The man who would replace Britain’s Conservative Party holds forth on immigration, social unrest, the “mum vote,” and what’s “far right” these days.

My first question to Nigel Farage when I met him at Reform UK’s HQ high up in Millbank Tower by the Thames was to wonder if he fancied a pint.

“I’d love to, but I’m absolutely up to my…” He paused. “Things are happening.”
“Yes, it’s kind of your summer in a way isn’t it? Everything seems to be coming together for you.”

Reform UK has only got five members in Britain’s Parliament, but it is well ahead in the polls as we move toward next year’s local elections in May. If the 2029 general elections were held today, Reform would capture 34 percent of the vote, Labour 25 percent, and the Conservatives a dismal 15 percent, according to a June Ipsos poll.

“There are two factors in that: One is to be lucky with your enemies. And I’m jolly lucky with my enemies,” Farage said, before launching into an elongated chuckle.

He singled out as proof of this Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s reply at the last Question Time, before Parliament’s summer recess, when asked where he would put the “tens of thousands of aggressive males” coming across the Channel. Just as they were during the migrant surge in the United States, migrants were housed in UK hotels at taxpayer expense; Starmer had pledged in his 2024 election manifesto to stop that practice. The UK government spent £1.3 billion during the last year to house asylum seekers in 210 hotels, where 32,000 are still living. That’s £40,625 (US$55,000) a year per migrant, which is not much less than the annual tuition for London’s most exclusive boarding schools.

“Starmer said it’ll be ok, because there’s lots of social housing in the country. There’s almost none. And I looked at his eyes and he didn’t look right,” Farage said. “He did not look right.… So, I’m lucky with him.”

As for the Conservative Party, Farage noted Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch’s desperate attempt to reshuffle her shadow cabinet was met with public indifference. A popular UK radio presenter “responded to Kemi’s reshuffle by saying NO ONE IS LISTENING!”, Farage shouted triumphantly. “And they’re not. So I’m lucky with the opposition.”

He said the second factor in his success is the rapid growth of his political party, Reform UK, formerly called the Brexit Party until Farage changed its name in 2021. Crucial to its growth is the “mum vote,” which is switching increasingly to Reform as women have grown fearful of the threat that mass immigration poses to their safety. This has been most visibly demonstrated at the recent protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, especially in Epping in Essex and London’s Canary Wharf.

A disturbing 41 percent of those charged with sex crimes in London in 2024 were foreign nationals, according to data obtained by the think tank Centre for Migration Control under a Freedom of Information request from the Metropolitan Police.

Foreign nationals account for one quarter of the population of London, compared to 16 percent of the country as a whole, but are a growing minority. And if it’s assumed that those whose nationality is impossible to determine were foreign as well, then the figure goes up to 47 percent.

“The party, the brand, is now as big as I am,” Farage said.
“Why?”
“Because we’ve broadened, because we’ve pushed people forwards … because, even this week, we’ve had attractive new members joining, including a very stylish lady…”

He was referring to Laura Anne Jones, Conservative member of the Welsh parliament, known as the Senedd, who had just defected to become Reform’s first member there.

“I saw her picture, a beautiful woman,” I said.
“I’d better not comment on that… but certainly stylish.”
“A well-chosen word.”
“Quite. I’m not completely stupid.”

Farage also mentioned Laila Cunningham, a Conservative Westminster councilor who defected to Reform in June, stating that she “can’t defend failure anymore,” and Sarah Pochin, a Reform MP for Runcorn. Both women, one a former Crown Prosecution Service lawyer and mother of seven, the other a former magistrate and mother of two, flanked Farage at the recent launch of Reform’s “Britain Is Lawless” summer campaign on crime.

There, he said of the recent angry protests against the presence of asylum seekers put up for free in The Bell Inn in Epping, one of whom has been charged with sexually assaulting a local teenage girl: “Do I understand the people of Epping? You bet your life I do. I’m sitting next to two working mothers.”

He also said that because of mass immigration, Britain is “close to civil disobedience on a vast scale” this summer.

I asked whether “the great summer” Reform is enjoying is linked to that rising unrest.
“Interestingly, I was very, very cautious in terms of the words I used,” Farage said. “I was very, very clear that it’s not what I want to see. But you open The Daily Mail and there’s Professor Frank Furedi saying in the main op-ed that this is a tinderbox. Even Downing Street … [Deputy Prime Minister Angela] Rayner saying we’re worried about the social fabric.”

