How Donald Trump’s rhetoric seeped into the Reform conference

The day before he strode on the stage to deliver a speech on the first day of Reform’s party conference, Nigel Farage posted a picture on his X.

He’s standing in a blue suit behind the Resolute Desk in the White House, beside the seated Donald Trump.

There’s no shortage of pictures like this around the place, with the Reform leader and the US President posing together. If anything, the latest was a little more formal than the previous grin-and-thumbs-up versions.

But across the two days of conference at Birmingham’s NEC, it became clear that this snap was not all Farage was bringing back from Washington.

Even if he was rarely mentioned by name, Trump and Trumpian politics permeated the event.

It wasn’t hard to find Reform fans wandering around with ‘Make Britain Great Again’ baseball caps, an adaptation of the Maga hat made famous by the President – in the party’s signature teal, rather than Republican red.

In the closing minutes of the conference, just before Farage arrived for his climactic address, deputy leader Richard Tice asked the crowd: ‘Do you want to make the United Kingdom great again?’

Attendees roared back: ‘Yes!’

Then there are the policies. Like Trump, Reform wants to roll back environmental protections and abandon net zero, with Greater Lincolnshire Mayor Andrea Jenkyns borrowing the President’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ catchphrase for her speech.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, an adviser to US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, was given a prime slot on stage to spout claims linking the Covid vaccine with cancer, which are not supported by scientific evidence.

A Reform spokesperson said he was ‘a guest speaker with his own opinions’ and the party ‘does not endorse what he said’.

But party chairman David Bull introduced Malhotra by saying they had co-written Reform’s health policy together, and Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaran has recently voiced similar views.

These Trumpian links all serve to illustrate a strange tension at the centre of the party’s project.

Reform is part of a global tilt towards right-wing populist politics, a trend led and best exemplified by Trump.

Like the US President, Farage represents a brand of politics that is all about disrupting a status quo that many people feel has failed to improve their lives.

However – and it’s a big ‘however’ – Donald Trump is catastrophically unpopular in the UK.

When YouGov asked Brits for their assessment of Trump’s performance in the White House in June, just 13% said he was ‘great’ or ‘good’, while a massive 70% described him as ‘poor’ or ‘terrible’.

That’s come into sharper focus as the US embraces a harsh and unpredictable trade policy which has placed extra pressure on the British steel industry, even after the government secured a wide-ranging deal.

All of this poses a tricky balancing act for Farage, already one of the UK’s most divisive political figures: the more he boasts about his relationship with the world’s most powerful man, the more he risks having some of that unpopularity rub off.

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