Farage is up and Starmer’s down – but real story of this election is much deeper

But something is different this time round.

According to Politico’s poll aggregator of UK voting intention, Reform were sailing at an average of around 30% at the time of the by-election, while Labour was around 22%.

Since then, Reform has dropped to 25% and Labour has fallen almost as far, to 18%. It’s joined in the high teens by post-Polanski bounce Green Party and the Tories, while the Lib Dems aren’t too far behind.

If 2025 was the moment Reform shattered the old party duopoly, we might remember 2026 as the moment the British quintopoly arrived.

At these elections, Reform will complete the process of ‘bedding in’ at a local level which it began last year, and the Greens will likely begin that same process.

Has British politics become ‘volatile’?

‘We are living in a mood where the public are extremely pessimistic and they’re looking for change, and they’re extremely volatile with who they’re voting for,’ said Kieran Hurley, director of politics at polling firm Ipsos.

‘So, if I was going to describe politics in Britain in one word, it is “volatile”.

‘That does mean that if there’s a general election in 2029 only a fool would predict it with any degree of certainty.’

Reform is also going to upset established systems in Scotland, where the party is vying with Labour for second place in the Holyrood election, and Wales, which has a surging Plaid Cymru in the mix too.

All this means we’re likely going to have to get used to a very different UK political landscape – one more similar to continental Europe, where it’s rare for any single party to get a majority in parliament.

Is this now inevitable?

Kieran Hurley said: ‘[The landscape] will take time to change, but it can change.’

He added: ‘It is possible that if there was a sustained period of political stability, and also economic progress, then you do see times when the public mood improves.

‘David Cameron was very effective at leveraging this in run-up to the 2015 general election, where economic optimism improved as we got closer to the polls.’

However, it won’t be news to anyone that the current economic picture isn’t looking particularly rosy. Some of that will be down to the Labour government’s decisions, and some of it won’t.

Kieran continued: ‘When we look at the wider geopolitical environment and the potential economic ramifications that are still being unwound about the conflict in the Middle East, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change anytime soon.’

With the arrival of this new reality, we’ll need to get used to a perpetual feeling of uncertainty.

That’s the thing about political earthquakes – they rarely make the ground more stable.

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