Nigel Farage, a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, a driving force behind Brexit and Britain’s most notorious political agitator, has been elected to Parliament for the first time.
The new insurgent party he leads, Reform UK, was predicted in outgoing national polls to win four seats, more than many analysts had predicted, in an electoral system that usually punishes small parties. His party was supported on an anti-immigration platform.
Mr Farage won by a wide margin in Clacton, a declining seaside town, where pre-election opinion polls had suggested he had a strong chance of winning. He had tried and failed seven times before being elected to Parliament.
“The establishment is terrified, the Tories are terrified,” Mr Farage gushed in a speech last month, referring to the ruling party. Britain was “a broken nation,” he added, attacking targets ranging from asylum seekers to the BBC.
A divisive and pugilistic figure as well as a skilled communicator, Mr Farage, 60, helped the Conservatives secure a landslide victory in the last general election by failing to field his Brexit Party candidates in many key areas.
This election, his plan was different: destroy the Tories by stealing a large portion of their vote, then replace — or take over — the party’s remnants. Earlier in the campaign, when a reporter asked him if he wanted to merge his fledgling party with the Conservatives, he replied: “More like a takeover, my boy.”
Reform UK has come under fire in recent weeks after several of its candidates were accused of making inflammatory statements. One said Britain should have remained neutral in the fight against the Nazis; another used anti-Semitic tropes, saying Jewish groups were “agitating for the mass importation of Muslims into England.”
The party blamed some of its problems on teething troubles, dropped some candidates, and threatened legal action against a private company that had paid to vet candidates.
Last week, an undercover investigation by the UK's Channel 4 News secretly filmed Reform activists in Clacton using racist and homophobic language, with one even using a slur to describe Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
But for two decades he has shaped British political debate, spearheading the Brexit cause, outflanking the Conservatives and pushing them further to the right.