Nigel Farage is as likely as Sir Keir Starmer to become the new prime minister after the next election, according to a new poll.
The survey, by More in Common, reveals that the Reform UK leader is in joint poll position to make it to Downing Street in four years time.
It comes ahead of local elections on May 1, at which Mr Farage’s party is looking to make notable breakthroughs.
After consistently polling at over 20 per cent of the national vote all year, Reform has pushed the Conservatives into third place.
Voters were asked who they thought would be the prime minister after the next election and 13 per cent of said Mr Farage.
This was the same as the percentage of people who think Sir Keir will still be prime minister in four years.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch only received 5 per cent of the vote while Some 10 per cent backed a different Tory leader to become prime minister.
Around 40 per cent admitted they did not know who would be the country’s next leader.
Luke Tryl, the executive director of More in Common UK told the Telegraph: ‘Only 13 per cent of Britons are confident Keir Starmer will remain in post after the next election, while a striking 41 per cent say they simply don’t know what the next elected government will look like.
‘In fact, the public rate Nigel Farage’s chances of becoming prime minister as highly as those of the current PM, with Reform voters particularly convinced their man will be walking into Downing Street.
‘It’s yet another sign of the Reform leader’s ability to cast a political shadow far larger than his party’s presence in Westminster.’
Earlier this week, Mr Farage warned Labour that Reform was ‘parking our tanks on the Red Wall lawn’ as he fired the starting gun on his party’s local elections campaign.
In a major speech in Durham, the Reform leader insisted Labour had just as much to fear from his insurgent party as the Tories in its traditional working-class heartlands.
He even joked of a ‘Nige-mare on Downing Street’ as he taunted Sir Keir Starmer over the prospect of winning the next general election, with the populist party continuing to ride high in the polls.
But the Tories accused him of ‘cosying up to the far-Left’ in a cynical bid to win more votes after he used the speech to talk of the need for a ‘good partnership’ with militant trade union bosses.
Striking a similar tone to Sir Keir in some of his speeches, Mr Farage added that ‘a pragmatic, sensible relationship’ was ‘vital’ when dealing with hard-Left barons.
Mr Farage added, however, that in the wake of the Birmingham bin strikes, he would take a ‘firm but fair’ approach with the unions if he were negotiating with them.
It comes after Reform led the crusade for nationalising British Steel and after Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader and MP for Skegness, wore a trade union Save Our Steel badge in the Commons chamber during a crunch debate last Saturday.
Asked if Reform may propose nationalising further industries in the future, Mr Farage did not rule it out and said it was the party’s aim to ‘re-industrialise’ Britain.
Speaking on whether he really believed he could turn ‘the Red Wall’ – the label given to Labour heartlands in the Midlands and North – into ‘the Reform Wall’, he said: ‘Yeah, you know what, I think voting has become much more transitory than it’s ever been before.
‘And while Labour did win back the heartlands [in last year’s general election], it was a loveless win in many of those seats, actually with fewer votes than they got under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.’
The local elections on May 1, when 1,641 seats across 24 councils will be up for grabs, are the first Reform will stand in after winning five parliamentary seats in last year’s election.
Asked what a Reform-run council would look like, Mr Farage said the party would introduce ‘a British equivalent of DOGE in every single council’.
This was a reference to US President Donald Trump’s bureaucracy-slashing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Tesla tycoon Elon Musk.
He added: ‘We’ve got to see the long-term contracts that many of these county or unitary authorities have signed up to.
‘We will look at the sums spent on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives). A massive change of culture, that’s what we’re going to bring to these county councils.’
He also admitted that women have been more ‘cautious’ about voting Reform than men but insisted that new polling shows the split is now ’50:50′.
It came after polling by Survation across Red Wall seats found Reform’s support since the last election has soared from 18 to 30 per cent.
At the same time, Sir Keir’s net rating in the North and Midlands was -26 per cent, based on 27 per cent approving of him and 53 per cent disapproving.
By contrast, the polling agency had Mr Farage on -4 and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch on -8.
A Tory spokesman said: ‘He’s cosying up to the far-Left and will always side with vested interests, rather than the national interest.’
Labour has been mobilising in a bid to head off a Reform surge on May 1, with the premier turning his fire on Mr Farage.
The party’s approach of ignoring the newcomers appears to have been abandoned, with strategists convinced Reform will be a bigger threat than the Tories by 2029.
The prime minister has been focusing on Mr Farage’s NHS views, close ties to Donald Trump, and claims he has a soft stance on Russia.
Tony Blair’s spin chief Alastair Campbell is said to have warned at a recent pep talk for Labour special advisers that they need to treat Reform as a more serious electoral threat.
He apparently suggested setting up a hit squad of backbench Labour MPs to attack Reform’s policy positions.
Mr Farage’s outfit has often been seen as eating into the Tory vote.
But the party came second in 98 seats at last year’s general election – and 89 of them were won by Labour.