Many on the left and in the media brand as “far right” the protesters outside the hotels where asylum seekers are housed at the taxpayer’s expense, but most are just local people at their wits’ end, and many women. Their makeshift, handwritten placards betray the spontaneous nature of their protests, which are in sharp contrast to the slickly produced ones of the counter protesters from left-wing activist groups such as Stand Up to Racism.

The anger of the protesters at the threat they feel asylum seekers present economically, culturally, and physically, and the despair they feel at the accusation from so many on the left that they are far-right extremists is summed up by their slogans that proclaim: “STOP CALLING US FAR RIGHT. PROTECT OUR WOMEN AND CHILDREN.”

“I think the big one on this is the mum vote, the protest in Epping was about mums,” Farage said. “I know lots of mums who went to that protest and live in Essex. It’s about the safety of women and girls on the streets.

“And it’s about the fact, and let’s be frank, there are people from certain parts of the world in which women are not even regarded as second-class citizens, they are merely commodities to be bought and sold,” he said. “And when you look at the fact that an Afghan living in Britain is 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than a British-born person, then you realize there is a problem.”

“The influx of young undocumented males into our country is a threat to women and girls.”

This prompted me to say that a taxi firm in Oxted, Surrey, to south of London, the nearest town to where my father lives, who I’d come to see and who would soon die just two days short of his 100th birthday, is run by Afghans. Oxted has traditionally been a true-blue Tory heartland in the Stockbroker Belt, just a few miles from Farage’s home in the village of Knockholt, across the county boundary in Kent.

“Again, we’re not saying every Afghan is evil—we’re not doing that, but we’re just saying there’s a propensity,” said Farage, carefully. “So the anger in Epping, the anger that’s going on in Canary Wharf, I promise you this is just starting.”

Instead of hotels, Reform will house asylum seekers in military bases awaiting deportation, he said.

But how will he stop the small boats?

“We will never solve this with ‘smash the gangs’ and ‘Rwanda’,” he whispers with a sarcastic cackle.

But former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, I point out—whom I spoke to in June for the Swiss news magazine Die Weltwoche—still feels the only answer is his failed Rwanda scheme, by which asylum seekers were to be sent to Rwanda, where their applications would be processed.

“Cobblers!” Farage exclaimed. “There was the airplane on the tarmac ready to fly, the first flight to Rwanda, and at 10 p.m. an unnamed single judge—who was probably a jurist and not a judge—at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg—a building I know well—said ‘non’.”

Well, okay, but why not just leave the European Convention on Human Rights (the treaty that set up the Court of Human Rights) to interpret and enforce it?

“Well. We’ll do it the first week.… And we must deport people.”
But how?

“David Blunkett [Home Secretary during Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s second term in office] did it, 47,000 a year, no problem at all.”

Really? Last year, Britain managed to deport just 8,000, though that was 2,000 more than in 2023. So how will he stop the small boats?

“No one who comes via this route will be free to roam the streets or ever be given refugee status. If that doesn’t stop them, then the boats will be taken back to France.”

Great, but how?

“Royal Marines.”

This begged many questions, such as what would happen if—as seems certain—the French refuse to take them back. But, conscious that my time was short, we moved on. After our interview, I pressed him on this question via digital message, but he declined to answer.

So far this year, a record 25,400 so-called asylum seekers have crossed the English Channel by small boat, up 50 percent from the same period in 2024. Since 2018, when figures were first recorded, more than 170,000 migrants have arrived in Britain by small boat. Often, the migrant dinghies are escorted into British waters by French naval vessels, where they transfer to British border patrol boats, which take them to Dover. It is, in fact, a taxpayer-funded taxi service.

The Channel boat people are an outrageous affront to the British sense of fair play. After all, what on earth is so bad with France?! It’s not a warzone, is it?

But the numbers of illegal immigrants arriving by boat are dwarfed by the many hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrive in Britain each year legally. Since the millennium, Britain’s population has grown by 10 million. Earlier this year, university researchers estimated that by 2063, white British people will be a minority in their own country.

The escalation in legal immigration began in earnest after Labour’s Tony Blair came to power in 1997, but reached astronomical levels under recent Tory governments. Between 1950 and 2000, net migration—the difference between those emigrating and immigrating—averaged 30,000 a year. Under Blair, it shot up to 300,000 a year, but got steadily worse under the Tories, peaking in the year to June 2023 at a staggering 906,000. This so-called “Boris Wave” was the result partly of Johnson relaxing the rules for student and work visas when he was prime minister.

“It is a catastrophe,” Farage said.

But the default view on the left is we need lots of migrants, I said, playing devil’s advocate, “to do the jobs we won’t do and to pay for our welfare and pensions.”

