There is no love lost between Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch (Image: PA/Express)

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr Farage and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch are going to have to put aside their differences, however hard that is.

They will have to work together to remove Sir Keir Starmer from 10 Downing Street and provide the UK with a stable government after the next general election.

It found 24% of voters would back Reform if an election were held now, putting Mr Farage ahead of any other party.

The survey put Labour on 17%, the Greens on 15%, and the Liberal Democrats on 11%.

And because this is a giant MRP poll, it is able to predict how many seats each party would get.

Reform would have 188 MPs, with the Conservatives on 159.

Labour would be left with just 89, a devastating defeat. But here’s the thing – no party would be close to having a majority of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

There’s no way Mr Farage could become prime minister without help from another party, even though Reform won the most votes.

And the only people who might possibly work with him are the Conservatives. The alternative would be chaos, leaving the UK without a functioning government, which nobody wants.

Of course, neither Nigel nor Kemi will admit that any sort of pact is possible, before the election.

But when it’s over, it looks like they will have no choice except to work together.

This is just one opinion poll. But it’s part of a pattern.

Lots of polls have suggested that Reform’s support has stopped going up and is starting to fall slightly. That’s not a criticism of Nigel Farage. It’s amazing that he’s made his party the most popular in Britain. But perhaps there’s just a limit to how many people want to vote for him.

The last time we had a coalition government in this country was after the 2010 election, when the Conservatives joined forces with the Liberal Democrats.

It worked surprisingly well. That’s not to say the government, led at the time by Tory David Cameron, got everything right. But the two parties worked together despite their differences.

Whether Kemi and Nigel are capable of doing the same remains to be seen. But they may have no choice.

Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage: Could the Conservatives and Reform UK Ever Join Forces?

British politics has entered a period in which traditional party boundaries are becoming increasingly difficult to define. The Conservatives and Reform UK compete for many of the same voters, yet their leaders, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, have repeatedly emphasized the differences between their parties. That creates a political paradox: the two parties can challenge the same Labour electorate while simultaneously competing against each other.

The question of whether Badenoch and Farage could eventually cooperate has therefore become one of the most discussed issues on the British right. It is sometimes framed as a question of whether they can put personal and political differences aside to defeat Labour. But the evidence so far suggests that any such arrangement would face substantial political and practical obstacles.

The relationship between the Conservatives and Reform has been particularly complicated because Reform’s growth has come partly at the Conservatives’ expense. Reform has attracted former Conservative voters and several former Conservative politicians, while Badenoch has sought to maintain a distinct Conservative identity rather than allowing her party to become an extension of Farage’s movement.

Polling earlier in 2026 demonstrated why the issue has generated so much debate. Lord Ashcroft’s analysis found that Conservative and Reform support together represented a substantial share of the electorate, while also showing significant differences between the two groups of voters. The analysis examined whether supporters of each party would prefer the other party’s leader to Keir Starmer and explored the difficulties involved in combining the two electorates.

Those difficulties matter because an electoral alliance cannot simply assume that two parties’ vote shares can be added together. Voters have their own loyalties, priorities and objections.

A Sky News analysis similarly found that a proposed Conservative-Reform pact had only limited support among the parties’ own supporters. Among Conservative supporters surveyed, 39 per cent opposed a pact while 31 per cent supported it. Reform supporters were somewhat more receptive, with 38 per cent supporting an alliance and 30 per cent opposing it. The analysis also found considerable hostility between the two voter groups.

This is an important distinction. The arithmetic of electoral competition can make cooperation appear attractive, but political alliances depend on more than arithmetic.

Badenoch has also been explicit about her position. In June, she rejected the idea of a Conservative-Reform electoral pact, describing the proposal as effectively finished after the parties’ contrasting performances in by-elections. She argued that Conservatives and Reform were different parties and that voters should not be treated as if their support could simply be exchanged between political organisations.

Her opposition has not been limited to electoral strategy. Badenoch has also criticised Farage personally and politically, particularly over the £5 million gift received by Farage before the 2024 general election. The matter has been subject to parliamentary standards scrutiny, while Farage has denied wrongdoing and maintained his explanation of the payment.

In August, Badenoch went further in an interview with LBC, saying that a coalition with Reform would be “monstrous” and arguing that such an arrangement could alienate as many voters as it attracted. Her comments demonstrated that the disagreement was not simply a technical question about constituency arrangements. There are genuine differences over political identity and strategy.

