election in July. In 89 of these it was second to Labour.
In the mid-term, between 2026-28, Reform will also need to invest in the professionalisation of its policy portfolio. “Policy development is a three-year project if you start from scratch,” says Frayne. “Reform has been a campaigning organisation – from Ukip through to the Brexit Party to Reform – and they never before expected to get MPs and be challenging for this many councils. So they didn’t need policies before, but that’s not viable when potentially they could be running actual councils or scores of seats in the Commons.”
So Reform’s policies need to evolve beyond the “bumper sticker” approach to issues like immigration and Brexit. A serious policy platform requires investment because you need to employ experienced political professionals to start devising ideas on subjects such as health and education. To do that you need experts who understand, for example, how an NHS Trust works or what academy schools or foundations mean for education. This is not the work of zealous activists.
“You need outside ideas,” says Frayne. “In an ideal world you would have a Reform-friendly think tank but they can probably spend some money hiring people from existing think tanks anyway.”
All this will mean a bigger, more professional party headquarters. According to the party’s most recent accounts, in 2023 it only had 12 full-time staff.
“In time, they will need a stronger infrastructure that requires serious investment,” says Frayne. “Farage will be dangerous for Labour and the Tories because he can increasingly call on people who understand financing, people who understand electoral law, people who know how to produce good-quality election leaflets. If they want to challenge for government in five years they will need to bulk up their central organisation by then.”
“You want a big ‘war room’ with more staff ahead of an election campaign,” says the former No10 adviser. “That can only be done by attracting donations.”
However, there is an inherent contradiction in Farage’s plan to “professionalise” the party – and he will have to find a balance that does not result in him losing the support of people attracted to Reform as an organisation that rejects many Westminster norms.
“Farage has talked of professionalisation but he also must know that has not been the essential appeal of Reform up to this point,” says the ex No10 adviser. “The appeal has been as an insurgency, not as a well-oiled establishment party.”