“No, no, no, this is all cobblers!” he retorted. “Of the last 3 million who came in from outside Europe under a Conservative government, only 20 percent are working.”

How did he know that?

“ONS (Office of National Statistics) stats. Mind-blowing stats. I am not anti-immigrant, far from it,” he said. “But I genuinely believe this population increase has devalued the quality of life of virtually everyone in the country: whether that is access to a [doctor’s] appointment … getting your kid into the local school … On the economics, it’s very simple: you increase the population by 10 million, your GDP increases, but your GDP per capita falls.

“These arguments I’ve been making for a very, very long time, for which I’ve been abused, had pints of beer chucked at me, and God knows what, are now mainstream. I have not moved, but the public has caught up with me,” he said.

How will he stop it?

“Very simple. You raise the bar, not lower the bar, which is what Boris did in the most incredible way—the Boris Wave.”

Other data show that even when migrants are working unskilled jobs, which is the most common situation, their cost to the state outweighs their benefit. A low-skilled migrant costs the British taxpayer an average of £150,000 (US$202,000) by the time they reach pensionable age, according to a 2024 report by Britain’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent, state-funded scrutineer of public expenditure—and £500,000 (US$672,000) if they make it to 80. This is the first time such information has been made available to the public.

So what will he do about it?

“We will not allow your third cousin from the Punjab aged 72 who will be a big, big—sorry!—but a big problem for the NHS—sorry, it ain’t going to happen.”

But what about the second cousin?

“They’re not coming. We’ve had enough! We literally can’t go on like this. The public knows it.”

I wonder what he would do to stop widespread benefit fraud by migrants. His answer was brutally simple.

“No foreign national should be entitled to any benefits, full stop.”

Would he actually cancel their benefits?

“Whatever the protests. You have to work, pay taxes, and obey the law for five years to be entitled. And I think that’s fair and reasonable and what most reasonable countries around the world would do.”

Reform supports Rudy Giuliani’s highly successful zero-tolerance policing when New York mayor in the 1990s. “The broken windows theory works, to which we subscribe wholly,” Farage said.

But do the police?

“The men and women coppers who overwhelmingly vote for us do.”
How do you know they vote for you?

“Those who wear uniform on behalf of this country, overwhelmingly vote for us.”

Do their bosses?

“That’s a very different question.”

There is, I suggest, an unholy alliance between the bosses and the left, a bit like the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.

“Do you know, it was so funny, I went to the 80th anniversary of D-Day,” Farage said.

“All the guys in uniform, all the ex-para[trooper]s, all wanted to have pictures and a chat with me, and the officers told them not to do so.”

Even in the armed forces?

“Well, it’s the woke corporate takeover of everything in our country. It’s the extension of what Blair did,” he said. “Why is MI6 flying the pride flag?!”

“Blairism fundamentally changed so much of our managerial governing classes, and we are going to reverse it all,” he continued. “The extraordinary thing about all this is why has it all been allowed to happen? Conservative cowardice! Absolute cowardice!”

Politicians say ad nauseam that they’ll sort out crime, so why would it be any different with him, I wondered.

“Because I’m not a politician. I don’t need to be doing this.”
“I wanted to ask you why you bother. The workload, the energy, the insults, the adulation as well,” I said.
“I don’t give a bugger about the insults. I couldn’t care less.”
“What about the workload?”
“Massive. Absolutely massive. Long days. Long bloody days.”
“Do you really get up at 4:30 a.m., as I’ve read?”
“Generally, yeah.”
“Good God! How many hours do you sleep?”
“I haven’t got time for that sort of nonsense.”

He continued, “If you’re doing something because you love what you’re doing, if you’re doing something because there’s a purpose to it, if you’re doing something because you’re climbing the mountain, you can do almost anything.”

“The more difficult thing—and I’ll admit this—is when you get to the top, and then life became a lot more difficult. I’ve climbed mountains and it’s very jolly and then you’re there [at the summit] and it’s covered in cloud and you say, ‘What’s going on?’ I admit that.”

Farage believes that British politics is undergoing the most fundamental change for a century.

“Not since the First World War has an established party been replaced, which effectively Labour did post-1918 with the Liberals. And you’ve got a Conservative Party that’s been there in a recognizable form for 200 years, and I genuinely look you in the eye and tell you we are replacing them.”

My last question was: So if you are not far-right, who is?

“Ask the BBC. Virtually everybody!”
“But, are you?”
“No one did more to beat the far right in Britain than me. I believe that the agenda I stand for is the commonsense middle.”