Nigel Farage campaigns across Essex, Yorkshire and Sussex

Nigel Farage spent 24 April on a high street walkabout at the Braintree Outlet Village shopping centre in Essex with prospective councillor and billionaire backer Nick Candy. The Reform UK leader had already been seen in Shipley, Great Dunmow, Crowborough, Crawley, Redhill and Dagenham as he criss-crossed the country before the May elections.

Braintree Outlet Village, Essex

Sean Smith followed Farage through a busy schedule of walkabouts and meet-ups with prospective councillors and supporters. Reform UK was campaigning around the country in the local elections, and its campaign began with a series of rallies for supporters and candidates.

At those rallies, people who were not already members were asked to join the party and put their names forward as candidates. Farage then shifted from set-piece events to street-level campaigning, appearing with Candy at the shopping centre on 24 April.

Crowborough and Redhill

On 15 April, Farage toured Crowborough’s high street with prospective councillors before going to the site of a cadet training camp he had visited as a schoolboy and that now houses asylum seekers. Last year, the government announced that about 500 people seeking asylum in the UK would be housed in an army camp on the outskirts of Crowborough in East Sussex.

Protests followed the announcement, and a local volunteer patrol group was started after it. Farage also did video for Reform’s YouTube channel and other social media at the camp, then moved on to Crawley, where he met a group from the Chagos islands, and later to Redhill for a candidate meet-up at a pub.

Great Dunmow and Dagenham

Farage’s 17 April stops showed the same pattern. In Great Dunmow near Uttlesford, he met supporters and prospective councillors, met a fan in a barber shop, and later saw friends with their dogs in Waltham Abbey. A man rushed out of the barber’s mid-haircut to take a selfie with him.

He had started the sequence earlier, on 10 April in Dagenham, where he appeared with Reform candidates for the local council elections. By 22 April, he was in Shipley, Yorkshire, extending the campaign trail across several regions in the run-up to the vote.

The picture that emerges is of a national local-election effort built around repeated face-to-face stops rather than a single launch event. Reform’s leaders used rallies to recruit candidates and then pushed them into towns and shopping centres, where the campaign could be seen in public and in real time.