'There's zero chance Nigel Farage will be PM' | James Hanson

I want to return to a running theme on this program, which is the... Marked decline of Reform UK and we have been sort of monitoring its decline over recent months, really ever since 2026 arrived because they've had a shocker of a year and I honestly can't remember the last time Nigel Farage and Reform had a good week and this has not been a good week. This has been another terrible week for Reform UK. You may remember a couple of months ago I stuck my neck out and I made a prediction that in a year's time. And I made this prediction in August, so let's say by August 2027, Nigel Farage will not be the leader of Reform, because I think he will just quit. He will realise he's on to a loser, that there's no point sticking around being the leader of what will increasingly become a fringe party in British politics again. You know, Reform for a time, a year ago, they were way ahead in the polls and it looked viable that Nigel Farage would be the next prime minister. What a difference a year makes, I think there's zero chance currently of Nigel Farage being the next Prime Minister. They are dropping like a stone in the polls, the Conservatives are rising, Andy Burnham has revived Labour, to their right flank they've got Restore nicking some of their voters. Things are really bad now for Reform UK. And what makes it worse for the party is they are making so many sloppy errors. It's almost as if Nigel Farage is deliberately trying to tank Reform's poll numbers. I'll give you some examples. So first of all, the week began with Reform hosting a news conference, a business event for business leaders touting their economic agenda. There's a big slogan behind Nigel Farage saying Britain is broke. But instead of being surrounded by loyal party supporters, as he used to be at these events, I mean, earlier this year, they used to hold, every Monday, they'd hold a press conference and they'd be packed out with journalists and with party supporters. Not anymore. They can't get anyone to turn up. This event was half empty. Embarrassing enough as it is. To make it worse, Nigel Farage, by way of an excuse for the half-empty hall, Blamed his staff. Take a listen. For this hall, well, staff incompetence. It's all well and good, advertising the businesses, but on Mondays, people who run businesses tend to be rather busy. So it might be easy. Thank you. And no doubt... Many of those that are here, it's going to cost them a very great deal of money to have given up their day to come and visit us here in London. What a great example of leadership, eh? Just throwing your junior staff under the bus and blaming them for incompetence for not organising the press conference on the right day. Or as Harry Truman used to say, the buck stops with me. Nigel Farage doesn't believe the same. He thinks, oh, no, the buck stops with the junior office staff who've arranged my rally to be on the wrong day. And that's why it's empty, not because no one can be bothered to turn up because reform support is now dwindling. So that was bad enough. Then we had Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick again asked about the disgraceful comments. From Raheem Kassam, who is a former chief of staff to Nigel Farage, who came out recently and accused Kemi Badenoch of being, in his words, a Nigerian scammer. Now, let's be really honest about what those comments are. They are racist. It is playing into an age-old racist trope that Nigerians engage in scams. And it's taking advantage of Kemi Badenoch's Nigerian heritage, and it is just a base, racially motivated insult. And it should be pretty easy for Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick and other leading lights in Reform UK to denounce it as such. And yet, for some reason, they don't want to. They were defending Raheem Kassam. I mean, Robert Jenrick was on LBC with Lewis last Sunday and wouldn't say, no, no, that's a racist comment, even though it quite clearly is. Nigel Farage was challenged about it again earlier this week and he wouldn't denounce those comments. Why not? Again, you can't claim to be a straight talker who calls a spade a spade when you won't call a racist comment a racist comment when it quite transparently is. So that made the week even worse. And then, to add an element of farce to this shocker of a week for Farage and reform, He then got himself embroiled in a row with the Liberal Democrats. So Nigel Farage was not in the chamber for John Healey's budget on Wednesday, which I would argue is a bit of a dereliction of duty, because if you seriously want to be the next prime minister, if you want reform to be taken seriously as a prospective party of government, then you've got to be in the Commons chamber to contribute to the budget debate, to hear it in