Find yourself in a marquee on a Saturday afternoon where there’s a bar with wine and beer, gags being cracked, and speeches being made and you might think it’s a wedding.

But the marquee at Chelmsford City Racecourse on Saturday was packed with more than 1,000 people who had turned up to a Reform UK rally, where the best man’s speech and jokes were provided by the MP Lee Anderson, the crowd sang ‘Here We Go’ as he took the stage and the star turn who arrived to his own thumping sound track was Nigel Farage.

The crowd seemed to be having fun, even though it is plain some of those gathered there have been drawn in because they are deeply disgruntled with the status quo in the UK.

One grandfather told me he felt “emotionally angry even talking to you and keeping my composure”, citing illegal immigration and the grooming scandal as the reason for his unhappiness.

A newly joined party member said he was there because Farage “is a breath of fresh air” and current politicians were failing to give younger generations a chance to get on.

And a Reform councillor from Suffolk said people were cross about the idea of pylons going everywhere as the government plans more green energy. They might have listed different reasons. But that obvious unhappiness is what seems to be driving the rapid growth of Reform UK.

As if by magic, when Farage was on stage the party’s membership passed 170,000, and two hours later the party told me they had added another 1,000.

With new financial backers and a rapidly growing base, Reform UK does, at this moment, seem to have what they brag is the big momentum. Farage claims he’s putting the party on the path to win the next election.

The Reform leader has never been short on ambition – it goes far beyond his obvious desire to be a political celebrity, which he achieved long ago, and beyond the UK leaving the EU, in which his decades of agitating played a huge part.

The mood in a packed room in Chelmsford made it clear Farage and his growing party reckon they can shake everything up.

And he’s not hanging around in 2025. He has made two big speeches over the past few days, is the first UK political leader of the year to appear on a public platform – and he’ll be appearing on our Sunday programme this week.

But how realistic is that ambition to win power – and when will we know whether Reform’s growing support is here to stay?

Since the election, Labour’s sagging popularity and the Tories’ doldrums have made space that Farage, and his four fellow Reform MPs, have stepped into. The party has used his tried and tested techniques, talking about issues in a way that other politicians just won’t. He would say those politicians are too cautious or politically correct – they’d say they have a responsibility not to stir up tensions.

I’ll always remember intakes of breath around Westminster when he unveiled his poster depicting refugees on the continent and claiming immigration was at “breaking point” during the EU referendum in 2016. Some other Leave campaigners said it made them “shudder” and it was even reported to the police. But did it stir up a conversation about the EU that Farage wanted? It certainly did.

Years later, now with a perch in Parliament, Mr Farage was met with howls of criticism when he questioned the police’s assessment of what had gone on in the Southport attacks. His willingness to jump into controversy is part of the brand – and for his backers, part of the appeal.

Who’d know a thing or two about that? Enter Farage’s two pals across the Atlantic – one of them, Donald Trump, will in two weeks again be the most powerful man in the Western world, and the other is a tech billionaire, Elon Musk.

From the outside it’s hard to tell how deep these friendships are – whether the Reform gang lurk on the fringes waiting to be invited for brief chats, or whether over time Musk and Trump will donate political fire power (or even cash through Musk’s UK business).

But without question, these unusual bromances give more oxygen to Reform UK, and for the leader of a small UK party to have a direct line to the White House and the richest man in the world is hard to ignore. Can you imagine Ed Davey hanging out with Jeff Bezos? Or John Swinney spending time with Mark Zuckerberg?

Making headlines is not, of course, the same as getting people on side, and while these high-wattage friendships are a draw for some voters, they risk hurting Reform with others.

Musk, who appears to have a fixation with the UK, on Friday accused PM Sir Keir Starmer of being complicit in the “rape of Britain” by not going after gangs grooming and abusing vulnerable young girls – it’s hard to think of a more offensive charge, and Labour’s Wes Streeting branded it “misjudged and certainly misinformed”.

