(June 19): The emphatic defeat suffered by Nigel Farage’s Reform party in Thursday’s Makerfield by-election laid bare political handicaps that threaten his ambition to reach 10 Downing Street.
Despite sweeping up all the seats on offer in the area’s local elections just six weeks ago, Reform sank to a heavier-than-expected defeat in the standalone parliamentary election. While the popularity of Labour’s Andy Burnham was key to that result, Reform’s Robert Kenyon was also hampered by old social media posts that were received as sexist and homophobic.
A senior Reform official said the party had to recruit better candidates — what he called a need to professionalise. The vote also highlighted a gender gap resulting from a failure to appeal to women. A pre-election Survation poll showed women supported Burnham over Kenyon by 53% to 32%. Men, by contrast, preferred Kenyon to Burnham by a hefty margin.
Burnham ultimately won 54.8% of the vote, with Kenyon taking 34.5%. “This is unarguably Reform’s worst night since the General Election,” Luke Tryl, UK director of the polling and research organization More in Common, said in a post on X.
The emphatic defeat suffered by Nigel Farage’s Reform party in Thursday’s Makerfield by-election laid bare political handicaps that threaten his ambition to reach 10 Downing Street.
The loss highlights the dilemma for Reform, which is also facing a threat from its own right flank. The upstart Restore Britain party, founded this year by Farage’s former-colleague-turned-nemesis Rupert Lowe, gained 6.8% of the vote.
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“The danger is that Restore carries on annoying them, and so they try to ‘out-Restore’ Restore,” said Damien Lyons Lowe, chief executive of pollster Survation and a former adviser to Farage. “They might get pulled to the right by Restore, and that would be a strategic misstep. They should probably just try and ignore them.”
Several Reform officials and donors rued the choice of Kenyon as a candidate and the failure to properly vet him. It’s just one instance of the right-wing party’s teething problems as its popularity has soared.
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Reform MP Sarah Pochin said statistics that indicate women are more likely to be abused by their male partner following a football loss.
Reform has topped national polls for more than a year, despite only having eight Members of Parliament. The party is just eight years old — five under its current name — and has little senior campaigning experience.
Some inside the party have compared its frenetic and often fraught energy to that of a startup, as it rushes to find high-quality staff, learns through making mistakes, and demands total dedication from its employees in the pursuit of growth.
The party’s positioning towards women has also been a longstanding issue, starting with Farage himself. The leader, who has been married twice and is now separated from his second wife, has repeatedly joked about his own womanising behaviour in the past.
Asked last year if Reform could do with more women in senior roles, he laughed and said: “I’ve spent my entire life trying to appeal to women — I’ve had the odd success, here and there.”
Several women who spoke to Bloomberg in Makerfield in the weeks before the election said they had been put off the party by its poor record on their rights.
Hannah Cross, 31, said she’d “looked into” Reform but couldn’t vote for them because they’d restrict women’s freedoms. She expressed concerns that Reform might also “take away gay rights, and it’s a shame really because everyone’s fought for that.”
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During the campaign in Makerfield, Kenyon was found to have made a number of off-colour statements about women on social media. In 2021, Kenyon responded to a sexually graphic post on X directed at former TV presenter Carol Vorderman by writing: “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.” He had also suggested that women falsely claim to have been raped in order to get abortions, and that women couldn’t drive.
Angela Catterall, 75, said she wouldn’t vote for Reform because of that record. “There’s his Carol Vorderman comments, his comments about women claiming they’ve been raped,” she said.
On Friday, in the aftermath of England’s first World Cup Game, Reform MP Sarah Pochin attempted to raise awareness about domestic violence by posting a video clip on X captioned: “For the sake of women’s safety we need England to keep winning.”
She highlighted statistics that indicate women are more likely to be abused by their male partner following a football loss. “England won the football last night and thank goodness they did, because on the occasions that England lose their football matches, the instances of domestic violence go through the roof,” she said in the 13-second clip. “So boys, keep winning.”
Refuge, the UK’s largest charity helping victims of abuse, issued a statement by email saying it was “deeply concerned” by the “highly inappropriate social media post,” and added: “This is not only misleading, but could allow perpetrators to evade accountability.”
Reform tried to recover some of its support with women in the days leading up to the Makerfield vote, announcing its intention to create a “Women and Motherhood Protection Act” were it to gain a majority in government. That’s after it drew criticism for vowing to scrap the UK’s longstanding Equality Act, which gives protections based on characteristics such as sex, race and pregnancy.
Survation’s Lowe said Reform was aware of that weakness — even in his previous role as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). “They’ve always had a greater lead amongst men than women, and it’s always been a project,” he said. “In the UKIP days, they would often have a bias toward picking a female candidate in a by-election.”
He added that had there been a “strong female candidate at their disposal” in Makerfield, Reform probably would have picked her.
“The Makerfield by-election was a dramatic, emphatic win for Andy Burnham with a vote share that nobody could quite see coming,” said Farage after the result.
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