Tuesday, March 14, 2028: Nigel Farage has not yet finished his breakfast in the large suite at the Park Plaza Hotel in Westminster that has been his general election base when his most private mobile rings. He sees the caller ID and picks up immediately.
“Good morning, Nigel,” says the prime minister. “And congratulations. You fought a good fight. I’m calling to let you know that I am going to see His Majesty at 11am to tender my resignation. The office at No 10 will be in touch to make arrangements for your arrival. I wish you every success.”
Farage thanks the PM, engages in a little small talk and rings off. He looks out at the Thames and across to parliament. There are helicopters overhead, as police and media prepare for what is already expected to be a hugely consequential day in British politics.
Later that morning, for the second time in 20 years, the monarch will invite a party leader to form a coalition government. But this time, the Conservatives are the junior partner, subordinate to a party founded only seven years ago.
On Friday morning, the Guardian led with the headline: “Farage denied a majority”. But this was clutching at straws. In a political earthquake, Reform had won 270 seats, Labour 190, the Lib Dems 90 and the Conservatives 60. Labour has failed in its bid to cobble together a progressive alliance.
With a combined total of 330 seats, the new Reform-Tory coalition – already nicknamed “Conform” or “Reservative” – will have the smallest of majorities. But Farage has a plan to align with the eight DUP MPs, which will help. The point, he said to his inner circle as dawn broke on March 10, was to get started. He is 63, turning 64 on April 3. As far as he is concerned, it’s now or never. And he has waited long enough.
On both sides, there are, of course, deep anxieties. But the allure of power – of ministerial cars, of grace and favour homes, of being in the room where it happens – tends to conquer personal and ideological queasiness. As he likes to say: there are few qualms that an armoured Range Rover and a ministerial red box can’t overcome.
In any case: this is the first time that the Conservatives have held fewer than 100 seats. Reform may be a tantrum-throwing toddler of a party, but the Tories are in hospice care. They need this deal.
Which is not to say that the road to power has been easy. For all his braggadocio and pub-friendly swagger, the Reform UK leader has never doubted the scale of the task or the stamina and agility that it would require. He knows all about the long haul: it is 34 years since he first stood for parliament, as Ukip candidate in the Eastleigh by-election (952 votes), and it was only on his eighth attempt, in Clacton less than four years ago, that he succeeded.
So many setbacks survived, too: not least in late 2025, when racist remarks he made at school became a serious scandal, plunging him into conflict with the BBC as well as his former classmates.
As he looks back, he remembers 2026 as the year of two nightmares: the year when his dream came close to irrevocable collapse. The first disaster was paradoxical, in that great success led to great jeopardy: in May, Labour was destroyed in the Welsh, Scottish and English local elections. Keir Starmer announced his resignation outside Downing Street on Friday May 8, formally triggering the succession contest that had been unofficially underway since the autumn of 2025.
Traumatised and despondent after almost two years of political calamity and ideological muddle, the governing party wanted an unashamedly Labour leader to woo back the progressive voters now deserting it for the Lib Dems and the Greens. Its members were done with migrant-bashing and fiscal caution.
Andy Burnham, to Farage’s relief, was absent from the field, having mistimed his return to the Commons. By a narrow margin, Angela Rayner prevailed over Wes Streeting, whose earlier bid to sign her up to a dream ticket had fallen on deaf ears. Sooner than his colleagues, Farage realised what a blow this might be to Reform’s accelerationist strategy to get into power in five years from a standing start.
Rayner might not be the darling of the bond markets as Rachel Reeves had been. The Daily Mail hated her. But she leaned into that contempt, reciprocating the loathing of what she called the “entitled misogynists who have ground this country into the dust”.
She had populist panache, talked like a human being, and promised a grand reset, embracing meaningful wealth taxes, a housing revolution and new fiscal rules to permit big spending on transport and health. Less than a year after her resignation over unpaid stamp duty, she was the head of a G7 government, featured on the cover of Time, Forbes magazine and American Vogue. The media spoke of “Rayner rizz” and “Rayner-mania”. Labour ticked up in the polls, above the long-elusive 20% mark.
The second nightmare for Reform came at summer’s end in 2026 as Labour’s client journalists began to speculate that Rayner would exploit this energy before it dissipated and call a snap election. This was the moment of maximum peril for Farage, and he knew it.
But what followed the two nightmares was what he would later call the “twin miracles”. First, exactly as Gordon Brown had done in October 2007, Rayner lost her nerve. Her pollsters could not guarantee her a win. And so, on the eve of Labour’s conference in Liverpool in September, she had declared in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that, in spite of all the speculation, there would not be an early election, insisting that she wanted to concentrate on “the job in hand and the needs of working families”.
Farage was back in the game. But what turbocharged his prospects – and those of his party – again echoed Brown’s misfortunes in 2007. The collapse of Northern Rock in September of that year had been an early warning of the global financial crash which Brown had managed with great statesmanship but for which, like so many incumbent heads of government, he was punished at the polls.
For Rayner, the bursting of the AI bubble in March 2027 was a comparable disaster. Labour’s first woman prime minister was scarcely to blame for this moment of reckoning, a painful market correction made inevitable by the absurd overvaluation of so many tech start-ups. Britain’s economy was less exposed to the collapse than others. But financial pain does not respect borders and the Office for Budget Responsibility was not alone in warning the UK government to expect a fall of 2% in GDP.
