Britain’s Hard-Right Firebrand Has Big Plans for His Anti-Immigration Party

Nigel Farage, a Trump ally and Brexit champion, thinks Reform U.K. can become a major political force. At a conference on Friday, he sought to explain how.

A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.

On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant lawmaker whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.

In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage addressed supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election.

Declaring that this was the moment the party “comes of age,” he called on his enthusiastic audience to campaign and build networks of support across the country, telling them that the “sky is the limit.”

There had, he added, never been a time of “greater disenchantment” with Labour, which won the election, or with the Conservatives, who lost it and whose brand was “broken.” Later, Mr. Farage told reporters that Labour-controlled regions were now his main target.

His ambitions for the party were clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?

Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.

“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.

Having divided the Conservatives in the 2010s with his campaigning on Brexit, Mr. Farage dealt a huge blow to the party in July by splitting the vote on the right, allowing Labour to win. “Nigel Farage is the reason that the Conservatives had their worst-ever election result in July. Not even a reason. The reason,” Professor Ford said.

But taking the party a step further could be a challenge, he added, because it “presumes a level of strategic thinking that generally isn’t Farage’s strong point: He likes big, bold plans, lots of excitement, lots of razzmatazz.”

In an interview with The New York Times in June, Mr. Farage said his party could challenge both mainstream parties in the next general election, which must take place by mid-2029. “Five years will give us a lot of time to build us a mass movement,” he said, adding, “Very quickly into a Labour government, the desire for real change will get bigger.”

When it was put to him that Reform had few of the organizational structures of a modern political party, he replied: “Absolutely.”

Reform was founded in 2018 as a private company — initially called The Brexit Party — with Mr. Farage owning a majority stake. In a video released on Thursday, he pledged to give up his shares, saying: “I am giving up control, I am giving it to the members.” One of the tasks on the conference agenda in Birmingham is to adopt a formal constitution.

Having largely relied on volunteers until now, rewarding loyalty over expertise, Reform has begun recruiting for a number of jobs, including a regional director for England, a management accountant, a membership manager, a graphic designer and a video editor.

The party has five lawmakers in Parliament, including Mr. Farage and the blunt-spoken Lee Anderson, a former coal miner whose inflammatory, Islamophobic language saw him suspended by the Conservative Party early this year. He then defected to Reform.

Much of the work in professionalizing Reform will likely fall to its chairman, Zia Yusuf, 37. Born in Scotland to parents who emigrated from Sri Lanka, he studied at the London School of Economics and worked for Goldman Sachs before making a fortune by founding and selling a luxury concierge service.

On Friday Mr. Farage called on his party to copy the strategy of the centrist Liberal Democrats, who won a smaller share of the vote than Mr. Farage’s party in July but secured 72 seats in Parliament. That was achieved by ruthlessly targeting areas where they had a realistic chance of winning.

Reform came second in 98 constituencies in July. Of those, 89 were won by Labour, often in the deindustrialized north and middle of England. The party will try to campaign aggressively in those areas, hoping to win over disenchanted voters amid rising disillusionment with the mainstream political parties.

Mr. Farage also sees an opportunity in elections to the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd, and the Scottish Parliament, both scheduled for 2026. Those contests take place under different voting systems, which award seats in proportion to the number of votes cast.

But the party’s many challenges include vetting candidates to exclude extremists and cranks. Mr. Cameron, the former prime minister, once described members of one of Mr. Farage’s earlier parties, the U.K. Independence Party, as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly.”

During this year’s election campaign, embarrassing revelations emerged about one Reform candidate who said that Britain should have “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality” in the Second World War, and another who used antisemitic tropes.

On Friday Mr. Farage said that amateurism had let down Reform in the past, adding: “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots.” It was left to other speakers to rail against an array of targets, including illegal immigrants, climate protesters, trans activists, the BBC, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

But perhaps the biggest question surrounds Mr. Farage himself. He wavered before deciding to run for Parliament this year, confessing doubts as to whether he wanted to spend time in Clacton, the seaside area he now represents. He appears regularly as a presenter on GB News, a right-leaning TV channel, and recently declared earnings of almost £98,000 a month (about $131,000) from those appearances.

Gawain Towler, a spokesman for Reform U.K., said Mr. Farage’s recent trips to the United States were arranged months ago, when the general election was expected to be held later in the year. He said Mr. Farage was now committed to building up his party and campaigning against immigration and against government plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Yet while he is the party’s undisputed star, Mr. Farage is a divisive politician. In one pre-election interview, he said the expansion of the European Union and NATO had provoked the war in Ukraine, prompting widespread criticism. During riots in August that were fueled by far-right conspiracies about the murder of three young girls, he was accused of stoking the violence by questioning whether “the truth” had been withheld by the authorities.

“Having him as your frontman ensures that you get media attention whenever you want it,” Professor Ford said. But, he added: “There are an awful lot of people — including quite a lot of Tory voters — who just don’t like the guy at all.”

Our Coverage of U.S. Immigration

• America’s Brutal Visa Lottery: For Chinese seeking educational opportunity, the United States has long been the top spot, but as more want to stay to work, their paths are full of roadblocks.
• A Migrant Family’s Struggles: Margarita Solito and her family fled violence and poverty in El Salvador, hoping to build a better life in San Francisco. The city often wasn’t what they thought it would be.
• Home-Buying Assistance: Gov. Gavin Newsom of California rejected a Democratic proposal that would have extended first-time home-buyer loans to some undocumented immigrants. Republicans had widely criticized the bill.
• When One Partner Is Deported: American citizens whose spouses have been deported face wrenching decisions on what is best for their future, especially when they have children.
• Asylum Restrictions: The Biden administration is considering actions that would make the president’s tough but temporary asylum restrictions almost impossible to lift, essentially turning what had been a short-term fix into a central feature of the asylum system in America.