Coffee House Shots: mums for Reform?
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2026
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Britain’s mums are backing Nigel Farage. One in five Mumsnet users intend to vote for Reform at the next general election, the first time a party other than Labour has topped its poll. Having been more negative towards Farage and the right in the past, why are its politically engaged users changing their minds? Are they swayed by issues like single-sex spaces, or does it reflect a wider collapse of confidence in the establishment?
James Heale speaks to Tim Shipman and Sonia Sodha.
Produced by Megan McElroy.
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Transcript
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| 0:35.4 | Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel and I'm joined today with Spectators political editor Tim Shipman and the journalist Sonia Soda. |
| 0:43.9 | Now Tim, first of all, there was a big article out in the Sunday Times last week talking about reform success among a territory and a group which maybe hasn't always yielded results for Nigel Farage's |
| 0:54.5 | various parties, which is a mum's net survey saying how well they're doing with older women. |
| 0:58.5 | Yeah, I mean, traditionally and consistently, Farage has been a man's politician, and there's |
| 1:06.0 | pretty much always been a massive bias with every party that he's led towards men and particularly older |
| 1:12.1 | men that kind of beer-swilling pub-going fraternity that likes, thinks of him as a bit of a |
| 1:17.7 | cheeky chappy who's challenging the establishment and that's always played quite well. |
| 1:21.8 | I think there's always been a fairly inbuilt scepticism from the female voter. |
| 1:26.0 | There's been a, you know, I mean a big deficit, sort of 10, 15 |
| 1:29.0 | points quite a lot of the time in his support. And this, you know, Mumsnet isn't everything. It's not the |
| 1:35.0 | sort of, you know, they are not the whole electorate, but they're a pretty key sort of influential |
| 1:40.1 | group. And it's a bit of a right of passage for politicians to trot off to mum's net and |
| 1:44.5 | you know get a grilling and doing well with a bunch of people who are quite politically engaged |
| 1:50.5 | and have a disproportionate tendency to vote it's good news for Farage you know i think there still is |
| 1:57.4 | a male kind of bias in the reform vote in general. Young women are |
| 2:02.0 | flocking to the Greens, but the fact that older women are now interested in reform, I think, |
... |
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