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This was Rayner’s undoing and (as he admitted in private) Farage’s “second miracle”. The “Labour Abundance Agenda” of mid-2026 had to be reined in almost completely. The economics of scarcity which had always fuelled Farage’s populism and scapegoating were restored – and then some.
Yet the Reform leader was a student of history and knew that, in politics as in life, absolutely nothing is a sure bet. He had never believed the polls predicting that his party would win more than 400 seats at the next election, understanding that such surveys were emotionally and psychologically useful (normalising the idea that Reform might soon hold power) rather than statistically reliable.
In rolling meetings with David Bull, the party’s chair, Zia Yusuf, head of its DOGE unit and senior strategist, Danny Kruger, the eloquent East Wiltshire MP who had defected from the Tories in September 2025, Andrea Jenkyns, mayor of Greater Lincolnshire and a handful of others, Farage realised that his instincts were correct: to win a single-party majority of 326 seats would require a 16-17% national swing, unprecedented in peacetime elections.
The Reform insurgency was indeed extraordinary and, thanks to a combination of luck and cunning, had not fizzled out. The key had always been to remain a phenomenon rather than a conventional movement; to escape deep scrutiny by sheer kinetic energy and chutzpah. When asked by friends when he first thought he might be prime minister, he always answers: “In the jungle”. Finishing third in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2023 was the real game-changer.
But every phenomenon has limits. Farage grasped that he had to fight publicly for outright victory – the sheer arrogance of that ambition was central to his political identity – while preparing in private for a much more complex outcome.
If Reform emerged as the largest single party, he knew that many of his colleagues would prefer the ideological purity of minority government to a deal with the Conservatives. Wasn’t the whole point to replace the Tories rather than to work with them – much less to give them ministerial posts?
But Farage knew how nasty, brutish, and short were the lives of minority administrations. He had witnessed with disdain the wretchedness of John Major when he lost his Commons majority in December 1996; and then Theresa May’s final, dismal two years after she squandered the Tory majority.
The logic was implacable: he needed the Conservatives to do well enough to be useful in coalition; but not so well that they won seats within his party’s grasp. A formal electoral pact was out of the question: many Reform members were still angry that Farage, as leader of the Brexit Party, had decided not to contest 317 Conservative-held seats in the 2019 election.
Yes, it helped that the Conservatives were now led by Robert Jenrick, who had replaced Kemi Badenoch in 2027 after another terrible local election performance. It was partly the shadow justice secretary’s ideological proximity to Reform that had helped him defeat James Cleverly. By this stage, many Conservatives feared extinction and saw some sort of alliance with Farage as the only lifeboat in raging waters.
Still, there had to be plausible deniability. When the Financial Times reported in December 2025 that Farage had told donors he expected a deal or merger with the Tories before the election, he posted on X: “After 14 years of dishonesty & lies they should never be forgiven. The idea I’d work with them is ludicrous”.
Meanwhile, Farage established a tiny circle of trust to enact a twofold strategy. First, he would soft-pedal in Tory-Labour marginal seats where a Reform vote would be wasted, such as Swindon South, Milton Keynes North, Loughborough, Ipswich, and Walsall North. In return, he expected a mostly clean run in the 89 seats where Reform had finished second to Labour in 2024.
Nothing was put in writing or recorded in WhatsApp groups. Direct contact between the two parties was carried out at a relatively junior level; most of the informal meetings taking place at Tate Britain, a discreet gathering place favoured by pro-Brexit plotters before the 2016 referendum.
The second task was to establish a basis for a future governing partnership. Just as David Cameron had tasked Oliver Letwin to find potential common ground with the Lib Dems in 2010, Farage deployed Kruger to draft a “heads of agreement” document that would satisfy the Tories without committing him to too much detail. The principal areas of convergence were straightforward: immediate exit from the European Convention on Human Rights; net zero targets ditched; all immigration paused, except for capped numbers to fill gaps in the labour market, and to keep the higher education sector ticking over, to be fixed by a new Department of Homeland Security and Integration; and a “patriotic curriculum” for schools.
Economic policy was always going to be the hardest sell: Reform is a populist party that supports some nationalisations, increased NHS spending and protected benefits for its core voters. The Tories are neo-Thatcherites, committed to smaller government, deregulation and tax cuts.
Kruger proposed a bipartisan “National Prosperity Commission” to “examine the issues and potentialities, across the full spectrum of British markets, regions and sectors” – by which he meant, to split the difference. Jenrick balked at this on Friday, until Farage promised him the keys to No 11; at which point, the whole deal was sealed with pleasing alacrity and formally agreed on Monday night. In the end, Nietzsche’s “will to power” always trumps Freud’s “narcissism of small differences”.
Try as she might, Rayner has not been able to come up with an alternative – even by appealing to the handful of remaining “One Nation” Tories to join her in an anti-Farage parliamentary alliance.
“Power is where power goes,” as Lyndon Johnson liked to say. And now it has gone to Farage. Was it inevitable? Of course not. But – as in 1945, 1979 and 1997 – the character, texture and trajectory of politics have changed fundamentally. Whatever happens next, it will not be business as usual.
He puts down his coffee cup and heads into the outer room where his team is waiting. “Morning, prime minister!” they say in unison. “Not yet,” he replies, with the familiar gap-toothed smile. “But give me a couple of hours.”