person, to be able to make an informed intervention potentially. I mean, if Nigel Farage was... Prime Minister one day. Is he going to skip the budget then? You're kind of meant to be there, are you not? And yet when challenged on why he wasn't there, he blamed it on the Liberal Democrats. I mean, at the state opening of Parliament, I got involved. I didn't want to, but I got involved in a physical altercation with an MP in my chamber. I didn't make a fuss about it. I didn't complain, but I could see... Given that my prayer card had been removed, I was heading towards another physical altercation. And just sometimes, it's better to avoid conflict. That's one reason. The second reason is, actually, I sat going through the budget with our team of economists in the office, so I actually had the time to go through it line by line, knowing I had to come and face all of you at three. And I don't spend my whole life studying this in a way that Jenrick does. So it was actually more useful to me to sit in the office with a team of economists around me. But I was going to go to PMQs, but I could see potential conflict. And being a very quiet, shy, modest kind of person, I decided to give it a wide berth. I mean, where to begin with that? Why would you volunteer that as your excuse for missing the budget? Because the most generous interpretation of that, and we'll come on to the least generous because it gets worse, but the most generous interpretation of that is that the man's a wimp who's afraid of a Lib Dem, because it turns out it was a female Lib Dem MP called Caroline Voaden. We're going to hear from her in a moment. And And look, Nigel Farage talks a lot about the threats he comes under, and they are disgraceful, and he needs more security, in my view. Who he does not need protecting from is female Lib Dems. That is not who is threatening Nigel Farage. And how are we meant to believe this is a man who would be able to stand up to Vladimir Putin if he gets intimidated by a female liberal Democrat? And then, to make matters even worse, we learn that isn't even the whole story. Because Caroline Voaden, the Lib Dem MP in question, was on LBC, speaking to my colleague Tom Swarbrick the other night, and she put her side of the story, and it doesn't reflect well on Nigel Farage. As he tried to get out of the chamber to get into the procession, there were a whole bunch of us who were standing in front of him on a flight of stairs. He wanted to get past. He didn't ask politely. He just said, let me through. I said... You can wait your turn like everybody else and he didn't like that, grabbed me by the arm, shoved me to one side on the stairs and tried to push past me and one of my colleagues put his hand out to stop him because he was concerned that I was going to fall down the stairs. So if the most generous interpretation of that physical altercation is that Farage is being a wimp and was scared of a female Lib Dem MP, Then the least generous interpretation surely has to be that Farage was actually being a bit of a bully and was the aggressor in this situation with a female Lib Dem MP. Either way, it reflects horrendously on him. And what makes it even worse, the only reason we're talking about this is because he brought it up. He raised it. He actually thought this was a worthwhile excuse For not attending the budget, for not being in the Commons chamber for John Healey's statement. We would not be having this conversation, I would not be talking about it on LBC, if Nigel Farage hadn't injected this into the public debate. Caroline Voaden admitted she didn't want to talk about this. She raised it privately with the authorities and the Commons, but she was never going to go public with this. Nigel Farage did. How do you think this possibly reflects well on you? And this is why I remain convinced that Nigel Farage will not be the leader of Reform UK in 12 months' time because he is making so many sloppy errors. There's a phrase in football, your head's gone. Nigel Farage's head has gone. He used to be a very gifted politician. He made very shrewd decisions. Almost every decision he has made in 2026 has been a bad one. The varying excuses and the changing excuses he's come up with for the £5 million personal gift from Christopher Harborne, to his evasive answers over allegations about childhood racism at Dulwich College, to his welcoming of failed Tory MPs into the Reform UK party, to his decision to call that disastrous by-election in Clacton where he ran against a bin, and now this. It's disastrous decision after disastrous decision. He's on a very bad run of form. His head has gone. Does he actually want to be Prime Minister anymore? Is his heart still in it? So I stand by my prediction. You mark my words. Twelve months' time, Nigel Farage will not be the leader of Reform UK.