In Kent,
the ‘silent Reform voter’ may give Nigel Farage his greatest victory
Emine Sinmaz
Sat 26 Apr
2025 10.00 CEST
Nigel Farage
grinned as he clutched an inflatable blue lilo at a seaside shop in Ramsgate
just hours after holding a press conference about immigration.
“It’s Reform
colours, that’s what it is,” he joked to the throng of press photographers,
possibly tickled by its resemblance to the migrant dinghies that wash up on the
nearby beaches.
Dressed in a
blue suit and £300 Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses with built-in cameras, Farage had
embarked on a busy day of campaigning across three towns in Kent, one week out
from England’s local elections.
It was just
after 2pm and the sun was shining over Ramsgate where Farage, 61, began his
whistle-stop tour by eating cockles and talking to scrap metalworkers.
But his walk
to the Royal Victoria Pavilion, the largest Wetherspoon’s pub in the country,
was interrupted several times by people wanting selfies and asking questions.
One man, a
former newspaper journalist, grilled the politician about his assertion that
Reform UK could ultimately usurp the Conservatives.
Farage told
the man: “Our voters loathe the Conservative party. [Making a deal with them]
is the last thing they’d ever want me to do. And frankly, if I do a deal with
someone, I shake their hand, I look them in the eye and I trust them. I don’t
trust them.”
As Farage
attempted to move on, drinkers outside the Queen’s Head pub cheered. An older
man in a hi-vis jacket patted him on the arm and said: “You’ve got my vote.”
Farage is a
man who likes an audience and Ramsgate is certainly a place where he wouldn’t
expect to get a rough ride. But, to the horror of the Conservative party, and
many in Labour too, the signs are that Reform UK is making a genuine impact
across the country.
Keir
Starmer’s government, still less than a year into a five-year term, is
unpopular. The Tories under Kemi Badenoch appear still in shock from last
year’s general election implosion.
Ever the
opportunist, Farage has seen the gap and charged into it. And next week could
be quite a moment for him.
Earlier this
week, Robert Hayward, a pollster and Conservative peer, said he believed Farage
would win up to 450 seats while the Conservatives would lose up to 525 in the
local elections. Reform was also said to be on course to win two mayoral
contests, according to a YouGov poll released on Friday.
This
despite, or perhaps because of, his willingness to cause offence and peddle
populist ideas. On Thursday, his assertion that the UK is “massively
overdiagnosing those with mental health illness problems” was predictably
provocative.
The National
Autistic Society said his remarks were “incorrect, wrong, fake news”. He has
described net zero as “lunacy” and vowed to scrap carbon targets entirely.
So far,
there is little sign of any lasting damage to his brand from his relationship
with Donald Trump, or the fact he has seemed sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.
One of his
own MPs, Rupert Lowe, even condemned him for being the messianic leader of a
protest party. None of this appeared to worry the voters
at the
Wetherspoon’s pub in Ramsgate, where he ordered a pint of Doom Bar. His burly
security guards hovered nearby as there were more photo opportunities, this
time with five male Reform candidates wearing rosettes.
But before
he could finish his pint, Farage was approached by a 57-year-old man who said
he has struggled to find work since moving back to Ramsgate from Spain.
He feared he
was being discriminated against, he said. “But I believe in what you’re doing,”
he told Farage. “I would love to meet up with you some time and have a chat, if
there’s anything I can do.”
Farage
introduced the man to the party’s local chair before heading upstairs to the
balcony overlooking the harbour for an arranged interview with the Daily Mail.
After
finishing up, he had a cigarette in the sunshine while surrounded by the
council candidates, including 75-year-old Trevor Shonk, a former Ramsgate
mayor, and Ukip and Tory councillor who recently defected to Reform.
In 2014,
Shonk told the BBC’s World at One programme that Britain had become a “racist”
country because Conservative and Labour governments had let in too many
immigrants.
Shonk, who
campaigned for Farage when he stood in Thanet South, his seventh unsuccessful
attempt to enter parliament, said door-to-door campaigning in recent weeks had
gone so well that people had been chasing him down the streets, saying:
“Trevor, we’re voting for you and Reform.”
As Farage
and his mostly male entourage prepared to leave the pub to drive to
Sittingbourne, their final stop of the day, a group of young men at the New
Belgium Bar opposite cheered and asked for selfies.
“He’s a man
of the people, he’s not stuck up, he’s more like a commoner like us,” one said
of the privately educated MP for Clacton. “He’s definitely got the celebrity
status.”
The longtime
Eurosceptic politician reportedly made a joke about the name of the drinking
establishment, saying: “Why are you drinking in the Belgian bar?”
One drinker
recognised Zia Yusuf, the Reform party chair, who was by Farage’s side, but,
the man said “he just walked off because nobody was giving him any attention”.
Similarly,
inside the Wetherspoon’s pub, one woman who seemingly had no idea who Yusuf was
had reportedly asked if he could take a photo of her with Farage. Yusuf is said
to have politely declined before walking off.
After Farage
departed, Karl Serveld, who manages Peter’s Fish Factory, said the politician
seemed to be the only person listening to local concerns about immigration.
“Not
everybody would voice their opinion because we all know the racism card comes
out. But it’s not about race, it’s about money being spent and we’re not seeing
any benefit of it,” he said.
Kent county
council has been run by the Conservatives since 1997 but an Electoral Calculus
poll of 5,400 people predicted last month that Reform UK would take control.
Serveld said
that he hoped Reform would change Kent so “the normal working man was looked
after”.
Earlier, at
the Best Western hotel in Dover, about 20 miles (32km) away, Farage had held a
press conference in which he announced Reform would be appointing a minister
for deportations.
Introduced
on stage as Britain’s next prime minister by Yusuf, Farage reeled off a bunch
of statistics about immigration.
“We’re in
Dover because it was here in 2020, just as the pandemic was kicking in and
lockdown was starting, that I began to go out from this port to film the
migrant boats crossing,” he said.
“I said
that, frankly, you might as well put up a sign on the white cliffs of Dover,
[saying] ‘everyone welcome’. And I predicted there would be an invasion, the
word that got me in very big trouble, but have a look at the numbers that have
come.”
Farage
claimed there had been a trend of Palestinians from Gaza making the crossing in
recent weeks. “Frankly, letting people in from war zones, young males of
fighting age from war zones, when you don’t know what their involvement in
those areas might have been, is an incredibly dangerous thing to do,” he said.
His words
were echoed by one of the two would-be Kent councillors filming his address
from the front row.
“It does
feel like an invasion. And if they’re coming from war zones, where are the
women and children? They’re all fighting age men and that’s scary,” said Paul
King, the chair of Reform’s Dover and Deal branch and a candidate for Dover
West.
With a blue
rosette pinned to his dark suit, the 56-year-old said he had been heartened by
the local support after delivering thousands of leaflets in recent weeks.
“Virtually
everybody I speak to is fully behind us. Not very many people want to be
publicly supporting us, but privately they do, like a silent Reform voter.”
King, who
lives in a village outside Dover, blamed the silent majority on the public’s
fear of being labelled racist. But he said Farage’s distancing of Tommy
Robinson had worked in the party’s favour: “Because then we could actually
explain that we’re not far right, we’re not racist. Our chairman is a Sri
Lankan Muslim. We’ve got homosexual candidates. We’ve got people of colour.
We’re a meritocracy.”
Pauline
Bailey, the campaign manager of the Dover and Deal branch, said there had been
an uplift in support since last year’s general election when she was spat at
and called names while leafleting. “Now they’re grabbing papers off me,” the
62-year-old claimed.
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