In 2024, Barndoor Strategy was one of the few public affairs agencies to bother attending the Reform UK Party Conference. Twelve months on, much has changed. Not only was the 2025 Reform UK conference on a whole different scale to the previous one, but there was enough of a corporate presence there for a Business Lounge, sponsored by Heathrow Airport no less, to be required.

That says everything you need to know about where Reform UK is at as a party. Yes, it still only has a handful of MPs, but since the local elections it controls Councils from Kent to Durham and has two elected Metro Mayors. Perhaps more importantly, it is Reform UK who are dictating the political discourse at the moment, with even the Labour Government with a majority of 148 seemingly dancing to their tune on a whole host of issues, most notably immigration.

Poll after polls has Reform UK winning a General Election majority themselves if one were called today and there is no doubt it is not just voters who are sitting up and taking notice.

This Conference was a big event, taking up two huge venues at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, more than twice as big as last year. It is easy to forget sometimes that Reform UK was only formed (as the Brexit Party) in 2018 and is really still a start-up. There was a proper programme of fringe events this year for the first time, although the focus remained very much on the main hall where the feel was much more like a rally than a conference.

The mood throughout was upbeat and there is no doubt at all that Reform UK doesn’t just think it can win elections, it believes it will. Newly appointed Director of Policy Zia Yusuf actually stated in his speech that Reform UK will win the Welsh Senedd elections next year. He may well be right too if our intelligence on the ground in Wales is to be believed.

Reform UK will have headed home from Birmingham feeling bullish after a big crowd and a successful event. But if it is to succeed in the polls, Reform still has many areas where there is room for improvement.

The decision to move Nigel Farage’s speech forward to react to the resignation of Angela Raynor backfired. He came out to a hall with plenty of gaps when he would have been expecting a full house. It made little difference to the media coverage and was a misjudgement.

The large number of bang-average Tory defectors joining the ranks is not especially popular with members either. Dame Andrea Jenkins speech went down as well as her singing, and her jokes landed as effectively as Nicola Murray’s in TV sitcom The Thick of It. Welsh Senedd Member Laura Ann Jones and MSP Graham Simpson were met with polite applause at best and delivered uninspiring speeches that spoke volumes about their limited political abilities.

The big reveal of Nadine Dorries fell spectacularly flat too and the decision to put her on midway through Nigel’s speech was bizarre and another mistake. There was much talk in the bars of how she had been at odds with Farage and was the Minister responsible for the much hated (in these circles) Online Safety Act.

Other prominent Tories like Jake Berry and David Jones were (perhaps wisely) a much  lower-key presence. Reform’s members want to shake up the establishment and the recruitment of failed Tory politicians, traditionally the establishment party, is a clear source of unease even with Reform members.

“We won’t win the General Election if we are packed to the gills with the lot of lost the last one” as one member told me.

But a bigger challenge is the continued prominence of conspiracy theories among their ranks. Dorries has form in this area of course with her book, The Plot, and the decision to allow Dr Assem Malhotra to state, on the main stage, that the recent royal cancer diagnoses were as a result of COVID vaccines, was a huge misstep.

If Reform UK is going to be taken seriously in enough circles to really win the next General Election, it has to leave these crackpots behind. Moreover, rather than average Tory defectors who look to outsiders like they are moving to save their jobs, Reform needs some more ‘red-wall’ Labour defectors to broaden its appeal.

Aside from Nigel Farage, it was Jacob Rees-Mogg who drew the biggest crowds. Rees-Mogg admitted his daughter had joined Reform UK and is apparently advising the party but not joining himself. He would be a genuinely big coup if he could be tempted over – one of the few Tories who left the previous Government with any credit left in the bank.  But even Rees-Mogg is a polarising figure and in some ways a personification of the establishment which Reform seeks to usurp.

For now, Reform UK remains largely a one-man band. Despite their best efforts, there is no doubt that this is the Nigel Farage Party. He stood astride this conference like a colossal and what happens to the party if and when Farage is not there is a major problem.

Their other big problem is detail… or the lack thereof so far. Reform UK offers many popular policies. Farage promised to stop the boats in two weeks if Reform were elected (although he immediately clarified in interviews that he meant withing two weeks of enacting the legislation). Yusuf said in his that all illegal immigrants would be deported in five years. Delegates were told taxes would be cut, the welfare bill reduced, and much more. But no-one at any point said how all this would be achieved.

To an extent, that was playing to a room where many Reform UK members want to hear these big statements but far fewer seem interested in engaging on the minutiae of policy.

To be fair, Reform have four years to put together their next manifesto. They are bolstering their policy team and there are new think-tanks being set up and relationships being built with existing ones. Policy details, we were told, would come. And it should be noted that Labour was elected in 2024 despite saying very little about what they would actually do in Government, so perhaps like Starmer; Farage is hoping to win purely on the basis of not being ‘the other guy’.

Whatever the reality, there is no doubt that Reform UK are driving the current discourse, flying ahead in the polls, and looking likely to, at the very least, massively shake-up the Westminster duopoly, if not win an outright majority themselves at the next General Election.

That is why Barndoor Strategy was at the Reform Conference this year and will be there again next year. And that’s why all our clients are fully briefed on Reform UK developments and engaging where appropriate with a party that really could make up the next Government of the UK.