Nigel Farage’s popularity is in freefall. The latest net approval ratings from More in Common put the Reform UK leader on -32% — his lowest level since the 2024 general election. Now that Andy Burnham has replaced Keir Starmer, whose net popularity slid to -56 % last month, it also makes Farage by far the most unpopular major party leader.

The Election Maps polling average shows that the commanding lead that Reform enjoyed a year ago has diminished to almost nothing — or less than nothing in the latest Survation and BMG polls, both of which put Labour back in first place.

To cap off a miserable week for Reform, the party came a distant second in the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election — in contrast to their first place across the same area at the local elections in May.

The question is no longer whether support for the party has hit a ceiling, but how far they’ll fall before they find their floor.

That is not all: polling trends now confirm that the commanding lead Reform enjoyed a year ago has diminished to almost nothing — or less than nothing in the latest Survation poll, which puts Labour back in first place. This is no longer a matter of whether support for Farage’s party has hit a ceiling. Evidently, it’s now falling — with the key question concerning the location of the floor.

It would be relatively comforting for Reformers if they could blame their retreat on the new Prime Minister’s honeymoon. In that regard, they can point to the fact that all the opposition party leaders have seen their ratings suffer since Andy Burnham took over. However, while Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey and Zack Polanski have slipped by a few notches, Farage’s net approval has plummeted by 10 percentage points in a fortnight.

It’s therefore reasonable to conclude that the Reform funding row is cutting through, and that the Clacton by-election farce has only made things worse. Ominously for Farage, the story about his party’s shady finances keeps sprouting new legs — and that’s before we get to the outcome of the current investigations. In other words, this is looking a lot like Partygate, involving a tangled mess of multiplying allegations focused on an embattled leader.

So, like Boris Johnson before him, has Farage become a liability to his party? Yes — but also no, because Reform can hardly do without him, even in his damaged state. It’s like saying that the hull of the Titanic was a liability after it hit the iceberg.

Reform’s lack of an alternative is underlined by its underwhelming efforts to deepen its talent pool. According to James Heale of The Spectator, “Reform’s shadow cabinet [is] set to be expanded at party conference, with two or three more names added.” But this was a process that began back in February. The first four appointments — Robert Jenrick, Zia Yusuf, Richard Tice and Suella Braverman — were followed by… nothing. Most parties manage to complete a top team over the space of a few days, but it’s been 165-days-and-counting for Reform.

The other not-so-big personnel announcement of the week was the defection of Julian Brazier — a 73-year-old Tory ex-MP who lost his Canterbury constituency to Rosie Duffield in 2017. Tellingly, Farage was willing to relax his ban on “current and former” Conservative parliamentarians to let him in.

Perhaps the biggest problem for Farage is that Kemi Badenoch is in a better position than he is to adapt to the Burnham era. Unlike her rival on the Right, she doesn’t have a funding scandal or a pointless summer by-election to distract her. Instead, she’s free to refresh her own top team in response to the new government. And to that end, she has rising stars including Nick Timothy, Claire Coutinho, Neil O’Brien and Katie Lam ready and waiting in the Commons to take the key positions around her.

Though, it might not be long before the shine comes off Burnham, Reform should not assume that this lost support will be coming back its way.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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