Farage Counts Down to Reform Overtaking Conservatives as Largest UK Right-Wing Party Getty Images

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is on the cusp over overtaking the legacy Conservative Party in paid-up members, launching a live tracker for the countdown.

Reform UK has over 121,000 members at the time of going to press on Monday, putting it within striking distance of overtaking the Conservative Party, reckoned to have some 131,680 members, shortly. The party has experienced strong growth in recent months, and is making something of an event out of the race to beat the Tories, launching a live membership tracker.

Announcing the stunt, leader Nigel Farage remarked: “we’ll track daily what our membership numbers are, you’ll see in live time as they go up… I reckon we’re going to [surpass the Conservatives] pretty soon”.

The Conservative Party is the oldest political party in the United Kingdom and has a case to be called the oldest political party in the world. It is certainly the most successful political party in British history: in the past 100 years, a Conservative government has been in power for all or part of 70 of them.

Yet years of serious neglect of its own voters, illustrated best by robust rhetoric on border control and taxes while actually throwing the borders open to levels of mass migration never before seen in British history and historic-high levels of taxation — talking right while governing left — has seen the brand severely tarnished.

Complete political realignment with a new party being admitted into the British two-party system is exceedingly rare, and last happened a century ago. But Farage insists the conditions may be ripe.

British bookmakers say Mr Farage is the favorite to be the next Prime Minister.

Certainly, Reform UK is the fastest-growing UK political party. It has 30,000 members in early June, rising to 100,000 by late November, little less than a month ago. While the vast majority of members have paid £25 each to the party, last week Mr Farage launched a special for young voters, welcoming under-25s with a special £10 deal.

That saw a fresh surge of sign-ups, with 1,000 new members in just 48 hours by Saturday. The party had climbed to 118,000 members by Sunday and today the live tracker proclaims 121,096 members at time of publication.

In terms of the proclaimed goal, Reform are using the 131,680 figure for Tory membership given by the Conservative Party itself at the time of the election of its latest leader, Kemi Badenoch in November. Per Conservative Party rules, this figure would include all paid-up individuals who had been members for at least 90 days prior to the ballot.

While Reform snaps at the heels of the ancient Conservative party, the membership figures of both remain far behind the Labour Party which boasts over 300,000, and far further still behind the support parties could once command in the recent past, with millions signed up in post-war Britain.

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