Once-fringe agitator Nigel Farage returns to U.K. election fray in serious threat to ruling Conservatives

Open this photo in gallery:

Nigel Farage strode across the small stage to the thumping sound of Eminem’s Without Me as spotlights swirled, fireworks flared and the crowd cheered.

The 800-seat Princes Theatre in Clacton-on-Sea, on England’s southeast coast, was nearly full on a balmy Tuesday evening, and some supporters had waited in line for an hour to see their political hero.

“I just like him,” said Amanda Woods, who left work early to hear him speak. “He just says how it is.”

For the next hour, Mr. Farage regaled the audience with his usual mix of self-deprecating humour and dire warnings about how excess immigration was ruining the country.

“I believe today the biggest single problem this country faces is the population explosion,” he told the crowd. “And I put it to you that our quality of life has diminished for every single one of us as a result of this population explosion.”

Mr. Farage, 60, has been a political agitator for nearly 30 years and famously led the charge to pull Britain out of the European Union. Now he’s shaking up the current election campaign and posing a serious threat to the ruling Conservatives when voters head to the polls on July 4.

Until a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Farage had been largely a fringe figure during elections, and none of his political parties – he’s led three – had ever gained much traction with voters. He quit front-line politics in 2020 after the U.K. formally left the EU and turned his attention to broadcasting, taking on big banks and championing Donald Trump.

When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called an early election last month, Mr. Farage initially said he wouldn’t run as a candidate. He changed his mind a few days later and took over the helm of Reform UK, a party he co-founded three years ago. He also announced plans to run in Clacton, a riding that overwhelmingly supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Since then Reform’s support has steadily climbed in most opinion polls, and some surveys have put the party neck and neck with Mr. Sunak’s Tories.

Open this photo in gallery:

Mr. Farage has tapped into the country’s deep dissatisfaction with the Conservatives, who have been in power for 14 years, and a growing discontent with establishment parties. While both Reform and the Conservatives trail the Labour Party, which has a 20-point lead in the polls, Mr. Farage believes that within five years Reform will replace the Conservatives as the country’s main opposition.

He’s drawn inspiration from Preston Manning and the Reform Party of Canada, which helped usher out the Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s. The PCs were decimated in the 1993 election as disaffected Tory voters flocked to Reform in the West and the newly formed Bloc Québécois in the East. The PCs fell from 157 seats to just two, while Reform soared from one seat to 52 and the BQ won 54.

“I met Preston a few years ago and I watched what they did,” Mr. Farage told reporters after Tuesday’s rally. He even rebranded his former Brexit Party as Reform UK “thinking very much of our Canadian cousins.”

Canada’s Reformers “didn’t waver,” he added. “They didn’t listen to the criticism, and in the end they sort of reverse took over the old Conservative Party. They are the model.”

The comparison to Canada wasn’t lost on Tracy Neill, a long-time Conservative in Clacton who is fed up with the Tories and plans to vote Reform. She knew all about Canada’s Reform Party and hopes Mr. Farage will have similar success in supplanting Britain’s Conservatives.

“We need a good shake-up,” she said as she waited for an autograph from Mr. Farage. The Conservatives “are just not listening to people like me, and I believe we are the majority.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Mr. Farage still faces many challenges. He’s failed to win a seat in Parliament seven times, and Clacton’s incumbent MP, Conservative Giles Watling, won 72 per cent of the vote in the last election, in 2019.

Reform’s policies, which include strict limits on immigration, slashing foreign aid, steep tax cuts and scrapping programs to reduce carbon emissions, have also faced criticism from analysts who say they are unworkable.

And unlike Mr. Manning’s Reform Party, which had a base of supporters in Western Canada, Reform UK’s supporters are spread across the country. That means the party will likely win a substantial number of votes but fail to elect many MPs.

“The threat that Reform poses in the U.K. is less parliamentary and more just in terms of the Conservatives’ voter base,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.

Dr. Bale said it’s possible Mr. Farage could eventually merge Reform with the Conservatives and become the party’s leader. “There are polls which indicate that members of the Conservative Party will actually welcome him as their leader.”

Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, doubts Reform UK will win more than a handful of seats. “So the main net effect of Farage’s presence in this campaign on the House of Commons that follows will not be to destroy the Conservatives and replace them with Reform UK. It will just be to destroy the Conservatives.”

Dr. Ford noted that the Tories could make a comeback in the next election without Mr. Farage, given the volatile nature of British politics. He pointed out that Labour fell to its lowest seat total since 1935 in the last election, and polling shows it’s expected to win a massive majority on July 4.

Whatever happens across the country on voting day, Peter Harris is confident Mr. Farage will win Clacton. Mr. Harris is a local councillor who quit the Conservative Party last fall and is now helping run Mr. Farage’s campaign in the riding.

“Who better to represent this district than Mr. Brexit himself?” he asked.