This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with my colleague Joseph Sternberg. He's in London.

So he's very close to springtime and to Najibiraj. There are elections pending, local elections,

and there's a by-election, parliamentary elections, and there are two mayoral contests that one of the major newspapers, the independent predicts, will all go reform's way.

What reform is, requires some careful explication.

Reform is Nigel Farage.

Nigel Farage is from the Brexit days, the Boris Johnson Brexit days when they

were all aspirational. Nigel Farage is a force of nature. I've set with Nacho Farage in my studio

in New York once upon a time. He's extremely pleasant. He's very well spoken. He's very casual about everything. And what he has to say is reasonable. In other words, what's not the like except the rise of reform? Joe, what is the ambition here to become the Tories, to take over the Tories? Because everybody's areing fingers in all directions. Can we say what

Nigel Farage wants to achieve? Well, reform is interesting because as you pointed out, John,

it is the latest iteration of a protest party that really started during the Brexit political

battles before 2015 in that referendum.

And, you know, the party has been getting traction more recently as a protest party against

this consensus, or this view that the political consensus in London is failing the country.

They had a great deal of success in the last national election last year for

parliament, where, you know, they only won a handful of seats, but they got a much larger

proportion of the vote than people might have expected. And what's interesting about them is that they

managed pull votes from both the center-left Labor Party and the center-right conservative party. So they are forging an electoral coalition between

blue-collar working class voters who might have supported Brexit and have a more populist

tilt and then also weirdly the libertarian wing of the Conservative Party.

And I think that because reform is capable of pulling voters from both of the mainstream parties,

you can talk about them starting to have a chance in some of these elections.

And so the liberal Democrats, the Tories, and even the Red Wall, the Labor's Red Wall in the North, all are attractive, Nigel Farage.

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