Last week’s local elections were about the Labour Party’s loss of faith in its leader, prime minister Keir Starmer, but they were also about the right-wing insurgent Reform UK winning a shade over 1,400 seats across the country.
Reform feels like the de facto opposition party for much of the United Kingdom outside of the confines of Westminster, which is an incredible feat of smoke, mirrors and mind-capture when you consider the party still has only 8 MPs compared to the 116 seats held by the Conservatives.
To understand just how Reform UK, and its leader Nigel Farage, have effectively driven the political conversation in the UK for the past two years, I caught up with Daniel Trilling, a journalist who has covered the far-right for years and author of the new book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable.
