The Badenoch v Farage membership row is the shape of politics to come

At the core of the fight is this: Farage claims Reform UK’s membership has overtaken that of the Conservative Party, and even projected the figures on to Tory HQ to celebrate. 

Badenoch’s response to this was to accuse Reform of faking a counter on their website that added up membership numbers over the Christmas week – saying that instead of drawing on real data, their figure just ticked upwards over time.

Farage is, of course, acting as if he is spluttering with rage at the very suggestion he would ever exaggerate in such a way, even threatening to sue Badenoch over the accusation. 

Reform released information on its code to several media outlets, who found it seemed to be looking up real data and was fluctuating as you’d expect – going up much more slowly at night, for example – and so the counter was unlikely to be faked. 

There are various complications, not least that Badenoch says Reform changed how its counter worked before it shared the code with the media. But ultimately what matters here is the leader of the opposition arguing over what a website says about the membership of a party with five MPs.

Commentators seem to be agreed that this was a stupid fight for Badenoch to pick, though their reasons for reaching this consensus differ. Some note that Badenoch – who before becoming an MP was digital editor of the Spectator – should perhaps avoid drawing attention to her experience poking around other politicians’ websites, given she admitted to having once hacked Harriet Harman’s site, a criminal offence.

More significantly, Badenoch is making a bigger story out of the apparent fact – neither Reform’s nor the Conservatives’ membership figures are independently audited – that Farage’s party has overtaken her own when it comes to grassroots membership. 

It’s easy to drag out a story during the dead days between Christmas and New Year, and Badenoch has created easy hooks for Reform’s stunt to roll over into days two, three, four and onward. She is essentially letting more and more voters hear that Reform, and not her own party, is apparently where the action’s at.

Of course, that’s if political party membership matters at all: Reform is boasting that it has a little over 130,000 members, surpassing the Conservatives’ 

 total according to their last leadership election. Neither is remotely close to the more than half a million members Labour achieved under Jeremy Corbyn – and as his record showed, membership and electoral success can be completely detached from one another.

In classic Westminster fashion, Farage and Badenoch may well be rowing over something that couldn’t matter less.

Still, that doesn’t stop one of the most common critiques of Badenoch from being straightforwardly out of date and wrong. Several people have commented that the leader of the opposition shouldn’t be so online, shouldn’t be getting into the gutter, and should have her head focused on higher matters.

Such people have not been paying attention. If ever there was a time in politics when voters rewarded politicians for dignity, for decorum, for “going high when they go low”, 2024’s US election has proved those days are over. 

Voters – even and perhaps especially the pensioners Reform and the Conservatives are fighting over – are extremely online these days, and they want politicians to fight like they do. To speak in bland, cautious soundbites is to lose: it sounds phony and artificial, and it doesn’t work  on Facebook, or other social platforms. 

Over-70s are sharing often outlandish – even mad – political news from alternative media online, and politicians need to understand voters aren’t living in News At 10-land any more. It’s going to continue to be visceral, and dumb, and the option not to play this game doesn’t exist any more for working politicians.

Badenoch does, at least, seem to understand this new political mood, even if she has so far been hopeless at capturing it. Though Labour is not caught up in this political row, they’ll soon be dragged down into all this again – and no-one in the party’s high command seems to get it, so caught up are their comms in Blair-era thinking. 

The game has changed. The future of politics is petty, performative, and endlessly amplified online.

Badenoch and Farage aren’t fighting for votes—they’re fighting for clicks, shares, and the fleeting glory of going viral. They will hope that votes will follow.

For now, though, they have the field to themselves, as Labour hasn’t even noticed the game has changed. In time, it will still need to learn how to play.