The madman actually did it! Despite all the odds seeming stacked against him — denunciations from former colleagues, criminal charges, even an assassination attempt that put him a whisker away from death — Donald Trump was resoundingly elected to once again lead the free world. It was a victory that took Britain’s political pundits by complete surprise, so obvious had it seemed to them that the man was clearly unfit for office. But there was one man who never relented in his support for or belief in The Don: Nigel Farage.

Wales is ground zero for Reform to show the rest of the country what it can do

America has now undergone its second political earthquake after its first in 2016. Would Britain follow in America’s footsteps and witness its own rejuvenated anti-establishment insurgency? Could Farage emulate Trump and do it all again? Looking for answers, I headed to Celtic Manor, just over the border with England, for Reform’s Welsh Conference, keen to see how serious Farage and his latest political outfit were about translating Trump’s win to Britain.

Wales is ground zero for Reform to show the rest of the country what it can do and just how seriously it should be taken. The party had a very respectable showing in Wales at the recent General Election, coming an excruciatingly close third behind the Tories in total vote share, and coming second in 13 of the 32 Welsh seats. More importantly, in 2026 Wales will hold its Senedd election, in which an expanded 96 seats will be up for grabs. Crucially for an insurgent party like Reform, the Senedd is elected through proportional representation, making it far easier to translate votes into seats than Westminster’s first past the post system. A strong showing in the Senedd elections would allow Reform to continue to professionalise, gaining a new set of full-time politicians each with their own team of staffers, as well as help the party continue to gain momentum. If Reform is to come anywhere close to emulating the success of the anti-establishment right across the pond, then Wales is a test it cannot afford to flunk.

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The conference started with a distinctly Trumpian bang, as party maverick Lee Anderson took to the stage sporting a Reform baseball cap, which he duly flung into the cheering crowd. The speech that followed was just as Trumpian as the bombastic entrance. With no notes or teleprompter, Anderson delivered a stream of jabs at Reform’s various enemies straight off the dome.

His speech received a well-balanced mix of cheers and jeers; cheers at every mention of Trump’s victory, which Anderson labelled “a great thing for this country”, and jeers at every mention of an assorted cast of Reform anti-heroes. Anderson talked of his glee at seeing the “lefty tears” that followed Trump’s win, and called for David Lammy to eat some humble pie, joking that the Foreign Secretary would probably take it with a side of chips given “he’s a big lad”.

But between the jokes and jibes was a more serious point: Trump’s win showed that old political orthodoxies around respectability and the importance of courting mainstream media opinion are dead. Anderson viewed Reform as MAGA’s transatlantic cousin; “he was about making America great again – we should be making Britain great again!”

The energy that had been suddenly zapped into the conference by Anderson was just as quickly drained, as the rest of the morning was occupied by speakers addressing the important but unsexy mechanics of devolution, tax policy, and psephology. Cue the PowerPoint bar charts.

Mark Reckless (yes, he’s back!) gave a monotone speech outlining the various failures of Labour on devolved matters in Wales, especially on health and education where the nation has fallen well behind England. Next up was Oliver Lewis, the party’s de facto leader in Wales, tasked with the unenviable job of holding the audience for fifteen minutes whilst discussing tax reforms.

Though not as captivating as Anderson’s showmanship, this was the most important speech of the day in hinting at what kind of policy platform we can expect from Reform. The headline policy as far as the Senedd elections were concerned was Reform’s plan to take 1p off income tax, thereby giving Wales the lowest rates in the country. The savings would come from massively slashing the bureaucracy in Cardiff, binning all QUANGOs, and scaling back the net zero agenda. 

Lewis is keen to stress that he is not advocating for a Trussian approach of slashing carelessly, nor does he view cutting taxes as the be all and end all of Reform’s economic agenda. Somewhat surprisingly, he admiringly quoted Clement Attlee, reiterating his belief that a rich man “should pay his taxes gladly”. The key difference under Reform would be that “tax is spent as efficiently as possible”. What is being offered is “a new social contract; you pay your reasonable financial contribution towards living in a civilised society, we spend it better”.

I later ask him for exact proposals on the main devolved public services: health and education. On health, Reform is willing to propose hitherto heretical ideas about increasing private sector involvement. Lewis explains that Reform would introduce cash vouchers that would allow patients to use private providers if they have been on an NHS waiting list for more than a month, thereby giving patients the freedom to choose where they are treated. Alongside the vouchers, Reform proposes making private healthcare tax deductible, overall supporting “the expansion of private healthcare”. Quite the change of tack from approvingly quoting Attlee.

