Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labor Party, will face off on Tuesday night in their first debate of the British general election. But it is a third man, Nigel Farage, who has grabbed the spotlight in a career defined, until now, by a fading incumbent and a rising opponent.
Farage, a cheerful insurgent who has long roamed the right-wing fringes of British politics, said he would stand as a candidate for Reform UK, a party he co-founded. This has shaken the race and threatens to siphon votes away from Sunak’s Conservative Party, given Reform UK’s strident anti-immigration message.
Farage’s entry into the race is not in itself transformative. He ran for a seat in the British Parliament seven times and lost each time. But his return could give a boost to other reformist UK candidates, posing yet another obstacle in Sunak’s path between now and the July 4 vote.
The prime minister is fighting to avoid a crushing defeat to Labour, who has held a double-digit lead over the Conservatives in the polls for more than a year. His debate with Starmer, although early in the campaign, is already shaping up to be a decisive opportunity to change a rapidly congealing narrative.
“The election is over; it does; Labor won the election,” Farage said as he announced his candidacy in a surprise announcement on Monday. Describing it as “the most boring, boring general election campaign we have ever seen in our lives”, Farage, 60, said his career needed to be “improved” and offered himself as a tonic.
Sunak called the election on May 22, several months earlier than expected, in part to exploit flashes of good economic news. He has moved aggressively to appeal to voters who might be attracted to the far-right Reform UK party, proposing a national service requirement for 18-year-olds and launching a new law that would ban transgender women from women’s toilets. and to women-only prisons.
But the Conservatives stumbled on the immigration issue when Sunak said his government’s flagship plan to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda would not start before the election. The Labor Party has promised to put politics aside if it comes to power, suggesting the flights may never happen.
There is no evidence that Mr Sunak’s decision to go to voters early changed the bleak electoral outlook for the Conservatives. A poll published on Monday by market research firm YouGov, which surveyed almost 60,000 adults, projects the party will lose 225 seats while Labor will gain 220.
Although on the more optimistic side of projections for the Labor Party, those figures would give the party a majority even larger than that won by former Prime Minister Tony Blair in his landslide victory in 1997. The poll does not project Reform UK to win. no seats, a testament to the obstacles smaller parties face in winning seats in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, although it was held before Mr Farage’s announcement.
For Farage, analysts said, the decision to run for Parliament may be part of a broader strategy to take over the Conservative Party after its expected defeat. But jumping into the ring now is not without risks, they said, and they go beyond their possible eighth consecutive loss.
“On the one hand, it grabs the headlines and will almost certainly be another nail in the government’s coffin,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “On the other hand, if he does too much damage to the Conservatives, the remaining Conservative MPs in Parliament, and even some of the party’s grassroots activists who claim to love him, won’t feel much love for him.”
“Still,” Professor Bale added, “a hostile takeover is still a takeover.”
Whether he wins or not, Farage will electrify a campaign that got off to a rocky start, dating back to Sunak’s announcement, made in pouring rain outside 10 Downing Street.
As Sunak withdrew from Rwanda, Starmer’s Labor Party lost several days due to an internal dispute over Diane Abbott, a black member of Parliament who was suspended from the Labor Party last year for suggesting that Irish, Jews and Travelers did not face racism. in the same way that the blacks did. (Travellers are a nomadic minority group who are among the most disadvantaged in Britain.)
Abbott, a revered figure on the party’s left, was expected to withdraw from the election in exchange for his suspension being lifted and being granted a peerage in the House of Lords. But after she resisted and the progressive wing of the party rose to defend her, Starmer said she was “free to move forward as a Labor candidate”.
Abbott, 70, confirmed he planned to run to win back his north London seat, ending an episode that distracted from Labour’s theme of “change” after 14 years of Conservative government.
Starmer tried to regain his footing Monday with a speech in which he promised to increase Britain’s military spending and modernize its nuclear arsenal. He said he would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons to defend Britain, a statement designed to reject Conservative criticism that the Labor Party is weak on national security.
Conservative officials pointed out that the last time it was proposed to renew the country’s Trident nuclear weapons system, in 2016, senior Labor figures, including David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, and Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, voted against. (Mr. Starmer voted to renew it.)
“This is a changed Labor Party and most importantly I voted for a nuclear deterrent,” Starmer said. “I lead from the front; “I have always led from the front.”
Given the size of Labour’s lead over the Conservatives, analysts said the biggest danger for Starmer was self-created problems, which could cause voters to have doubts about the party. That is why the row over Mrs Abbott’s status frustrated some Labor supporters.
But Starmer’s challenge pales next to that of Sunak, who is trying to bring his party back from oblivion. He has campaigned vigorously but unevenly, laughing at jokes about his rain-soaked debut and bravely accepting umbrellas.
The prime minister, who is not a born politician, has fought through campaign appearances and photo opportunities that have sometimes backfired. Last week, a young man, referring to the party’s proposal for compulsory national service, asked him: “Why do you hate young people so much?”
On Sunday, Sunak posted a TikTok video to mock what he said was Labour’s lack of plans. He turned the cover of a flipchart and revealed a blank page. Within minutes, Labor agents had altered the video to list the party’s objectives on the blank page. The next day, Mr Sunak was photographed chatting with residents of Henley-on-Thames, England. Behind him sailed a boat with Liberal Democrat supporters, cheering and waving signs.
Sunak has long ruled out any alliance between the Conservatives and reformist Britain. On Monday he brushed aside the threat from Farage, who will run for a seat in the coastal constituency of Clacton.
“At the end of the day on July 5, one of two people will be prime minister, Keir Starmer or me,” Sunak told broadcasters. “A vote for anyone other than a Conservative candidate is simply a vote to put Keir Starmer in 10th place.”