Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is looking more and more like the Conservative Party by the day.
Former Tories have been sneaking into the arch-Brexiteer’s faction over the last year, but it is only since the start of 2026 that this trickle has turned into a torrent. Starting with the former Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi on 15 January, Farage has since onboarded Shadow Foreign Office Minister Andrew Rosindell, Shadow Secretary of State Robert Jenrick, and even former Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
These new acquisitions have not been universally popular. Since gorging on the decaying corpse of the UK centre-right, many of the groups’ more hardline elements have accused Farage of betraying his principles. After all, they argue, it was the Tories that brought in the worst of the woke agenda that Reform is fighting against. Braverman and Zahawi, in particular, have frequently been targets of attacks by the party, with both having been in power during the start of the current UK migrant crisis, as well as the country’s latest anti-free speech crackdown via the Online Safety Act.
‘It was the Tories that brought in the worst of the woke agenda that Reform is fighting against’
By all accounts, these politicians have pushed terrible policies while serving with the Conservatives. So why does Farage want them?
Simple: He doesn’t actually want them. But he does need them.
The Tories, by all metrics, were a disaster for the UK, with the party overseeing a massive drop in the country’s economic, social and political well-being. But this decline has accelerated into outright freefall under Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. With all attempts to tax the rich enough to pull the country out of its current tailspin having failed, talk of an IMF bailout seems to be on everyone’s lips.
It didn’t exactly help that the current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, broke down crying in the House of Commons last year.
All of these failures have turned Britain’s decline into a public spectacle, with Americans in particular having developed an almost lurid fascination with the island’s slow and painful demise. The growing pornification of the country is not exactly helping things, with the strange dichotomy of the ever-more ghetto-Islamified UK Left facing off against the ever-more porn-obsessed right having developed into a strange cultural-aesthetic zeitgeist, known commonly as ‘Yookay’.
It’s amid this maelstrom of madness that Britain is turning to Farage for salvation. After 100 years of two-party rule, Reform UK is now massively outpolling both the Tories and Labour. It is now almost an absolute certainty that Farage will be the country’s next non-Labour Prime Minister, though whether he will rule with Reform alone or with some sort of unholy coalition is still up in the air.
But the truth is, Reform UK is not ready to rule. This is not a slight against the party. Founded in 2018 as a single-issue project, the faction has not even existed for a decade. Expecting such an outfit to have the infrastructure and experience needed to run a country would be completely unfair.
But Reform won’t need to run the UK. Reform will need to save it from armageddon. Chances are, by the time Farage enters Number 10, Britain will be facing down one of its most dire crises since the 1800 Act of Union. One that could, if Farage is not careful, see the entire country cease to exist as the smaller nations of the UK make a break for the door.
And to avert this crisis, Farage will need to rely on a party that can barely go a month without one of its candidates becoming embroiled in a scandal over stupid social media posts.
The bottom line is that Farage needs technocrats. And since people capable of running nations do not exactly grow on trees, that means he has little choice other than to start raiding other parties for their so-called experts.
‘But Reform won’t need to run the UK. Reform will need to save it from armageddon’
As such, he needs to start poaching their leadership class. Even if those leaders are not very good at their job.
But will this be enough to save the Yookay?
Probably not.
Zahawi, Jenrick and Braverman—along with the former Tory staff they’ll likely drag with them—will help Reform professionalize. But the core issue remains that none of these former bigwigs were ever exactly exceptional at their jobs. At best, they were functional. At worst, they were disasters while in office.
And Farage is now relying on them to save Britain.
It’s not going to work. But the truth is, out of all of the bad moves available to the Reform UK leader, this is probably the least terrible among them. So, he is right to at least try to use this band of misfits to rescue his country.
But be under no illusion—his efforts will almost certainly fail.
Just don’t blame him when they do.
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