ANDREW NEIL: This week Nigel Farage promised a revolution with Reform winning the next election. Here's why he could be right...

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Nigel Farage this week won 'Newcomer of the Year' at The Spectator's prestigious Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Westminster's version of the Oscars.

The Reform party leader, of course, is no newcomer. He's been a seminal, Marmite figure in British politics these past 15 years. But, after multiple abortive attempts, he finally made it to the House of Commons in July. So, with tongue firmly in cheek, The Spectator designated him the newcomer.

How the audience, dominated by Westminster's Labour-Tory establishment and its media camp followers, chortled. Until Farage made it clear he expects to have the last laugh.

'I've got a bit of a shock for you,' he said while collecting his trophy. 'If you think that I and four other newcomers [his fellow Reform MPs] were a shock, I'm very sorry. At the next election in 2029 or before, there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label.

'We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the First World War,' he went on, referring to how in the 1920s and 1930s Labour replaced the Liberals as the country's alternative to the Tories. 'Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election.'

Farage returned to his seat in silence. He has few friends among this sort of audience. But it wasn't so much a silent protest as a stunned silence. It had dawned on the room that he might well be right.

Reform won more than 4 million votes – 14.3 per cent of votes cast – in the July general election. Thanks to the vagaries of our first-past-the-post voting system, that gave Reform only five seats in the Commons. The Liberal Democrats won 64 seats with a lower share of the vote (only 12 per cent).

Labour's victory was especially lopsided, winning 411 seats (out of 650) with a mere one third of the vote. A lot has changed in the five months since then, largely to Reform's advantage. A new poll this week put Reform on 24 per cent, one point ahead of Labour and only two points behind the Tories (which, given the margin of error, is statistically nip and tuck).

Nigel Farage this week won 'Newcomer of the Year' at The Spectator's prestigious Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Westminster's version of the Oscars 

Of course, polls don't matter much this early in a new parliament and this one could be an outlier. But the two big parties would be wise to regard it as a possible harbinger of things to come. Reform scores over 20 per cent in an average of the latest polls.

More important, the omens are propitious for Reform, not so much for Labour or the Tories. Look at the reasons Donald Trump enjoyed such a convincing win over Kamala Harris in last month's US presidential election.

Harris's incumbent Democrats had lost control of America's southern border with Mexico, allowing millions of illegal migrants to pour into the country. A post-pandemic spike in prices, made worse by President Biden's stoking of the economy with massive rises in federal spending, left people bitter about the squeeze on their living standards.

The Democrats piled on the agony by pursuing a net zero carbon emissions strategy which increased energy prices and undermined US business, including the country's huge automotive industry, whose electric vehicles Americans refuse to buy.

Keir Starmer is determined to repeat all the Democrats' mistakes. His government, under the malign influence of energy secretary Ed Miliband, is even more obsessed with net zero than Biden-Harris. Household energy bills are rising again and our car industry teeters on the brink, the dole queue beckoning for thousands of Labour-voting workers.

The self-inflicted burden of net zero means another squeeze on living standards, which are anyway officially predicted to rise only 0.5 per cent by 2030, barely an improvement on the pathetic 0.3 per cent managed by the Tories in the last Parliament.

Starmer inherits record net migration but can't even be bothered to make its reduction one of his so-called 'missions', much less put a figure on any cut.

In normal times, when a government makes such a hash of things, the main opposition party would benefit. But these are not normal times. For with everything Labour is doing wrong, the Tories were there first.

They invented the net zero rules that are pushing up domestic energy bills and deindustrialising the country. They promised countless times to cut net migration to 100,000 a year and never once came even within shouting distance. Their parting gift was net migration of almost 1 million — ten times their target. And, of course, they presided over the worst cost of living squeeze in living memory.

Sir Keir Starmer is determined to repeat all the Democrats' mistakes. His government is even more obsessed with net zero than Biden-Harris, writes Andrew Neil

So even as Labour makes it all worse, why would voters turn back to the Tories, who were previously complicit in everything bad now happening? They are much more likely to vote Reform, which shouts loudest about curbing migration, is opposed to net zero and has clean hands when it comes to living standards.

Red Wall voters in the north of England are also likely to find Reform more congenial. They lent their votes to the Conservatives in 2019 and now have buyer's remorse: they feel badly let down by Boris Johnson and those who followed him.

They're now more likely to switch to Reform, which comes without the Tories' social baggage. In much of the Midlands and North, after all, the Tories are still seen as the 'posh party'.

Labour spin doctors are briefing friendly journalists that all this is fine and dandy: a resurgent Reform will split the Right-wing vote, guaranteeing another Labour victory come the next election, just as the Left-wing split in the 80s between Labour and Social Democrats handed Margaret Thatcher two landslides.

This seriously underestimates the danger Labour faces. Reform is as much a threat to Labour as the Tories, perhaps even more so. At the election, Reform came second in 98 seats, of which 89 are held by Labour. That should send a shiver down Starmer's spine.

The Conservatives have their own misconceptions. Many Tory activists welcome Reform as a way of dragging their party to the Right, absorbing Reform in the process. They don't seem to realise Farage's strategy is to replace the Tories on the Right. Far-fetched? Far from it.

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The current two-party system is already on its knees. At the last election, Labour and the Conservatives claimed a combined 57 per cent of the vote, their lowest share since 1918. The most recent poll puts their combined share below 50 per cent.

The British voting system is harsh on insurgent parties like Reform. You can pile up a lot of votes but capture few seats for your pains. But there comes a point, if you can reach it, when a lot starts to fall your way.

The Social Democratic-Liberal Alliance almost broke through in the 1983 election, when it came only two points (25.4 per cent) behind Labour (27.6 per cent). But that was enough to give Labour more than 200 seats, the Alliance only 23. The Alliance was consigned to history.

Suppose Reform was to get closer to 30 per cent come the next election, which is not impossible, and Labour and the Tories floated on either side of 25 per cent, again not impossible.

Using the excellent tools on the Electoral Calculus website, that would make Reform the largest party on 229 seats, with the Tories and Labour languishing on 152 and 146 respectively. If the Tories went into coalition with Reform they'd probably be gobbled up and Reform would emerge as the dominant party of the Right.

Pie in the sky? Perhaps. But Labour seems destined for self-destruction, new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has yet to cut through to the wider public and Farage is nicely placed to make the running, as he already is, even if an £80 million campaign donation from Elon Musk is unlikely.

Reform can campaign in favour of oil and gas in Scotland, the car industry in the Midlands, farmers in rural areas and against immigration and net zero everywhere. Who knows what harvest it might then reap?

When even the denizens of the Westminster village can see the writing on the wall, as they did at that fancy awards ceremony, it's time to take the prospects for Reform seriously.