LONDON — Nigel Farage is crying foul as pollsters place his struggling Reform UK behind right-wing rivals, the Conservative Party.
A combination of scandal and a rejuvenated opposition has seen Reform slump to a second-place tie with the Conservatives for much of the last fortnight, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
There are potentially years to run until the next U.K. general election — and British politics remains volatile. But it represents a steep fall from when Farage was being treated as Britain’s next prime minister and his right-wing outfit spent a year out in first place ahead of the governing Labour Party.
It’s a major test of Reform’s claim to be the best-placed right-wing vessel to stop another Labour victory.
So what’s Farage’s answer? He is increasingly trying to remind voters how the Conservatives operated in government — and claiming the polls themselves are bogus.
POLITICO spoke to half a dozen figures on Reform’s frontline to try and understand their gripes with the polling. All were granted anonymity, like others in this piece, because of the generally held convention in Westminster that parties don’t discuss polling.
Farage goes after the number-crunchers
“The jiggery-pokery that is going on with polling is utterly astonishing,” Farage told journalists after a speech last week. “What you’ve seen from the polling industry is nonsense, and I mean that.”
The Reform UK leader claimed that the “raw data” shows his party is really eight points clear of the Tories — and berated a “desperate push from the establishment” to get back to the “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” state of two-party politics.
Two senior Reform Party insiders challenged the methodology used by Britain’s pollsters. They argued that Reform’s polling is suppressed because of the way undecided voters are partially stacked with the party they voted for at the last election. Both insiders argued this would harm the party because it was a much more nascent outfit back in 2024.
The party is also sharing alternative calculations that adjust for higher turnout than pollsters assume for Reform voters.
But that assessment is already being challenged by parts of the polling industry.
Three polling experts denied the extent to which these factors would have a major influence on Reform’s polling. A fourth, the More in Common think tank, provided POLITICO with a detailed explainer of how its findings put Reform in third place on its own tracker regardless of how they crunch their data.
From leaving the results raw to removing “don’t knows,” Reform UK remains behind the Tories in the research group’s findings. In a bid to boost polling transparency, More in Common is preparing to publish a detailed explainer of how it arrives at its findings.