One of the the oldest political parties in the world may not be around very much longer. The British Conservative Party emerged, loosely organised, from a turbulent late 17th century, during which Protestantism triumphed over Roman Catholicism in both church and parliament. The “Tories” (as they are still known today) objected to the exclusion of the Catholic James II from kingship, since the crown was rightfully his by birth. They were not, however, pro-Catholic—their objection rested on a point of principle that party members felt honour-bound to uphold. But four centuries later, the Conservative Party is in danger of disappearing. That is, admittedly, a large claim, and it may be too large or at least premature. Still, Andrew Marr, a veteran political analyst and one of the UK’s keenest commentators, recently floated this possibility for the first time in his life in an article for LBC.

Several times during their long history in British politics, the Conservatives have been down but never out. They were previously overtaken on their left, first by the Liberals and then by the Labour Party. Today, however, their possible destroyer has emerged on their right, and they are ill-equipped to deal with this threat. Until the 2024 general election, the Conservatives retained a support base among the working and lower-middle classes by emphasising the importance of patriotism, the family, and lower taxes. But now Reform UK, a populist and trenchantly Eurosceptic outfit founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, has adopted those Conservative positions and super-charged them.

Much of the new party’s current success stems from its unapologetic opposition to mass immigration at a time when that position was still a political taboo. In this way, they have aligned themselves with the New Right parties of Europe and North America, and they now find themselves able to influence and even dictate the way immigration is discussed on the centre-left and centre-right. In opposition, the UK Labour Party furiously opposed a (now defunct) Conservative plan to deport illegal and criminal immigrants to detention camps in Rwanda, a policy that Labour’s leader Sir Keir Starmer described as “unworkable, unethical, and extortionate.” But now that it is in government, Labour has created detention camps in the UK, which critics allege are comparably inhumane. The website of Detention Action, a human-rights organisation established to oppose Labour’s scheme, claims:

[C]onditions in immigration detention mirror those of a prison. In most cases, people are held in small cells with barred windows, where they are locked in for several hours during the day and at night. Healthcare services are often under-resourced and access to legal support and contact with friends and family is extremely limited.

Nevertheless, Labour is cleaving to its newfound hawkishness on immigration, anxious to neutralise the electoral threat from the nationalist Right. Reform’s recent by-election victory in Runcorn and Helsby, where they snatched a seat in Labour’s heartland by just six votes, suggests voters remain unconvinced by the sudden conversion of Starmer and his party.

The political genius responsible for creating a successful populist party to the right of the Conservatives is a former City of London commodities’ trader named Nigel Farage. Before he became leader of Reform UK, Farage was a vehement critic of the European Union and leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) from 1997 to 2016. UKIP played a large part in leavers’ narrow victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and Farage quickly realised that his single-issue party had tapped into popular dissatisfaction that went beyond antipathy to the EU. He left UKIP and established the Brexit Party to harness that dissatisfaction with a manifesto that promised a “political revolution that puts ordinary people first.” Its policies included a phased abolition of the BBC licence fee, ending Value Added Tax on fuel bills, and scrapping inheritance tax and interest on student loans. Civil servants would have to sign a pledge of political neutrality, foreign aid would be “redirected,” and companies earning less than £10,000 annually would not pay corporation tax.

The degree to which these policies have brought voters to Reform UK remains to be determined by closer examination. But like other New Right parties, Reform finds it has considerable power to berate the parties of government. Since the March local elections, in which Reform UK made giant gains and neither Labour nor the Conservatives managed to hold any of the councils they controlled before the election, the usual exchange of political slander has been superseded by an increasingly confident claim of populist superiority. “The two-party system,” Farage crowed, “has been smashed!” This month’s polls measuring voting intention seem to support this triumphalism, at least for the time being. Survation reports that Reform UK is now tied with Labour while YouGov reports that the populists have surged into a seven-point lead.

Reform UK also enjoys an advantage over many of Europe’s other New Right parties. Although Remainers maintain that Farage and his fellow Brexiteers have ruined Britain by substantially reducing its trade, the party itself is so young that it has no institutional past for which it must apologise. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni, on the other hand, was formerly a member of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement; the founders of the Sweden Democrats, now the largest faction in their country’s coalition government, were once neo-Nazi supporters; and France’s Rassemblement National was once led by obsessive antisemite Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of the party’s present co-leader, Marine Le Pen.

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Farage and the other senior leaders of Reform UK, meanwhile, have been able to present themselves as nothing more sinister than patriotic British nationalists, whose internationalist opponents are congenitally incapable of advancing or defending the interests of their own country. “Many of those who supported the European Union,” Farage told an accommodating GB News interviewer in April, “also believed in global governance. They didn’t really believe in us as a country. And by definition, I think that’s unpatriotic.” The Reformers closely resemble the European New Rightists in this respect. They represent those disenchanted with liberal and centrist politics of which the EU is held to be emblematic, even if Brussels is not the main object of their grievance. For some of these voters and activists, Russia is not the aggressor in Ukraine, it is a wronged former superpower merely defending its own borders from intrusion by NATO and the European Union.

Farage has attempted to chart a course between this line and its unpopularity in Britain. Last year, he allowed that the Russian invasion was the responsibility of Vladimir Putin, but he was quick to add that Russia’s autocrat had been provoked by the reckless behaviour of NATO and the EU. This March, he sought to distance himself from the Ukraine policy of US president Donald Trump, a formerly close ally who is now widely disliked and distrusted in the UK. “I would say,” Farage ventured, “it’s quite right to aim for peace, but we can’t have a peace that turns Putin into a winner. So I would not be 100 percent with where his team is right now, absolutely not.” This puts Farage on the same ground as Georgia Meloni and at odds with Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland and the Austrian Freedom party. The German and—especially—the Austrian New Rightists have preferred to follow Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, by calling for a peace that would award Russia large swathes of Ukrainian territory and foreclose the possibility of Ukraine ever joining NATO.

Reform’s rapid rise has made Farage a contender for the highest office in the UK, a development once considered unthinkable. His forecasts that he will be prime minister now attract expressions of anxious concern not mockery from the liberal commentariat. The next general election may still be more than four years away, and a lot could change in that time. Nevertheless, the Labour Party and its abnormally uncharismatic leader are going to struggle to convince a sceptical electorate that its promises to raise living standards and secure an independent and influential place for Britain in the world have been kept.

The Conservatives face an even more daunting challenge—one that may yet prove to be existential: they must secure themselves a place in the national political scene they once dominated. If Reform UK continues to rise and win more seats in council and national by-elections, it will end up replacing the Conservatives as the main party of the Right. Similar developments have already occurred elsewhere in mainland Europe, where the Rassemblement Nationale now easily outperforms the centre-right Republicans; in Italy, where the governing party, Fratelli d’Italia, is now a long way ahead of the centre-right Forza Italia; in Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats are the largest party in the centre-right government (although the Social Democrats do remain the most popular party there). In Germany, the Alternativ für Deutschland remains shut out of government, largely due to an enduring taboo against cooperation with a party that still contains far-right elements. But the AfD now leads the governing centre-right CDU in the polls, while the CDU’s leader and German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is thought to be untrustworthy by seventy percent of Germans.

Reform UK is now firmly in the political slipstream of some of the most important New Right parties in the EU, and a radical nationalist government in the UK looks like a realistic possibility. Nigel Farage—a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other—finds himself on the cusp of replacing and retiring one of the world’s oldest parties, and with it, the two-party system that has defined UK politics since the Second World War. The political turbulence that began with the announcement of a referendum on EU membership in 2016 looks set to continue for some time.