On education in Wales, Lewis tells me that a major policy is currently under wraps, but can reveal to me that the priority will be to improve the offering “for those for whom an academic curriculum and trajectory simply isn’t appropriate”. In practice, this means implementing a policy that has been floating around wonkish circles for aeons of introducing proper trade schools alongside secondary comprehensives. “We want to make sure that it doesn’t matter in what way you are successful,” Lewis adds, “You just have to be successful at something.”

There was one final wonkish speech before lunch, as Reform’s sole member of the London Assembly, Alex Wilson, gave a breakdown of the voting patterns in Wales over the last few decades. The graphs were plentiful, but the overall message was singular: Reform are quickly growing in Wales, and a relatively small swing to them from Labour would lead to a series of seats being won. Success in the Welsh elections was not just a pipe dream by a group of chancers; the data showed a promising upward trajectory for Reform. Wilson outlined ways for Reform to keep the momentum growing, especially focusing on the importance of consistently contesting council by-elections. We had moved a long way from speeches centred on calling David Lammy fat.

The afternoon’s schedule promised a return to the more rousing speeches that had kicked the conference off, with a crescendo of party bigwigs culminating with the star of the show — Nigel Farage. Before Reform’s politicians got underway, Professor Matthew Goodwin took to the stage to outline his now-familiar diagnosis of the country’s woes. He took aim at Britain’s out-of-touch “new elite”, decried Britain’s “broken economic model”, and warned that the country was falling into another period of managed decline.

Perhaps a few years ago Goodwin’s speech would have ended there, a succinct summary of why voters are growing frustrated, packed with polling data and research. But this is a new Matt Goodwin, now free of his full-time teaching position at the University of Kent. He came not only with a diagnosis of the problem, but with solutions.

“Legal immigration needs to be dramatically reduced – it needs to be completely slashed,” he exclaimed. “We need to leave the European Convention of Human Rights,” he added, before highlighting numerous shocking cases where foreign criminals had used the ECHR to remain in Britain, much to the irritation of many in the audience — murmurs of “unbelievable” and “disgusting” emerged from the crowd with every case Goodwin brought up.

“I’m not afraid anymore of fighting back. We’re not afraid.” Goodwin was bringing the crowd in with him. “We believe that it’s the members of this national community that should always be prioritised above and beyond everybody and everything else … like we just saw in America, we represent the forgotten majority.” He seemed all in, decrying the “uniparty” for only offering more of the same, and claiming that “this movement is going to represent the same realignment that just put Trump back in the White House.”

Goodwin’s speech was captivating, polished, perfectly paced, and used just the right mix of data and rousing applause lines to keep the crowd engaged like no other speaker had managed. I couldn’t help but wonder, is this the heir to Nigel Farage, the man to take Reform up a gear? Does this speech represent the former professor marking himself firmly into the territory of a politician? I awaited his closing line with great anticipation.

“I’ll be watching. I’ll be here. I’ll be talking. Let’s change the game.” Perhaps not. For now, it seems, Goodwin will be cheering from the sidelines.

Wilson and Anderson were back to give their second speeches of the day, both underscoring how much potential there was for a strong performance from Reform at the Senedd if the party, and especially those packing out the conference, got organised and fought like hell. “The battlefield is the ballot box,” Anderson proclaimed.

Following the affable Anderson, it was time for Zia Yusef, Reform’s rising star, to show why Farage saw so much potential in him that he was catapulted from a complete political non-entity to chairman of the party virtually overnight. For the first time today, the speaker’s entrance was preceded by a slickly produced video accompanied by booming audio of highlights from previous speeches. The anticipation in the hall built. It was time for the big boys.

Yusef’s speech certainly got the crowd going. It was littered with rich metaphors, evocative adjectives, and rallying calls to action. The conference’s attendees duly applauded at every applause line, and all the core Reform talking points were included. But there was something about his performance that felt a bit off to me. It felt phoney.

It felt as if Yusef was trying a bit too hard. His constant allusions to “the great nation of Wales”, his overwrought metaphors, the mention of various obscure places in Wales he had clearly Googled whilst writing the speech. I felt like I was hearing the product of someone prompting ChatGPT to “write an inspiring speech about how Reform will make Wales great again. Include more metaphors.” The delivery, too, left a lot to be desired. The speech felt like the result of Reform’s Chairman having binge watched “top political speeches” and vainly trying to emulate the gravitas of history’s great orators. But the result was a delivery that was too shouty, and a pacing that felt formulaic and forced rather than flowing naturally.

