\n<\/p>\n
Nigel Farage is riding high in the polls. And the last few months his party has had a slew of political defections from the Conservatives \u2013 with more expected to follow. He\u2019s also fresh from Davos, the meeting of the World Economic Forum that he once railed against as a jolly for the global elites.<\/p>\n
But where does all this leave Farage and Reform\u2019s renegade image? Peter Walker<\/strong> is the Guardian\u2019s senior political correspondent and says some Reform voters would like the defections to stop. \u201cThere is a worry if you get to the election and there\u2019s loads of former Tories, then Keir Starmer can go, \u2018look at them, they\u2019re just another version of the Tories\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n And, hears Nosheen Iqbal<\/strong>, the defections in some way have been good news for Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives \u2013 inspiring them to fight harder for voters. \u201cThey\u2019re now in a fight to the death and they\u2019re quite relishing it. They\u2019re quite up for it. They now know where they are and I think they quite like that.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: @Nigel_Farage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nigel Farage is riding high in the polls. And the last few months his party has had a slew of political defections from the Conservatives \u2013 with more expected to follow. He\u2019s also fresh from Davos, the meeting of the World Economic Forum that he once railed against as a jolly for the global elites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[2374,515,838,3954],"class_list":{"0":"post-42457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-joining","9":"tag-podcast","10":"tag-reform","11":"tag-tories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}