Musk also suggested safeguarding minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” after she rejected a request for the Home Office to order a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. Phillips had said the council should commission a local inquiry instead, as happened in Rotherham and Telford. In a further post on X on Saturday, Musk said “what an evil human” in response to a video showing a previous appearance by Phillips on Question Time.

And in the last couple of days Musk has been tweeting support for right-wing activist Tommy Robinson, a man with criminal convictions who Nigel Farage tried incredibly hard to distance himself from. Farage described Musk as a “hero” for buying Twitter, but conceded he has “a whole range of opinions, some of which I agree with very strongly, and others of which I am more reticent about”.

So Farage has new friends and new energy – and what has also changed since the election is Reform’s potentially bulging bank balance.

Whether you like it or not, money matters in politics. It’s needed to pay for a lot of the unglamorous but vital work, such as hiring political organisers, opening local branches, and managing Farage’s burgeoning social media accounts. Since the recruitment of Nick Candy, a billionaire and former Conservative donor, as the party’s new treasurer, Farage has an ally who can write big cheques to support all that – he has promised to give Reform a seven-figure sum.

The latest recorded donation figures show donations of only £70,000 for the third quarter of 2024, but that seems set to change. The party’s website is advertising jobs, and Reform is putting on regular events and building its membership around the country, which it says is now bigger than the Conservatives’ rank and file.

Over the next week Farage is appearing in Leicester, Chelmsford, Esher, and Chester. The party is yet to make a huge amount of noise in the Commons with their tiny band of MPs, but their whole persona is to do politics in a new way, outside Parliament.

As they grow, so too will the scrutiny they face.

There is likely to be more checking back over what they branded their “contract with the people” in the general election. They promised to cut £5 out of every £100 in government spending within a hundred days, end shortages of doctors and nurses over the same time and give tax breaks to anyone who wanted to pay to go private in the NHS. They promised a freeze on non-essential immigration, more police, big changes to education, massive changes to the benefit system, and cutting tax while increasing spending on defence.

To some voters their plans might sound like an appealing pick and mix, but there are big questions over whether many of the plans are remotely workable.

And it’s not just their policies they need people to get behind – it’s their personnel, too. In the general election, as we revealed, candidates who wanted to stand for the party had expressed offensive views Reform found hard to defend. As they seek to expand, have they come up with a cast of characters the general public could get behind?

Voters attracted to Reform don’t come from any one political tribe, but ask pollsters and they share a sentiment – they’re pretty peeved with the UK in 2025.

Luke Tryl from the research group More In Common says the party has prospered because of dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and disappointment with the early signs from Labour.

He says their ratings have bumped up from around 15 to 20% thanks to people who previously would have said they liked Farage but were worried about him as PM, but are now saying, “well we’ve tried the Tories they didn’t work, Labour have taken away my mum’s winter fuel allowance, so we may as well try Reform”.

Their current polling suggests they could, theoretically, nab dozens of seats from Labour, although their actual backers are mainly former Conservative voters – and a general election is years away.

And unlike the other main political parties the chance someone would vote Reform does not change that much on the age you are. Their average voter is a Gen X man – born between the mid-sixties and 1980. It’s only among older pensioners that research suggests the level of support falls away. The pattern doesn’t seem to follow the cliché that parties on the right grab elderly traditional ‘small c’ conservatives.

In other words, the environment is ripe for Farage to thrive. But as his own political career demonstrates very vividly, political fashions come and go.

Labour hopes desperately that doing the hard yards will pay off, restore their popularity, and they will be able to improve the country in at least some of the ways they promised you back in July. The Conservatives fervently hope that before too long their new leader Badenoch can make some progress.

In 2025, the public will decide whether the party continues its march – or mucks up the opportunity it has. There will be tests during important elections in Wales, and contests for local mayors and local councils in May.

A senior government figure told me “we shouldn’t over think” the threat from Reform. But not to think hard about the party could prove foolish indeed.

Farage’s dream of a general election victory is years away and politically distant too. But he hopes in 2025 to prove that by the end of this year, it’s an ambition that will look less far-fetched.

Top picture credit: Getty Images

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