For a party that once boasted of being an unstoppable insurgent force, Reform UK’s sudden loss of momentum has been striking. New polling suggests Nigel Farage’s outfit may have hit its ceiling — and begun the long slide back down. In the latest YouGov figures, Reform dropped three points to 25 per cent, its lowest showing since April. Meanwhile, Labour climbed two points to 20 per cent, the Conservatives edged up by two, the Lib Dems gained one, and even the Greens — usually on an upward curve — dipped slightly.
Taken in isolation, a three-point fall might look like statistical noise. Taken in context, it looks more like gravity reasserting itself.
Only days earlier, another poll showed Reform’s once-commanding lead had narrowed to just three points, while the Greens under Zack Polanski continued to surge. The direction of travel is clear: Reform is no longer hoovering up disillusioned voters at will. Instead, it appears to be leaking support on multiple fronts.
So what’s going wrong?
First, there is the simple reality that Reform’s offer is remarkably thin. Strip away the pub-bore rhetoric and social media bluster, and the party sings almost exclusively two songs: immigration panic and privatisation-by-default. For a while, that was enough. But as the cost of living, public services, housing and crumbling infrastructure dominate everyday life, voters are increasingly sceptical of a party whose answers rarely extend beyond “less regulation” and “blame migrants”.
Reform brands itself as anti-establishment, yet its leadership is stuffed with familiar faces from the political and media class — career spivs who have spent decades orbiting power, lobbying, broadcasting, or failing upwards. Farage himself is a multimillionaire former MEP turned GB News presenter, hardly the outsider he markets himself as. The longer Reform hangs around, the harder it becomes to maintain the fiction that it represents a clean break from politics as usual.
That credibility gap has widened further since the party took control of its first local councils back in May. Instead of showcasing a bold, people-first alternative, Reform councillors quickly proposed tax rises and then descended into chaos, with a flurry losing their positions amid internal rows. For voters tempted by the idea that Reform might “shake things up”, this looked less like disruption and more like incompetence.
Then there are the scandals. Reform has endured arguably its roughest patch since its rebrand, battered by negative headlines and allegations that have undermined Farage’s carefully cultivated image. His links to Nathan Gill — the former Reform leader in Wales later convicted of taking Russian bribes — have been seized upon by opponents and raised uncomfortable questions about judgement, associations and oversight. While Farage denies wrongdoing, the optics are toxic for a party that claims to stand for integrity and national interest.
Crucially, Reform is also being squeezed ideologically. On the right, some voters are drifting back to the Conservatives as Labour’s polling improves and the fear of a Reform vote “letting Labour in” reasserts itself. On the left and among younger voters, the Greens are emerging as a more hopeful outlet for anger — offering radicalism that speaks to housing, climate and inequality rather than culture-war grievance.
Perhaps most damaging of all is a growing sense of fatigue. Reform thrives on outrage, but outrage is a finite resource. When every problem is framed as an invasion and every solution as deregulation, the message begins to sound less like truth-telling and more like a stuck record. Voters who once lent Farage their support as a protest are increasingly asking a simple question: what would these people actually do for me?
At the moment, Reform UK doesn’t have a convincing answer. And until it does, its slump looks less like a blip — and more like the start of a reckoning.
