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“Of course he’s tired. He’s just done two months campaigning every day on the road, it would be weird if he wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to quit,” says one friend of Nigel Farage who has spent time with him in recent weeks.

Westminster has been ablaze with rumours that Farage is growing weary in the job of leading Reform UK after the bruising scandal around his decision to accept a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

As he awaits the verdict of the standards watchdog over whether he was right not to declare the cash, Farage has flown to the US to rub shoulders with the Maga elite once again, with sources saying he is back in close contact with the Trump administration.

In London, Reform UK’s Millbank HQ is more riven with infighting and jostling for position than usual, amid questions over Farage’s future. There is also anxiety over the party’s recent byelection losses – and its decision to push further towards the hard right to take on the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain.

Old-time Reformers distrust the former Tories who have joined the party, primarily Robert Jenrick and his team, whom they suspect of plotting to succeed Farage, possibly in the event of a post-election deal with the Tories – something Jenrick denies.

Meanwhile, Zia Yusuf, the party’s combative donor and home affairs spokesperson, has spoken of not being picked to stand in byelections, and clashed with Jenrick on social media over the party’s deportation policy.

When Reform sources briefed the media that there was a push to get rid of Yusuf for shifting further to the right after the Makerfield byelection loss, the party’s policy chief, James Orr, endorsed a message in support of him, likening his critics to “snakes in the grass”.

At the root of the tensions is the question of who is the likely successor if Farage is unable to politically survive the scrutiny of his finances and wealth-building outside politics.

An adverse finding from the watchdog could lead to suspension as an MP for Farage, and possibly a byelection in his Clacton constituency, which he could still fight and win. Labour, the Tories and Restore are all preparing for a contest, while Reform is braced for one. It has hired the veteran journalist Miles Goslett, who helped on a favourable biography of Farage for the Tory donor and pollster Michael Ashcroft, and the party has shaken up its social media operation in recent weeks.

At the same time, there is no doubt that Farage has reduced his public profile since the Guardian revealed in April that he had taken £5m from Harborne before he became an MP. Harborne has also given £15m to Reform.

Reform insiders say Farage has been largely absent from party HQ – though Reform says he is at Millbank every day – and he has been taking a break from his 7pm GB News slot since before the local elections. In the meantime, he has been taking long lunches in favoured Mayfair and Chelsea clubs and restaurants, as well as spending time in his new Surrey property, bought shortly after Harborne’s £5m gift in 2024 – although he has said money for the purchase came from his I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! fee.

Farage is currently in Washington DC for the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations, and friends say he is in close contact with the Trump administration again, after failing to meet up with the president earlier this year. This is despite polling showing that links to the US president are a major impediment to voters backing Reform.

“There is a very different feel to Farage these days from even a few years ago,” said one person who has worked in Millbank HQ. “He’s on a really tight schedule, and that’s understandable, but that also means even some of his fellow MPs can’t get appointments and end up complaining that their own donors can’t get face time with him.”

Despite being out on the campaign trail in the run-up to the local elections, two Manchester byelections and a police and crime commissioner contest in Norfolk, Farage has shied away from his previously weekly press conferences.

A broadcast media round on which he was repeatedly grilled about the £5m was regarded internally within Reform as something of a disaster. “His strategy of lying low is the right one for the moment and he should have stuck to that,” one former adviser said.

Even when appearing in parliament recently, Farage has cut a semi-detached figure from the other seven Reform MPs. While Richard Tice and others gestured furiously at Keir Starmer in parliament when the prime minister said Reform should be “ashamed of themselves” for fanning the flames of racism, Farage remained largely impassive, and this week he left the chamber alone.

Farage defenders blame the speculation about his future on Tories and the Restore party fanning the flames, with some convinced that the two parties are working in concert to try to bring him down.

“It’s a classic out of the playbook against Trump in trying to weaken him by going after him personally,” said one Reform insider and Farage ally. Another described it as “wishful thinking by his enemies”.

Sources in Reform said they did not “recognise the characterisation” of the party as one that was struggling with divisions or stalling in the polls. “Reports of our demise are very much exaggerated and the legacy parties are putting too much hope in their fantasies of Reform’s decline. There will be no deals, no pacts. The Conservative party has failed Britain,” one said.

Danny Kruger, a Reform MP who defected from the Tories, went public with an attack on Farage’s detractors, saying: “The hounding of Nigel Farage and his family over their personal finances and living arrangements is a transparent attempt by established power – in the government and the media – to disable Reform because of the threat the party poses to their privileges.” He accused them of “playing the man and not the ball”.

Despite Kruger and others defending Farage, a few of those who are still working in Millbank and some who have recently left the party are questioning whether Farage as leader has been transformational enough to win a general election.

