Reform UK is back ahead of the Conservatives in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, barely a week after the Tories’ brief overtake was greeted as proof of a Kemi Badenoch revival. The average, published on Sunday, puts Labour on 28 per cent, Reform on 22, and the Tories on 21.
The reversal has drawn nowhere near the media coverage the crossover did, proving a deep seated media bias against Farage’s party. When the Tories edged ahead, one newspaper ran “Tories overtake Reform” on a gap of 0.07 points in its own tracker, and followed it a day later with “Tories pull five points ahead of Reform.” A comment piece had Badenoch “laughing all the way to Downing St.” Elsewhere, “yet another poll” showed Reform “falling to third place behind Tories,” and most of Westminster took the shift as “enough evidence of the ‘crossover’ moment.”
A one-point Tory lead was a crossover. A one-point Reform lead, it seems, is not news.
In POLITICO’s average, Reform led the Tories 22 to 21 in late October. The Conservatives then moved a point ahead, a lead that lasted around a week, before the two parties sat tied on 22 per cent. Nigel Farage had dismissed the polls showing Reform sliding as “jiggery-pokery.”
A Reform UK source told The National Pulse: “Kemi sunk the Tories well below their abysmal 2024 levels and it seems her ‘revival’ has already run out of steam. Last week we averaged 34 per cent in council by elections while the Tories languished on a pathetic 13 per cent. Kemi’s increasingly deranged attacks on Reform are backfiring spectacularly.”
Several recent individual polls point the same way. Deltapoll had Reform on 24 and the Tories on 20 earlier this month, Survation had Reform two points clear at 23 to 21, and Opinium put Reform a point ahead.
The National Pulse has previously reported that the Tories slipped back below Reform in Deltapoll’s survey, that a poll claiming an eight-point Tory lead was flawed, and that Britain’s go-to polling expert, Sir John Curtice, said the “Kemi bounce” doesn’t exist.
