Reform is plotting to boot out leading government ministers including Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and Bridget Phillipson as part of a ‘ruthless’ new strategy to win power.
Nigel Farage said the party is looking to unseat a string of senior government figures as part of a new strategy to target individual constituencies for the first time.
The Reform UK leader said he had worked as a ‘campaigner’ for 30 years, trying to increase national vote share in order to maximise influence on issues like Brexit.
But, with Reform now topping the polls for a year, he said the party is poised to switch to a target seats campaign to focus resources on winning power at the next election.
Key targets will include the Yorkshire constituencies of Ms Cooper and Mr Miliband and Ms Phillipson’s seat on Houghton and Sunderland South.
Mr Farage told the Mail that the education secretary was ‘toast’ and said that unseating Mr Miliband would be a ‘sweet moment’.
‘It would be lovely,’ he said, ‘although of course I’ve done it before. I did it in 2015 don’t forget, he was favourite to win the election. UKIP got four million votes and without that (David) Cameron would never have won a majority in 2015.
‘We are coming for Labour and they know it. You only have to look at the stage management of Prime Minister’s questions and the constant attacks on me to realise we’re deep under their skin.’
Ruthless: Nigel Farage says new strategy of targeting winnable seats will involve pushing to unseat members of the Cabinet
Vulnerable: Reform sources claim Ed Miliband’s Doncaster North seat is a ‘plum’ target, and are also targeting Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson
Other top Labour targets are likely to include the South Yorkshire constituency of defence secretary John Healey and Angela Rayner’s Ashton-under-Lyne seat in Greater Manchester.
One poll this month suggested Reform could take the seats of a dozen Cabinet ministers, with the Greens and independents unseating another four, including health secretary Wes Streeting and business secretary Peter Kyle.
The scale of the challenge threatens to complicate any Labour leadership, with many of the leading candidates potentially facing an uphill struggle to hold their own seats.
The main political parties have traditionally drawn up target lists of up to 100 seats in order to focus resources on marginal battlegrounds where they have a good chance of winning.
Because Reform is starting from a base of just eight seats, Mr Farage said it could have to target as many as 350 constituencies, creating a huge financial and logistical challenge.
In February, Mr Farage said Reform was ‘halfway’ ready to fight the election. He said the figure is now up to two-thirds, with the move to a more targeted campaign a vital next step in the party’s development.
‘What we’re trying to do is unprecedented,’ he said. ‘The massive shift in where Reform needs to be is, now we have a professional centre, we need to start developing local centres of excellence, real excellence around the country.
‘We’ve got to ruthless pick – what are the seats that we realistically think we can win a general election? Who are the right people to stand in those seats? Are they trustworthy? Are they prepared to work their socks off?’
He added: ‘This is going to be, you know, a massive sea change for me, having done things a certain way for 30 years. It’s a very, very big change.
‘I’ve always been used to doing the shotgun… firing the pellets as wide as possible to try and attract people to our ideas.
‘There’s always been a broad approach. It’s always been about changing national opinion. And to some extent, we fought this campaign that way. But that has got to change.’
