Nigel Farage, a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, a driving force behind Brexit and Britain’s best-known political disruptor, has been elected to Parliament for the first time.
Exit polls have shown the new insurgent party he leads, Reform UK, has won four seats, more than many analysts had predicted, in an electoral system that tends to punish small parties. His party has been driven by an anti-immigration platform.
Farage won by a wide margin in Clacton, a run-down seaside town where pre-election opinion polls had suggested he had a strong chance of winning. He had already tried unsuccessfully to be elected to parliament seven times.
“The establishment is terrified, the Tories are terrified,” Farage gleefully declared in a speech last month, referring to the ruling party. Britain is “a broken nation,” he added, attacking targets ranging from asylum seekers to the BBC.
A polarising, pugilistic figure and a highly skilled communicator, Farage helped the Conservatives to a landslide victory in the last general election by failing to field candidates from his Brexit Party in many key areas.
In this election, his plan was different: destroy the Tories by taking away a large part of their votes and then replace or take control of the remnants of the party. Early in the campaign, when a journalist asked him if he wanted to merge his fledgling party with the Tories, he replied: “More like a takeover, my dear boy.”
In recent weeks, Reform UK has come under heavy criticism after several of its candidates were found to have made provocative statements. One said Britain should have remained neutral in the fight against the Nazis; another used anti-Semitic tropes by claiming Jewish groups were “promoting the mass importation of Muslims into England.”
The party has blamed some of its problems on growing pains, has dropped some candidates and threatened legal action against a private company it paid to vet candidates.
Last week, an undercover investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 news secretly filmed Reform activists in Clacton using racist and homophobic language, with one using a slur to describe Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
But for two decades it has shaped the British political conversation, pushing the Brexit cause forward, outflanking the Conservatives and pushing them further to the right.
