The laws of physics apply equally to everyone, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. Dancers with particularly good elevation do appear to hover in the air momentarily, but their feet always touch the stage again seconds later. Politicians can also appear to defy gravity, especially those with good populist skills, but they too have to deal with the same forces everyone else does.

Nigel Farage is one politician with Nijinsky-like skills when it comes appearing to escape political gravity, but the latest polling on the fortunes of Reform shows that he, too, can’t do that forever.

An MRP poll, often known as a “mega-poll”, by YouGov suggested this week that if an election were held today, Farage’s party would not, as he has often claimed, be heading into government. Labour would end up the largest party in a hung parliament with 241 seats, with the Tories on 130 and Reform just behind on 123.

Now, that figure is extraordinary given Reform currently has just eight members, and for the main two parties, it is terrifying because it shows how much of a threat Farage’s party would pose to their chances of governing with authority. Labour would have to go into a coalition, while a Reform and Tory pact would not bring together enough seats to form a majority.

But for Farage, the poll shows that he too is subject to the laws of physics and politics. The last YouGov MRP in September 2025 put Reform just on the edge of a majority on 311 seats. And the party’s polling position nationally has fallen from 27 per cent to 20 per cent. For any other political party, it would hardly be a surprise, given the number of scandals and rows Farage has had to deal with in Reform over the past few months. Reform is still a powerful force in British politics but for this populist party, it’s a shock reminder that it cannot defy gravity – or scrutiny.

The other law of politics these days is that a party has to face two powerful forces pulling it in opposite directions at the same time. That tension is well understood for Labour: Andy Burnham has to work out how to appeal to the voters his party is losing to the Greens on one side, and to Reform on the other, without ending up putting both off with a hodgepodge of messaging. The Tories have to deal with the threat of the Lib Dems and Reform.

And Reform is under that same tension: YouGov’s research shows that as well as fending off the threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, Farage is also facing an increasingly sophisticated anti-Reform tactical vote. The pollster found that more than 40 per cent of Labour and Lib Dem voters would give their vote to their local Tory candidate to block Reform, and around 15 per cent of Tory voters would back Labour similarly.

And the mere presence of Lowe’s party is a threat to Farage because it splits the right-wing vote still further than it already is between Reform and the Conservatives. Restore won’t be able to stand candidates in every seat, but if it did, polling by Stonehaven earlier this month suggested that Reform would end up with 59 MPs as a result of that split.

All parties find it hard to respond to threats at either ends of their own internal political spectrums, but Restore has a particularly potent impact on Farage and Reform. Lowe’s rival party seems to make them come out with pronouncements that they just wouldn’t normally contemplate.

Zia Yusuf in particular uses the kind of language and policies that the much longer-in-the-tooth Farage has always tried to dance around with real delicacy: deportation camps in areas controlled by the Green Party, for instance. During the Makerfield by-election, Farage himself claimed that the 2010 Equality Act had ensured that “anti-Whiteness is institutionalised into every aspect of public life”.

These kinds of shifts towards Restore are dangerous to Farage as they galvanise the anti-Reform tactical vote even more. Where Farage normally pitches himself as the acceptable home for people worried about immigration, Restore makes him seem less moderate and more on the edge of politics.

The worst outcome for him would be if his party lurched about trying to regain attention from Restore but without those voters really believing Reform enough to move back, while sufficiently motivating its opponents towards tactical voting against it. It is dance that not even someone as nimble as Farage can pull off convincingly.