Five Tribes That Can Give Nigel Farage the Keys to Downing Street
4th October 2025
There’s no time of year sadder than the political perineum. The Labour Party conference, like Christmas, has been and gone. The Conservative Party conference, like the always underwhelming New Year’s Eve, is yet to arrive. What are we meant to do with ourselves? There’s no Quality Street lying about, no darts on the telly either.
Well, while we wait, here’s a fun little game. What we do know is that this next week, like the next four years, will be defined by how the two main parties go about trying to free themselves from the terrible jaws of Nigel Farage. Reform UK began party conference season miles ahead in the polls. They will almost certainly end it still miles ahead in the polls. Can they be beaten? There is plenty of evidence to suggest they can. But how might each party go about doing it?
Some polling and research done recently by Best for Britain suggests that Reform voters are not the monolithic, immigrant hotel protesting, flag to lamppost-tying homogenous mass they are sometimes considered to be. They divide into five distinct tribes. Some, for example, are so busy worrying about the NHS that they don’t even have time to paint their local roundabout with a cross of St George. The backbench Labour MP and occasional era-defining note-leaver Liam Byrne has also assigned each tribe their own bespoke cocktail of grievance, made from varying quantities of different grievances such as anger, pessimism and a sense of unfairness.
So how might Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch go about luring these angry tribes people back where they belong? And how might they be getting it wrong?