Reform can take power if it works fast at becoming more professional, says Farage

Nigel Farage has said Reform can win the next election if it works at “breakneck speed” to become more professional.

The Reform leader closed out the first day of his party’s conference in Birmingham by declaring his party must mature in the years before the next national poll.

Reform picked up 4.1 million votes and had five MPs elected in July but its campaign was dogged by racism rows over past comments by a number of candidates.

Asked if he could replace Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister in 2029, Mr Farage said: “I don’t know, but I’ll try and we’ve got a five-year plan.

“I don’t believe we actually have to convert anybody. I think it’s out there, I think among existing Labour and Conservative voters and among non voters.

“Unless we get over the hurdles successfully, this isn’t going to happen.

“We have to work at breakneck speed to build branches, to find candidates, to vet them and achieve what I think we can.”

Mr Farage had used his keynote speech to promise the party will “vet candidates vigorously at all levels” ahead of next year’s county council elections.

He said: “We haven’t got time, we haven’t got room for a few extremists to wreck the work of a party that now has 80,000 members, and is rising by hundreds every single day.

“We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think that way, because we represent the silent majority of people in our great country.”

He said the party had “come of age” after its struggles with candidate selection, adding: “The infant that Reform UK was has been growing up… The party is an adult, and this weekend is when Reform comes of age.”

He acknowledged several racism rows had hurt the party’s prospects and caused it to poll five percentage points lower than Reform chiefs hoped.

Reform now has 266 constituency associations and Mr Farage said the party could learn from the ground campaigns run by the Liberal Democrats to win more seats at future ballots.

“The Liberal Democrats build branches, and the Liberal Democrats win seats at district, county and unity levels,” he said.

“The Liberal Democrats put literature through doors… They managed, with a vote much lower than ours, to win 72 seats in Parliament.”

As part of his push to professionalise his party, Mr Farage is signing away all of his shares in Reform, having owned 53 per cent of the company until now.

Ending his speech to a standing ovation as indoor fireworks went off and balloons fell from the ceiling, Mr Farage said: “We don’t care about skin colour, we don’t care about orientation, we couldn’t care who you are.

“We care whether you share the values of this country, we care about whether you’re obeying the rules. We’ll judge you on who you are as a person.

“Can we succeed, can we make history, are you going to help us make history?”

Speaking to reporters after his speech, Mr Farage said Labour now should be more afraid of him than the Conservatives and winning support from Sir Keir’s party was “without a shadow of a doubt” his priority.

Earlier in the day, Lee Anderson, Reform’s chief whip and MP for Ashfield, ripped up his TV licence payment letter in the main hall of the conference as he called the BBC a “mistake”.

Mr Anderson said: “Let’s be honest, friends, we have made mistakes in the past and when we make mistakes, we must apologise.

“And we have been responsible for some awful things, things like the BBC.

“Just a few weeks back, they sent me a reminder for my TV licence. Some of you may have seen that I ripped it up online. Guess what, they’ve sent me another.”

Asking the audience what he should do with the letter, he was met with loud chants of “rip it up”, which he then did on stage before putting the shreds in his pocket.

Ann Widdecombe, Reform’s justice spokesman, suggested in her own speech the prison overcrowding crisis could be solved by putting prisoners in disused holiday camps.