Reform may have swept the board at the local elections, gaining nearly 1,500 councillors and taking control of 14 councils, but pollsters have begun to talk of a “ceiling” in Reform’s support at about 30%, restricted by a perceived lack of professionalism and political flirtations with the language of the hard right.

Rather than spending time worrying about how to defeat an Andy Burnham-led Labour, Farage’s party has instead being tying itself in knots over the threat from Lowe. Farage is known to be frustrated that Lowe and Restore have been outperforming Reform on social media. In part to tackle this, and in part in irritation at the traditional media’s focus on his finances, Farage recently launched his own Substack that attacks “anti-white” bias in its first article.

On the organisational and staffing front, there has been a lot of churn. Alongside high-profile policy hires from media outlets such as the Telegraph, there has been the departure of David Bull as chair after less than a year, to focus on standing to become an MP. Charlton Edwards has also recently exited as a company director and is no longer treasurer. Both men have not commented further on the reasons, but Bull recently caused a stir by saying he thought Farage needed a break from politics.

There have also been a few Conservative defectors trickling back. Robbie Lammas, a councillor who was a high-profile local government defection from the Conservatives, recently left Farage’s party again, described its central office as a “a strange place” staffed mainly by young and inexperienced workers, where former Tories were eyed with suspicion by new “Reformers” and an older breed of veterans from the Ukip days.

“Farage seems to hold his court in parliament virtually exclusively, though he might turn up for the occasional press conference. Millbank is almost a separate operation, very much dominated by Zia Yusuf,” he said. “It’s full of very young and inexperienced junior staffers in their early 20s. Youth is good but the problem is that there is no experienced hand at the end of each bench.”

Ems Barr is another former Conservative who joined Reform before returning to supporting the Tories. “Technically I’m still a member of Reform,” she said. “But a big part of what made me go back was that some of the Conservative people who joined Reform were the people I didn’t really want to be in a party with.”

Some donors to the party are unhappy about strategy and what they consider to be the lack of focus on policy – although Reform barely needs a broad base when it has raked in millions from crypto mega-donors such as Harborne and Ben Delo. This week the Iranian-born billionaire Sasan Ghandehari pledged to give further millions.

Earlier this year the party appointed Orr, a Cambridge theologian with hardline anti-abortion and pro-family views, as its head of policy. Since then, its policy output has been slow, apart from a plan to protect women and mothers in the workplace and a focus on deporting migrants who arrive in the UK illegally. Separately, some policies such as the party’s flagship crypto and digital assets bill appear to have disappeared from its website.

One Reform donor, speaking after Makerfield, told the Guardian: “Not only have they failed to win, but they have spectacularly failed … There are questions about strategy, but there are also other questions. One is about policies. Populists can only win up to a point and after that it can fall apart, as we have seen elsewhere. There needs to be a broader set of policies and ideas which the party can draw on and also project to the electorate.”

He added: “He [Farage] needs to knock heads together and stop the competition between his team, but he also has to learn to delegate much more.”

Another Reform donor said there were “clearly fault lines there for anyone to see” and that problems had started after Jenrick came into the party, “coming from a background where he was clearly at the centre of a Tory civil war and so that plotting has been part and parcel of who he is, and those who have come with him”.

He said: “I think Nigel has been happy to delegate stuff, both because he’s older but also because he has other interests. Zia Yusuf has basically been his prime minister, who wields the executive power. Richard Tice is the cement and mortar which fills in the gaps. So that was a triumvirate, but then you had Jenrick coming and that has been a source of disruption.”

Those fault lines are likely to deepen if big beasts in Reform sense that Farage’s leadership is at stake.

Ben Habib, the former Reform deputy leader pushed out in late 2024, who is now in a legal dispute with Harborne, believes his ex-leader is “facing an existential threat and that is in the hands of the parliamentary standards commissioner” and says Reform “does seem to be having a real problem with it”.

“I don’t think he necessarily would win a byelection [in Clacton]. Restore will happily take him on,” Habib said.

Rob Ford, a Manchester politics academic who co-authored a book on the rise of the radical right, thinks Farage is unlikely to step out of the political fray willingly – and that, if he does so, it would be a “total mess” for the party, with Lowe and Restore Britain probably the main beneficiary.

“I think there would be a big, big argument in Reform, which, if Lowe ticked up in the polls, would only intensify,” he said.

But Ford added: “Whenever Farage is under media criticism and scandal, he starts to sort of play his tiny violin and talk about how much he sacrificed and, yes, he loves it. He loves to be in the circus, and I don’t think – unless he’s physically prevented from being in the circus – that he’ll ever stop.”