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Nigel Farage is facing serious questions over his leadership for the first time since the general election last year.
Fellow Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, the former chairman of Southampton football club, warned it was “too early” to know if Farage would deliver as leader, and accused him of having “messianic” tendencies.
Mr Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth, was touted as a replacement for Mr Farage by Elon Musk earlier this year.
His criticism comes after polling suggested that the party may have hit their ceiling with a surge in support since the general election coming to an end three weeks ago.
The latest weekly Techne UK poll for The Independent puts Reform on 25 per cent for the third week in a row and has Labour pulling ahead by three points on 28 per cent after praise for Sir Keir Starmer following a week of diplomatic talks over the Ukraine crisis.
The one piece of good news for Mr Farage is that Kemi Badenoch’s Tories have fallen further behind to just 21 per cent a week after the party was forced to let staff go because of a shortage of funds.
But privately some Reform figures are questioning the party’s strategy, and if it can get above the 25 per cent threshold. Mr Lowe is the only senior party figure to go public with concerns, stating that Reform needs to stop just being a protest party.
A Yougov poll on Wednesday appeared to suggest that Mr Farage’s friendship with Donald Trump had also hurt him in public opinion since the row with Zelensky in the Oval Office and cancellation of military aid to Ukraine.
Sources have suggested that Mr Lowe could leave the party because of strains with Mr Farage, although this has been denied.
In his interview with the Daily Mail, Mr Lowe said: “It’s too early to know whether Nigel will deliver the goods. He can only deliver if he surrounds himself with the right people.
“Nigel is a fiercely independent individual and is extremely good at what we have done so far. He has got messianic qualities. Will those messianic qualities distil into sage leadership? I don’t know.”
He added: “We have to change from being a protest party led by the Messiah into being a properly structured party with a frontbench, which we don’t have. We have to start behaving as if we are leading and not merely protesting.”
In response, Mr Farage told TalkTV that without his personal following, the party would not have won any of its five seats in Parliament in July. He also said there would not have been a “cat’s chance in hell” of Mr Lowe winning his seat.
He also rejected that Reform UK is a protest party and said it is “making great strides”.
Techne’s polling suggests that one of the key battleground groups is 45 to 54-year-olds where Labour has taken a lead over Reform during the past two weeks. Currently, Mr Farage’s party is ahead with voters aged over 55, while voters under 55 are more likely to vote Labour.
Concerningly for Ms Badenoch, only six in 10 of her party’s voters from last year are willing to stick with the Tories. This compares to almost three quarters (71 per cent) of Labour voters remaining loyal. But 28 per cent of Tory 2024 election voters have switched to Mr Farage.
Techne UK’s chief executive Michela Morizzo said the latest poll was “a new high for the Labour Party in recent polling times and very much reflects the action and great coverage at an international level of UK role in dealing with Ukraine-USA issues.”
She went on: “Starmer is playing very well his cards and the public opinion feels reassured and agrees with his approach. Time will tell if this moment will last also when dealing with the country’s internal issues.”
