Nigel Farage grinned as he clutched an inflatable blue lilo at a seaside shop in Ramsgate just hours after holding a press conference about immigration.
“It’s Reform colours, that’s what it is,” he joked to the throng of press photographers, possibly tickled by its resemblance to the migrant dinghies that wash up on the nearby beaches.
Dressed in a blue suit and £300 Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses with built-in cameras, Farage had embarked on a busy day of campaigning across three towns in Kent, one week out fromEngland’s local elections.
It was just after 2pm and the sun was shining over Ramsgate where Farage, 61, began his whistle-stop tour by eating cockles and talking to scrap metalworkers.
But his walk to the Royal Victoria Pavilion, the largest Wetherspoon’s pub in the country, was interrupted several times by people wanting selfies and asking questions.
One man, a former newspaper journalist, grilled the politician about his assertion thatReform UKcould ultimately usurp the Conservatives.
Farage told the man: “Our voters loathe the Conservative party. [Making a deal with them] is the last thing they’d ever want me to do. And frankly, if I do a deal with someone, I shake their hand, I look them in the eye and I trust them. I don’t trust them.”
As Farage attempted to move on, drinkers outside the Queen’s Head pub cheered. An older man in a hi-vis jacket patted him on the arm and said: “You’ve got my vote.”
Farage is a man who likes an audience and Ramsgate is certainly a place where he wouldn’t expect to get a rough ride. But, to the horror of the Conservative party, and many in Labour too, the signs are that Reform UK is making a genuine impact across the country.
Keir Starmer’s government, still less than a year into a five-year term, is unpopular. The Tories under Kemi Badenoch appear still in shock fromlast year’s general election implosion.
Ever the opportunist, Farage has seen the gap and charged into it. And next week could be quite a moment for him.
Earlier this week, Robert Hayward, a pollster and Conservative peer, said he believed Farage would win up to 450 seats while the Conservatives would lose up to 525 in the local elections. Reform was also said to be on course to win two mayoral contests, according to a YouGov poll released on Friday.
This despite, or perhaps because of, his willingness to cause offence and peddle populist ideas. On Thursday,his assertionthat the UK is “massively overdiagnosing those with mental health illness problems” was predictably provocative.
The National Autistic Society said his remarks were “incorrect, wrong, fake news”. He has described net zero as “lunacy” and vowed to scrap carbon targets entirely.
So far, there is little sign of any lasting damage to his brand from hisrelationship with Donald Trump, or the fact he has seemed sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.
One of his own MPs,Rupert Lowe, even condemned himfor being the messianic leader of a protest party. None of this appeared to worry the voters
at the Wetherspoon’s pub in Ramsgate, where he ordered a pint of Doom Bar. His burly security guards hovered nearby as there were more photo opportunities, this time with five male Reform candidates wearing rosettes.
But before he could finish his pint, Farage was approached by a 57-year-old man who said he has struggled to find work since moving back to Ramsgate from Spain.
He feared he was being discriminated against, he said. “But I believe in what you’re doing,” he told Farage. “I would love to meet up with you some time and have a chat, if there’s anything I can do.”
Farage introduced the man to the party’s local chair before heading upstairs to the balcony overlooking the harbour for an arranged interview with the Daily Mail.
After finishing up, he had a cigarette in the sunshine while surrounded by the council candidates, including 75-year-old Trevor Shonk, a former Ramsgate mayor, and Ukip and Tory councillor who recently defected to Reform.
In 2014, Shonktold the BBC’s World at One programmethat Britain had become a “racist” country because Conservative and Labour governments had let in too many immigrants.
Shonk, who campaigned for Farage when he stood in Thanet South, his seventh unsuccessful attempt to enter parliament, said door-to-door campaigning in recent weeks had gone so well that people had been chasing him down the streets, saying: “Trevor, we’re voting for you and Reform.”
As Farage and his mostly male entourage prepared to leave the pub to drive to Sittingbourne, their final stop of the day, a group of young men at the New Belgium Bar opposite cheered and asked for selfies.
“He’s a man of the people, he’s not stuck up, he’s more like a commoner like us,” one said of the privately educated MP for Clacton. “He’s definitely got the celebrity status.”
The longtime Eurosceptic politician reportedly made a joke about the name of the drinking establishment, saying: “Why are you drinking in the Belgian bar?”
One drinker recognised Zia Yusuf, the Reform party chair, who was by Farage’s side, but, the man said “he just walked off because nobody was giving him any attention”.
Similarly, inside the Wetherspoon’s pub, one woman who seemingly had no idea who Yusuf was had reportedly asked if he could take a photo of her with Farage. Yusuf is said to have politely declined before walking off.
After Farage departed, Karl Serveld, who manages Peter’s Fish Factory, said the politician seemed to be the only person listening to local concerns about immigration.
“Not everybody would voice their opinion because we all know the racism card comes out. But it’s not about race, it’s about money being spent and we’re not seeing any benefit of it,” he said.
Kent county council has been run by the Conservatives since 1997 butan Electoral Calculus poll of 5,400 peoplepredicted last month that Reform UK would take control.
Serveld said that he hoped Reform would changeKentso “the normal working man was looked after”.
Earlier, at the Best Western hotel in Dover, about 20 miles (32km) away, Farage had held a press conference in which he announced Reform would be appointing a minister for deportations.
Introduced on stage as Britain’s next prime minister by Yusuf, Farage reeled off a bunch of statistics about immigration.
“We’re in Dover because it was here in 2020, just as the pandemic was kicking in and lockdown was starting, that I began to go out from this port to film the migrant boats crossing,” he said.
“I said that, frankly, you might as well put up a sign on the white cliffs of Dover, [saying] ‘everyone welcome’. And I predicted there would be an invasion, the word that got me in very big trouble, but have a look at the numbers that have come.”
Farage claimed there had been a trend of Palestinians from Gaza making the crossing in recent weeks. “Frankly, letting people in from war zones, young males of fighting age from war zones, when you don’t know what their involvement in those areas might have been, is an incredibly dangerous thing to do,” he said.
His words were echoed by one of the two would-be Kent councillors filming his address from the front row.
“It does feel like an invasion. And if they’re coming from war zones, where are the women and children? They’re all fighting age men and that’s scary,” said Paul King, the chair of Reform’s Dover and Deal branch and a candidate for Dover West.
With a blue rosette pinned to his dark suit, the 56-year-old said he had been heartened by the local support after delivering thousands of leaflets in recent weeks.
“Virtually everybody I speak to is fully behind us. Not very many people want to be publicly supporting us, but privately they do, like a silent Reform voter.”
King, who lives in a village outside Dover, blamed the silent majority on the public’s fear of being labelled racist. But he saidFarage’s distancing of Tommy Robinsonhad worked in the party’s favour: “Because then we could actually explain that we’re not far right, we’re not racist. Our chairman is a Sri Lankan Muslim. We’ve got homosexual candidates. We’ve got people of colour. We’re a meritocracy.”
Pauline Bailey, the campaign manager of the Dover and Deal branch, said there had been an uplift in support since last year’s general election when she was spat at and called names while leafleting. “Now they’re grabbing papers off me,” the 62-year-old claimed.