This Trump supporter helped crush the UK’s Conservative Party

LONDON : Nigel Farage, a leading figure behind Brexit and a longtime supporter of Donald Trump, set out last month with what many political analysts thought was a long-shot aim: Win millions of votes, get a seat in Parliament and destroy the ruling Conservative Party.

On Friday, Farage was in London celebrating. His upstart party Reform UK had won more than 14% of the total vote in Britain’s election last Thursday on an anti-immigration platform. The 60-year-old, who built a career protesting against the establishment, will now sit in Parliament alongside four other Reform UK lawmakers—his first victory for Parliament in eight attempts.

His six-week campaign helped ensure that the Conservative Party lost scores of additional seats, suffering its worst defeat in its nearly 200-year history, and giving an even bigger majority to the center-left Labour Party, which was widely expected to win. Former U.S. President Trump quickly sent a message of congratulations to Farage: “Nigel is a man who truly loves his Country!"

For Farage, a cigarette-smoking populist, the vote establishes a bridgehead in Britain’s Parliament from which he can launch the next stage of his strategy—professionalize his protest campaign to try a takeover of the right-wing of British politics and become prime minister when elections are next held by 2029. His campaign saw millions of mostly working-class voters switch from Tory to Reform UK.

“Let the Conservative Party tear themselves apart as they are going to do in opposition," he said Friday.

Farage’s strong showing in the election comes at a time when far-right parties across much of Europe are making big gains, especially in France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won the first round of