What does Reform need to overtake the Tories? Fewer than 340k voters

Nigel Farage’s plan to be prime minister in five years’ time may seem far-fetched, but it would take fewer than 340,000 voters to switch to Reform UK for the party to overtake the Tories and become the official opposition, a Telegraph analysis shows.

Reform’s return of just five MPs, including Mr Farage and party chairman Richard Tice, makes them a minnow in terms of seats, but the party received more than 4 million votes – the third highest of any party – and came second in 98 constituencies.

Where Labour averaged around 23,600 votes for every seat won, Reform averaged 820,745 votes per seat won.

The implication is obvious: Reform has a massive voter base which is currently too evenly spread, but if the party learned to organise itself it could convert those votes into large numbers of seats.

In order to overtake the Tories and with the 117 seats to become the second party in Parliament, Reform would have needed an extra 672,947 votes in the seats where they came closest to the winning party. Put another way, it would require 336,474 people to switch to Reform from the party that won those seats – just 0.7 per cent of the electorate.

Mr Tice says: “The number of seats where we came second is really significant, and we did that without even trying. Nigel is already talking about the next level of our growth, and the way he will professionalise the party.”

Unlike the Liberal Democrats, which won 71 seats despite having half a million fewer votes than Reform, Mr Farage’s party went into the election without the key tools of data and experience, instead relying on a “small group of guerillas” on the ground, as one party campaigner put it. 

Ominously for the other parties, this election has enabled Reform to build a huge database of voting patterns, enabling them to target their resources more scientifically next time around – and potentially convert those near misses into wins.

Speaking after the count in Clacton, Mr Farage said: “This is just the first step, I set out with a goal to win millions of votes, to get a bridgehead in Parliament and that’s what we’ve done so I’m very pleased.”

Mr Farage believes the clamour for proportional representation is going to be “enormous” from now on, but the reality is that no party with such a huge majority as Labour is likely to be interested in electoral reform.

The Telegraph’s analysis of the election results shows, however, that Reform could make huge gains even within the constraints of first-past-the-post.

In almost a quarter of seats, they took between 20 and 30 per cent of the vote share, in an election where two-fifths of seats were won with less than 40 per cent of all votes cast. Marginal gains would potentially deliver those seats to Mr Farage.

Asked where Reform goes from here, he said: “Forwards rapidly, very rapidly. I mean, look, I’ve got some things to do, I’ve got to professionalise it, I’ve got to democratise it, I’ve got to get rid of a few idiots that found it too easy to get on board. They will all go, they will all go, this will be a non-racist, non-sectarian party. Absolutely and I give my word on that.”

Despite Labour’s overall supermajority, the new government’s majority decreased in 22 seats where Reform came second.

Mr Tice said: “Labour is waking up to the fact that we are a serious threat to them. If you look at some of the results in the north and on the coasts we reduced Labour’s majorities, which shows the lack of appetite for Labour.”

Reform are convinced that increasing numbers of voters will turn to them if and when Labour fails to get legal and illegal migration down. One party aide suggested Labour was “praying for bad weather” to discourage a flotilla of small boats crossing the Channel after The Telegraph spoke to migrants who said they were waiting for a Labour government before making the trip.

Mr Tice also believes Labour will fail to achieve sufficient economic growth to pay for their plans, and that net zero will become “the next battleground” chipping away at Sir Keir Starmer’s popularity.

Mr Farage said: “This Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly and we will now be targeting Labour votes. We’re coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that.”

While the idea of a party of five MPs becoming the official opposition would have seemed fanciful a decade ago, the 2024 election has shown that politics has become so volatile and traditional allegiances so weak that nothing can be ruled out.

Mr Farage said: “It shows that there is a level of disenchantment with politics. I think people are looking for something different. But, and here’s the important thing, this is not a protest vote. They’re not saying two fingers up to the establishment. They’re saying, “‘you know what, we really agree with what these guys are saying, we really agree with what they’re saying about tax levels, we agree with what they say about levels of legal net migration.’”. He continued “I promise you the enthusiasm of people voting Reform UK is truly extraordinary.”

In Clacton, Mr Farage won with a majority of 8,405 over the second-placed Conservative Giles Watling, who had held a majority of 24,702 in the old seat of Harwich. 

On the Conservative Party, Mr Farage added: “They’ve been around for 190 years. They’ve been amazingly resilient. But this could be, I think this is the beginning of the end of the Conservative Party.”

He said of Labour: “What is interesting is, there’s no enthusiasm for Labour, there’s no enthusiasm for Starmer whatsoever. In fact, about half of the vote is simply an anti-Conservative vote.”

There is an added fear within the Conservative Party about Mr Farage’s elevation to Parliament.

With a Tory leadership contest about to begin, the Conservatives will effectively be rudderless for weeks, giving Mr Farage a free run at Sir Keir Starmer.

One senior Conservative said: “We can’t afford for a leadership election to drag on. The nightmare scenario would be for it to go on until December, which would mean Farage having the opportunity to cement himself in people’s minds as the official opposition.

“He will use Parliament, he will use GB News, and he will use social media to attack Labour every time a small boat crosses the Channel or the NHS gets worse or the economic figures are bad or taxes go up.

If we don’t get our act together people will see him as the man who is the real opposition to Labour and it will take a long time for us to turn that around.”

Reform’s detractors like to portray the party as a one-man band, entirely reliant on the charismatic Mr Farage, but the party is already eyeing up possible future leaders who might take over after the next election.

Zia Yusuf, a Muslim entrepreneur who gave Reform its biggest donation during the election campaign, wowed an audience of 4,500 party supporters at the NEC in Birmingham last weekend, and is already being talked up as a possible successor to Mr Farage.

Until the next election, Reform UK has five MPs in Parliament four of whom are high-profile figures: Mr Farage, Mr Tice, former Tory MP Lee Anderson, and businessman Rupert Lowe, a familiar figure as the former chairman of Southampton Football Club.

Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, said: “Nigel Farage has been given a wonderful hand of cards. It’s how he plays them now.

“He’s second in lots of Labour seats. He’s a viable alternative to the Conservatives. He’s got money flowing in. He’s got a presence in the House of Commons. He’s got the US election in the autumn. Much of Europe is swinging to the Right… incumbent governments getting smashed because of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis and populist parties are doing really well.”

Mr Goodwin told GB News: “What does that mean for the 2024-29 parliament? It means if there are by-elections, Farage is probably going to end up winning quite a few of those. Local elections? Well, if he’s organised, he’s going to end up doing quite well in those too.”

In the popular vote, Labour received 9.7 million votes, or a 33.8 per cent share, while the Conservatives received 6.8 million votes, or 23.7 per cent, and Reform received 4.07 million, or 14.25 per cent of the vote.

Mr Tice understandably raged against the mathematics of the most disproportionate election in history, in which Labour got two thirds of the seats but just a third of the votes.

He said: “How could it be right that the Conservative Party, that has just over 50 per cent more votes than we have, has 30 times the number of MPs? How could it be right that the now ruling Labour Party have double the number of votes that we have, and they’ve got some 100 times the number of MPs?”

Mr Farage preferred to look at the positives, saying: “Believe me folks, this is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you. It’s four weeks and three days since I decided to come out of retirement and throw my hat in the ring. I think what Reform UK has achieved in just those few short weeks is truly extraordinary.” 

He continued: “Given we had no money, no branch structure, virtually nothing across the country, we’re going to come second in hundreds of constituencies, how many seats we’re going to win - I don’t know. But to have done this in such a short space of time says something very fundamental is happening.”