Yusef wasn’t helped by the fact his speech was sandwiched between two great orators, Anderson and Farage, who have crafted their skills for decades and have an innate charisma that is hard to emulate. He is also still quite fresh to this game, and perhaps still needs time to hone his skills. Nevertheless, I felt perplexed as to why Yusef of all people underwent such a meteoric rise in the party. (There is, of course, one obvious factor that may explain his rapid ascension, though I feel too polite to mention it).

As Yusef’s speech was coming to a close, mean looking men with earpieces started to occupy the outer perimeter of the hall. It was finally time for Reform’s main man, fresh off the plane from America, to take to the stage and close out the conference.

As expected, the punters went wild. A sea of phones came out as attendees captured their leader walking through the adoring crowd, closely surrounded by an entourage of bodyguards, and up onto the stage for even more rapturous applause. There were no signs of fatigue or jetlag from Farage, who was his usual energetic self, and all the more jubilant after his friend’s decisive victory across the pond. Farage spent the first few minutes of his speech talking of nothing else, and a sea of beaming smiles met Farage’s insider anecdotes from his last few days at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s success had infused the conference with optimism, with attendees and speakers alike seeing Trump’s victory as their own. But amidst the schadenfreude at the beating the British libs had taken by MAGA’s triumph, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe it was those in this conference hall who were out of touch with the rest of Britain. A YouGov poll held straight after the election found that only 20 percent of Brits were “happy” to see Trump return to the White House. I put this to Lewis, who admitted that the type of campaign run by Trump in America would not necessarily translate well to British politics. “For me, it’s the symbolism of an unexpected election victory which is perceived as being ‘let’s get our own back on the establishment’, that’s what I would like to see us learning from.”

Farage’s attention eventually turned to realities closer to home. Though buoyed by Trump’s stellar success, Farage was sober in defining his expectations for Reform in the coming years. With his eyes on the 2026 Senedd election, Farage outlined that Reform’s “job in Wales is for us to be the leading party of opposition here challenging the Labour Party”. Recent polling had Reform at around 20 points in Wales, and the hope was that with some solid campaigning over the next two years, Reform could bump that up to at least 25 percent and become the nation’s second biggest party.

But the Senedd was set to be a springboard for even greater milestones. “We will succeed if we organise and mobilise. We will succeed if we professionalise. We will break every historical political record in this country.” Farage’s hope was to build “a respectable, decent party that … can go on and win the 2029 General Election”. That project was poised to start right here, in Wales, where “the sky is the limit”.

Farage’s parting message was dryly pragmatic: get involved, get organised. He urged the crowd to go and find their constituency’s branch representative and sign up to help out. The glamour of Mar-a-Lago now felt a million miles away; if Reform were to emulate Trump’s success, they had to be prepared to slog it out and build from the bottom upwards. Most of the audience seemed convinced, and local branch representatives were swamped as soon as Farage left the stage. Could these be the early signs that the next big political realignment would be right here in Wales?

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There is good reason to be optimistic about Reform’s chances here

Reform is still a party in its embryonic phase. Local branches were still in the process of being set up, and a comprehensive policy platform was still being worked on. In Lewis, a former banker who is currently undertaking a doctorate at the University of Oxford researching the failures of rail privatisation, Welsh Reform have a man brimming with policy ideas. But a single person can only do so much, and the party currently lacks the institutional infrastructure to seriously compete with the major parties when it comes to policy making. Though maybe the lesson from Trump is that such concerns are now outdated, and a set of snappy, popular policies can prove far more electorally successful than an in-depth program.

There is good reason to be optimistic about Reform’s chances here. Labour’s governance of Wales has been abysmal; “they’re just crap”, as one attendee put it to me. Incumbents are struggling in elections all over the world, and there is nothing to suggest that a Labour government, both in Cardiff and Westminster, will be able to deliver any tangible improvements in people’s lives before the Senedd election.

Reform’s main right-wing rivals, the Conservatives, have just elected a leader who seems to think coming up with actual policies is beneath her, and has appointed a shadow cabinet of “total non-entities”, as Farage disparagingly put it. With the Tories too, there are no signs that their fortunes are set to improve within the next two years.

If Reform is to transform Britain’s political landscape for good and stand any chance of coming close to their enormously ambitious target of winning the next general election, then success in Wales is a must. The energy seemed there, but attending conferences and giving witty speeches is the easy part. The real test will be whether in the coming months that enthusiasm, greatly invigorated by Trump’s victory, will translate to “the people’s army” convincing its supporters to give up their time and do the unglamorous jobs of leafleting, data collecting, fundraising, and so on. It’s easy for Reform to attract punters to Celtic Manor after a big morale boost. The question is, can they do it on a cold, rainy Wednesday night in Swansea?