But Farage’s party’s string of second-place finishes, particularly across traditionally Labour seats which fell to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, will give the incoming government the heebie-jeebies.
If Starmer fails to bring about the change and improve voters’ lives as he promises, who will Reform voters punish?
Farage was explicit about who he’ll be gunning for in the next election, which must be held by 2029. “We’re coming for Labour — be in no doubt about that,” he said in his victory speech in Clacton leisure center. “This is the first steps in something which is going to stun all of you.”
Labour will argue that Farage’s better-than-expected showing should not detract from the party’s extraordinary success in coming back from its worst-ever defeat less than five years ago to its greatest showing since 1997. And, indeed, it was a great victory.
If you’d told Starmer’s top team even a year ago that the governing Conservatives would crash to an abject defeat, losing two-thirds of their MPs, a string of ministers including a number of Cabinet ministers, and generally become a national laughing stock, they’d have scoffed.
Starmer could be forgiven for feeling elated after he turned around a party which had pretty much become unelectable under its former leader, hard-left Jeremy Corbyn.
