Has Nigel Farage ever had this much space?

A shift within the media class reflects a wider trend

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“I’ve never seen anything like this before”. That’s what I said to somebody at the very top of the Reform party last night.

What was I talking about?

I was talking about how Britain’s media class is now covering Nigel Farage’s growing revolt against the establishment.

Just look at the last few days.

One after another, The Times, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Spectator have all lined up to point out that Farage and a more professional looking Reform party could be about to takeover British politics.

Journalists, columnists, and editors who were once openly hostile toward Farage are now realising that he could yet push through the kind of once-in-a-generation political realignment that’s sweeping through America, the beginnings of which we’ve tracked on this Substack for the last two years (see here, here, and here).

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Just look at what very serious parts of the British media class are now saying.

According to The Times leader column, on Saturday, while it would be easy to dismiss as hubris Nigel Farage’s prediction that he is about to deliver Britain’s first great political realignment in a century, it notes:

“Yet there are signs that Reform UK is here to stay and poses a serious challenge to ­Conservative and Labour hegemony. Reform recently passed two key metrics: it has crossed the Rubicon of 100,000 party members and it has overtaken the Labour Party in a recent opinion poll. These developments do not make Mr ­Farage’s bold ­prediction about the next election a certainty, but they suggest momentum.”

Janice Turner, also writing in The Times at the weekend, in a piece titled ‘Suddenly, Reform is starting to look plausible’, similarly suggests:

“In July, it looked as though Britain had dodged the populist wave sweeping Europe, and in November we became such a centrist sanctuary against Trumpism that Democrats such as Ellen DeGeneres moved to the Cotswolds. Yet maybe we haven’t swerved it at all. Maybe Starmer is our Biden and we’re just one election behind”.

At the same time, former Conservative Party minister David Frost warns in the Telegraph that ‘there is only room for one party of the Right in Britain’, asking:

“Will we honestly see the hundreds of new Reform MPs that Farage predicts? Yes, it’s ambitious, but British politics are in flux … Watching Farage’s speech [at the Spectator Awards] and the uneasy silence that greeted it, I couldn’t help recalling the prophet Daniel and the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast. “You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom will be delivered to the Medes and the Persians.”

Even Andrew Neil, writing in the Daily Mail, under the headline ‘This week Nigel Farage promised a revolution with reform winning the next election. Here’s why he could be right’, also had something positive to say:

“Reform can campaign in favour of oil and gas in Scotland, the car industry in the Midlands, farmers in rural areas and against immigration and net zero everywhere. Who knows what harvest it might then reap? … it's time to take the prospects for Reform seriously.”

Last but not least, in the Spectator, Katy Balls points to ‘Labour’s Nigel Farage nightmare’ and quotes a senior Labour government figure as saying: “I think about Nigel Farage a lot. It’s not impossible he is in government in a few years.”

The point that I’m making here, as somebody who tracked Farage’s earlier UK Independence Party and Brexit Party revolts in detail, both of which met intense hostility from a London-based media class that often struggles to make sense of what takes place beyond the capital, is that things are now very much on the move.

The media class, which moves as a pack, is clearly starting to give Nigel Farage and Reform the kind of neutral or even positive coverage that would simply never have been seen in years gone by.

Throughout the 2000s and the 2010s, the only coverage that Farage inspired was strongly negative. He was either a clown to be laughed at or, in later years, presented as a serious threat to democracy.

He was never given what he is being given today —an air of electoral credibility, legitimacy, serious mainstream appeal, a minister or even prime minister in waiting.

What’s driving it?

Perhaps the media class is finally realising that neither Keir Starmer’s faltering and already divided Labour government, nor Kemi Badenoch’s underwhelming Tory party, have the answers to what historian Niall Ferguson described in a brilliant essay this week as “the Rot in Britain” —a deep-rooted malaise and sense of crisis that is now bombarding the country on all sides.

Perhaps, instead, they’re starting to …