Farage, meanwhile, has built Reform around a very different political proposition. Immigration, welfare, national sovereignty and opposition to the political establishment have been central themes of his party’s campaigning. During the May 2026 local elections, Reform used the slogan “Vote Reform, Get Starmer out”, presenting itself as an alternative to both Labour and the Conservatives.

That positioning creates a direct problem for Badenoch. If the Conservatives move too close to Reform, they risk weakening the distinction they are trying to establish. But if Reform continues taking Conservative voters, the Conservatives face continued pressure from a party competing for support on their right.

The May local elections illustrated the scale of the challenge. Reform made major gains across England, while Labour suffered significant losses and the Conservatives also faced intense competition. The result reinforced the idea that British politics could no longer be understood simply as a Labour-Conservative contest.

At the same time, the results did not automatically demonstrate that a Conservative-Reform alliance would work. Five parties were capable of attracting significant levels of support, with Reform, Labour, the Conservatives, the Greens and Liberal Democrats all occupying substantial parts of the political landscape.

The subsequent polling picture has remained fluid. A YouGov poll conducted on September 20 and 21, 2026, put Labour on 23 per cent, with the Conservatives and Reform both on 21 per cent. The Greens were on 14 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 12 per cent and Restore Britain on 4 per cent. The poll surveyed 2,286 people.

Those numbers underline why the relationship between Badenoch and Farage matters, while also demonstrating why it is difficult to predict the consequences of cooperation. A fragmented electorate can produce very different parliamentary outcomes from relatively small changes in national vote shares.

There is also an important change in the political landscape since many of these arguments first developed: Keir Starmer is no longer prime minister. According to the UK government, Starmer delivered his final speech as prime minister on July 20, 2026, when he offered his resignation and passed the premiership to Andy Burnham.

That changes the meaning of the argument that Badenoch and Farage “must join forces to defeat Keir Starmer.” Starmer’s departure means that a Conservative-Reform alliance can no longer be understood simply as a campaign to remove him from Downing Street. The political question has moved on to the competition over what comes after the Starmer era.

Indeed, the official parliamentary record shows that Starmer subsequently resigned as an MP for Holborn and St Pancras, with a by-election scheduled for October 8, 2026.

The central strategic dilemma for Badenoch and Farage therefore remains unresolved. Cooperation could potentially reduce direct competition between the two parties in selected constituencies. But it could also anger supporters who specifically chose one party because they did not want the other.

For Badenoch, maintaining a separate Conservative identity may be important to rebuilding the party after its severe losses at the 2024 general election and subsequent competition from Reform. For Farage, maintaining Reform’s image as an alternative to the established parties is equally important.

There is also the question of leadership. Even if Conservatives and Reform supporters could agree on broad policy objectives, a formal alliance would immediately raise questions about who would lead it, what policies would form its programme and how candidates would be selected.

Those questions are especially difficult because Badenoch and Farage represent different political traditions despite sharing some positions. The Conservatives remain an established parliamentary party with a long institutional history, while Reform has presented itself as a challenger movement seeking to disrupt the existing political system.

For that reason, the idea that Badenoch and Farage simply “hate each other” is better understood as headline rhetoric than as a complete description of their relationship. They have publicly criticised one another, and Badenoch has ruled out a formal pact. But their parties also compete in an electorate where there is considerable overlap in concerns about immigration, taxation, public services, national sovereignty and the future direction of Britain.

Whether that overlap eventually produces cooperation remains an open political question.

For now, the available evidence points to competition rather than a formal alliance. Badenoch has repeatedly defended Conservative independence, while Farage has continued to present Reform as a separate political force. Polling shows that some voters are open to cooperation, but substantial numbers of both Conservative and Reform supporters are also opposed to it.

The British right therefore faces a strategic choice that cannot be reduced to personalities. It involves competing party identities, voter loyalties, constituency mathematics and fundamentally different ideas about how political change should be achieved.

With Starmer’s premiership already over, the question is no longer whether Badenoch and Farage must unite to remove him. The more consequential question is whether Conservatives and Reform can coexist, compete or eventually find some form of accommodation in Britain’s increasingly fragmented political system.

At present, there is no formal Conservative-Reform pact. What exists instead is a continuing contest for voters, influence and political direction — a contest in which both Badenoch and Farage have strong reasons to preserve their parties’ independence.