Nigel Farage will tell his fledgling party on Friday to prepare for power as soon as 2027 – as he warns the financial markets could foreclose on Labour‘s spendthrift Government and force an early election.
Mr Farage, whose Reform UK has topped the polls for months, will issue the alert in a speech to his annual conference in Birmingham.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail ahead of the conference, the former City trader highlighted the rising borrowing costs being forced on Labour by sceptical financial markets.
And he predicted that a new party formed by Jeremy Corbyn could splinter Labour and help hasten the Government’s demise.
‘I think they may struggle to last the course,’ he said. ‘The financial situation is very, very grim. The bond markets, just every single day there is a loss of confidence. I was with a couple of big Wall Street guys last night and confidence in the UK is ebbing. If I’m right about the temptation of the Left for many Labour MPs, they may well struggle to get through another couple of years.
‘I shall tell the conference: be ready for an election in 2027.’
Mr Farage is accelerating his own plans too, including setting up a new ‘department of preparing for government’ by Christmas to examine ways to ensure the party’s radical agenda is not frustrated by the Whitehall Blob.
He is also launching a search for 5,000 candidates to fight next May’s elections in English councils and the Scottish and Welsh parliaments.
Nigel Farage (pictured) has told his party to prepare for a 2027 General Election amid mounting economic pressure on Sir Keir Starmer
These, he predicted, will see the Conservatives ‘cease to be a national party’ as Reform seeks to make big inroads in Scotland, Wales and London.
The Conservative Party, he said, is ‘disintegrating before our eyes’, with a steady stream of defections threatening to turn into a flood after Friday’s endorsement by former Tory Cabinet Minister Nadine Dorries, who he described as a ‘big hire for us’.
While Labour voters are switching to Reform in their droves, there are only a handful of Labour MPs on Mr Farage’s radar. The Parliamentary Labour Party is ‘infected with Blairism,’ he said.
The capital – like Scotland – was once a no-go zone for Reform, but Mr Farage insisted the mood is changing to the extent that the party could mount a serious bid for the London mayoralty. ‘London needs better than [Sadiq] Khan,’ he said.
The Reform leader is on a roll. It is just four years since he declared his political career to be ‘over’.
On Thursday he held private talks at the White House with his old pal Donald Trump, rekindling an alliance with the US President that appeared to have been in abeyance since the last election.
At a party attended by a good chunk of Trump’s Cabinet, he laughed off attempts by Labour’s new Reform ‘attack unit’ and the Conservatives to rubbish him.
‘I know what they’re going to say,’ he joked. ‘They’re going to say that I’m a drinker. They’re going to say that I’m a smoker. They’re going to say that I’m a gambler. They’re going to say that I’m a womaniser. The trouble is, it’s all true. So really – really – what can they hit me with?’
Sir Keir Starmer’s government has been told their time could be over soon as Farage launches a search for 5,000 candidates to fight next May’s elections
Mr Farage was coy about the contents of his meeting with Mr Trump, but revealed that the pair discussed issues including free speech and Labour’s controversial Net Zero energy policy.
‘We had a very good chat,’ he said.
‘He was asking all the right questions about the UK and what the hell’s going on.
‘The Americans are deeply shocked. The Graham Linehan case is just extraordinary.
‘Trump obviously thinks the Prime Minister is a perfectly decent fellow and that’s a good thing. But he is somewhat incredulous at our energy policy. He literally can’t believe that we’re deindustrialising at a time when America is going in the opposite direction.’
Relations are less cordial with Elon Musk, who once flirted with the idea of handing over a mega donation to Reform.
‘He’s being quite abusive about me,’ Mr Farage said of the world’s richest man.
‘He doesn’t think our deportation policy is tough enough. He thinks we should go down the Tommy Robinson route. You know what? It ain’t happening.’
Reform’s plan to deport up to 600,000 illegal migrants in five years has triggered an outcry from the Left and leading figures in the Church of England, including the Archbishop of York, who described the plan as ‘isolationist, short-term and knee-jerk’.
But the Reform leader is unrepentant. ‘I’ve been getting some great letters from evangelical church leaders saying they are 100 per cent behind me,’ he said.
‘The evangelical wing – which is the growing part of the church where a lot of young people are turning up – is very supportive.
‘I’m afraid these bishops are completely out of touch in every way.’
Mr Farage acknowledged that opposition from the civil service Blob is a ‘great concern’ but insisted that he will bulldozer attempts by the Establishment to block his plans.
‘We are just not going to have it,’ he said. ‘We will take on whatever fights we have to take on.’
The Reform leader dismissed a flurry of recent initiatives from Labour designed to tackle the small boats crisis, saying the ‘one in, one out’ deal was doomed to fail alongside Government efforts to close asylum hotels.
And he accused Sir Keir Starmer of ‘desperation’ over claims this week that Mr Farage is ‘not interested’ in fixing the small boats crisis because he is more interested in stoking grievance.
‘The PM says I want things to get worse for the British people.
‘I think that is a disgraceful and desperate thing to say,’ he said. ‘And you can tell from the look in his eyes that, frankly, he’s a beaten man.’
Mr Farage’s biggest challenge now could be simply holding his sometimes fractious party together until an election, which if it goes the distance, could be not two, but four years away.
‘It is a long slog,’ he acknowledged. ‘But I’ve been a long slogger for a long time.’
