Anyone who thinks that ordinary voters don’t care about the Nigel Farage funding row are deluding themselves. Both the Telegraph and the Daily Mail have covered the new Opinium poll that shows the Reform UK leader’s approval rating dropping to its lowest level since the 2024 general election. At -27 points, it is well below those of Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey, Andy Burnham and even Zack Polanski. While this won’t bring Reform’s momentum to a grinding halt, that’s only because it’s stalled already.

The party’s kill-the-Tories strategy had been based on the expectation that its gains in the May local elections would have the same impact as last year’s — a big boost to Reform’s poll ratings at the expense of the Conservatives. Now, two months on, that clearly hasn’t happened.

Even without the standards investigation and the farcical approaching by-election in Clacton, then, Reform would be in trouble. Getting out of this bind has to begin with an admission of fallibility. Dominic Cummings was right when he predicted earlier this year that the establishment would do everything it could to “smash the absolute living shit out of Farage”. But that being the case, Reform’s leader shouldn’t have handed the enemy a stick with which to beat him.

There absolutely is a need to raise funds to provide for security — the dreadful apparent murder of Ann Widdecombe last week has put that beyond doubt. But instead of doing it through an undeclared personal donation, the party should have very visibly set up a dedicated trust. Indeed, Reform should go out of its way to practice transparency in every regard — and then use it to shame politicians from the mainstream parties.

Letting the light in is just the start of what Reform needs to do. The bigger task is a complete rethink of its political positioning. That’s especially true with regard to the Tories. An attitude of pointless aggression, while paradoxically pursuing a near-identical set of policies, hasn’t worked. It’s time for Reform to try something different on both counts.

In case the party hasn’t noticed, it is now the main opposition to Labour across most of the North of England and the Midlands. Reform should act like it by developing an ambitious pro-growth policy program for left-behind Britain. That means putting hard-nosed industrial strategy before gimmicky tax cuts like the one the party wrongly imagined would win it the Makerfield by-election last month. At the 2019 general election, the Conservatives won Labour seats across the Red Wall with a pledge to level up the land. But Boris Johnson allowed Rishi Sunak and others to starve that mission of the necessary investment. Is Farage going to let Robert Jenrick make the same mistake?

With Reform’s current political offer apparently hitting a ceiling, the party should look at extending its appeal to untapped voter demographics. For instance, its support among younger people is markedly lower than for populist parties in other countries. A radical program to make home ownership affordable again might shift perceptions. After 20 years of leading populist parties, Farage won’t like moving out of his comfort zone. But just how comfortable is he stuck where he is?

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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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