Reform arrived in Birmingham with more elected representation than at any point in its history. 14 councils in England, eight MPs, 34 Senedd members serving as the official Welsh opposition and 17 MSPs tied with Scottish Labour as the second largest party at Holyrood. On paper, that is a party still on an upward trajectory.
However, polling tells a different story. Conference began with Reform at its lowest ebb since January 2025, with one survey placing the party third on 22%, behind a resurgent Labour and the Conservatives on 23%. Nigel Farage’s own favourability has slid from -27 last summer to -44 now. More significant still is what More in Common’s data showed: Reform’s share of the combined right-wing vote has fallen from 63% to 50% in a year. Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain is drawing modest but consequential support almost entirely from Reform’s existing base, and neither the membership nor the leadership shows any appetite for a pact to fix it.
That backdrop shaped everything that followed.
The donations row set the register
Reform’s head of policy, James Orr, and Nigel Farage’s closest aide, Dan Jukes, were suspended before the conference’s main stage even opened, after Channel 4 News and Verbatim Investigations broadcast undercover footage appearing to show senior figures discussing how foreign donations might be routed to the party. Farage called it entrapment and denied wrongdoing. The Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission are now assessing the material, alongside a separate long-running standards investigation into an undeclared £5 million gift from the businessman Christopher Harborne.
It was a senior Reform figure, speaking privately to the BBC, who captured the tension best: the party still has the instincts of what he called a pirate ship, prizing boldness over process, but increasingly needs the discipline of people prepared to ask the boring questions. That line ran through nearly every session I attended.
A policy prospectus, and an institutional gap still to close
This was the most detailed policy conference Reform has held. Richard Tice set out a £250 cut to energy bills within 100 days; Robert Jenrick detailed £80 billion in spending reductions alongside a rise in the tax-free personal allowance to £15,000. Suella Braverman focused on education and scrapping public sector diversity targets. Farage himself pledged a national emergency on day one in government, a Parliament sitting around the clock and the removal of civil servants he judges to be obstructive.
Danny Kruger’s fringe appearances told a more technical story. He has already published detailed institutional proposals. For example, splitting the cabinet secretary role into three distinct jobs, using automation to reduce Civil Service headcount, ending Whitehall’s property leases to shrink central government’s physical footprint and bringing political appointees in alongside career officials. It is a serious, granular programme for how the machinery of government would actually be restructured, in marked contrast to the broader promises made from the main stage.
The distance between Kruger’s groundwork and Farage’s more combative pledges, to sack obstructive civil servants, abolish the House of Lords by referendum if it blocks the party’s programme and reshape judicial appointments, is not yet resolved. It is the question that will matter most if Reform’s polling recovers: whether a government built in Farage’s image can be run on Kruger’s blueprint, or whether the two visions pull in different directions once in office.
What to watch this Autumn
The signal to watch this autumn is not the standards investigations but the polls. In the first days of September, a More in Common survey put the Conservatives ahead of Reform for the first time in more than 500 days. Kemi Badenoch’s party on 23%, Reform on 22%, both trailing Labour. Ipsos’s own tracker, taken in the same window, points to something equally uncomfortable for Farage: the public are now roughly as likely to see Badenoch as a future prime minister as they are him, a sharp reversal from a year ago when Farage led that measure by 14%. None of this amounts to collapse, and Reform still leads when voters are asked which party represents the real alternative to Labour. But the pattern is consistent across several pollsters rather than a single rogue survey, and it lands at precisely the moment the party most needs to demonstrate momentum behind its 100-day pitch.
Two internal stories will determine how Reform responds. The first is mechanical. The party has reportedly received around 3,000 applications to stand as parliamentary candidates and is racing to complete vetting before Christmas in anticipation of an early election that Andy Burnham has so far ruled out. How rigorously that vetting is carried out will say a great deal about whether the party has professionalised or is simply moving faster.
The second is more combustible. Succession. Farage insists he intends to lead Reform into the next general election, but he has already begun preparing for a handover, saying he would accept the party turning to Zia Yusuf if that was what members wanted. A Lord Ashcroft poll of the membership has Yusuf clearly ahead of the likely alternatives, with Tice some way behind and Jenrick trailing on single figures. That gap has reportedly pushed Jenrick and Tice into an informal understanding aimed at stopping a Yusuf succession, with party figures using the phrase ‘Anyone but Zia’ to describe the faction – Yusuf has clearly recognised this and already begun making overt pitches with slick social media videos and garnering a ‘bombthrower’ reputation. None of this will change how the party loyalty feels about Farage. Whether it changes how voters, business and Reform’s own senior team feel is the more consequential question – conference did not answer it.
