James Bagge, who ran as an independent in South West Norfolk in the 2024 Westminster elections, says he got quite good at spotting homes supporting Nigel Farage’s Reform UK when he was out campaigning.
“You might find a reasonably expensive car parked outside a not-so-presentable house,” said Bagge this week, in the kitchen of his lovely rural home near Downham Market.
He remembers one house in particular: “A lovely woman answered the door with a baby on her hip. She was so nice. Then a man roared from inside to ask who I was. ‘Is he Reform?’ he said. She said I wasn’t. ‘Then tell him to f**k off,’ he shouted.”
Bagge, a former lawyer and lifelong Conservative supporter from a prominent local family, ran in 2024 with one main aim: to cost former Tory prime minister, Liz Truss, her seat in parliament. He didn’t win, but his 6,500 votes, many taken from Truss, handed Labour a narrow victory over her that shocked the Conservative Party to its core.
That a former prime minister could lose what was one of the safest Tory seats in Britain in one of its rural heartlands, prosperous Norfolk in the East Anglia region, was a harbinger of Labour’s landslide win. Yet few noticed at the time that Reform had come a close third with a candidate who, Bagge insists, had barely done any campaigning.
James Bagge at his home in Norfolk. Photograph: Mark Paul 
Former prime minister Liz Truss pictured at a count centre in Norfolk in 2024 when she lost her seat to the Labour Party. Photograph: Jacob King/PA Wire
Two years on, almost everything in British politics has been turned on its head.
Labour faces devastation while Norfolk, like much of England’s east, is rapidly turning into Reform country. In English local elections due on May 7th, it is on course to seize control of Norfolk County Council from the Tories, who face a near-wipeout.
The Tories under Kemi Badenoch may have recently halted their death-slide in national polls. But Farage argues that reality will bite for his rivals on May 8th, when local results roll in across England, alongside devolved parliament results in Wales and Scotland.
In Norfolk, for example, Pollcheck predicts Reform could go from just two seats to more than 50 on the 84-seat county council. The Tories may lose all but-one of their 51 seats.
While much attention focuses on his Red Wall northern battle with Labour, Farage aims to make the east of England a graveyard for the Tories. This is Farage’s Turquoise Wall. If he is ever to reach Downing Street, it will be places such as this that send him there.
East Anglia, comprising Norfolk and Suffolk (in Anglo-Norman, the “north folk” and the “south folk”) as well as parts of Essex northeast of London, is now perhaps Reform’s most meaningful stronghold in Britain.
Labour and, increasingly, the Greens can still compete with Reform in the north, but in the east Farage has only an ersatz, weakened Tory party to beat.
The wider eastern England region running inland from the Wash estuary, and south towards the Thames, delivered most of Reform’s Westminster wins in 2024.
Deputy leader Richard Tice is MP for Boston in Lincolnshire, just above the Wash. Farage won further south in Clacton, Essex. Rupert Lowe won in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk while James McMurdock won another Essex seat, although both have since left Reform.
Last week, Farage stirred controversy with a campaigning visit to the Suffolk city of Ipswich and its Championship team’s football stadium, Portman Road.
This week, he focused on Norfolk, with a showbiz launch of Reform’s local election campaign at Norfolk Showgrounds, a few miles outside the city of Norwich.
Nigel Farage at a campaign launch for Norfolk local elections, scheduled to take place on May 7th. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images 
Supporters and candidates at a Reform UK campaign launch for Norfolk local election. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images
The crowd that showed up at the Showgrounds seemed more prosperous than the crowds that appear at Reform rallies in the north. Many told The Irish Times they were former Tories. Lots wore country-style clothing, with flat caps and Barbour jackets.
At the entrance gates, a noisy demonstration against Farage’s party was also held, with protesters holding placards declaring them to be “sick of Reform’s bullsh*t.”
A man inside the rally who gave his name only as Laurence said he was from near Great Yarmouth on the coast. He said he worked as an investor: “Farage will make a good prime minister. It’s taken time, but the movement has reached a critical mass now.”
The “movement” he referred to was the anti-European Union coalition that previously coalesced around Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip), a forerunner of Reform. Six of the seven district council areas of Norfolk heavily backed Brexit – only left-wing Norwich city went Remain. Farage has always had a toehold in Norfolk.
Farage and his “shadow chancellor”, former Tory defector Robert Jenrick, entertained the Showgrounds crowd with gag-laden speeches amid fireworks and a slick live production. It was clear, however, that Reform may still be short of viable candidates in advance of the deadline next week to sign up.
Reform UK treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick addresses supporters in Norwich earlier this week. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images
This, rather than any putative Tory revival, could be Reform’s biggest barrier to meaningful growth in areas such as Norfolk. Reform staff this week tried to sign up people interested in running at a stall down the back of the Showgrounds hall.
A woman in a pink coat told the crowd, via a host with a roaming microphone, that “the country has gone to pot, and Reform just needs to be allowed to get on with it”.
The Irish Times later that evening bumped into the woman in pink in the Parson Woodforde pub, down a warren of narrow lanes in the rural hamlet of Weston Longville, outside Norwich. She was aged in her 60s and gave her name as Margaret.
“I’m a farmer’s daughter and a builder’s wife,” she said. “This country used to be self sufficient. My father took down all the hedgerows to grow more food during the war. I can’t wait for Nigel to get in.”
A small crowd showed up near closing time in the pub because the Swan Inn in a village nearby had shut for the evening. The rumour was Farage and his team had booked it out.
The Parson Woodforde crowd included relatives of Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto investor who over the past year donated £12 million (€14 million) to Reform – the single biggest political donation in one year by an individual in UK history.
Next day, tentative support for Reform could be gauged among shopkeepers in Norfolk’s charming market towns such as Fakenham and Swaffham, which was in Truss’s old constituency – she once called it the “centre of the universe”. There seemed to be little activity this week at the Conni, the local conservative club.
However, Kay Mason Billig, the Tory leader of Norfolk County Council, responded to Farage’s “guff” with a piece in Wednesday’s local Eastern Daily Press: “To let these amateurs get their hands on power would be a disaster, and we would all pay dearly for it.”
James Bagge: ‘I can understand why people want to vote Reform – mainstream democracy has let them down.’
On Thursday in west Norfolk, in Bagge’s rural idyll, he conceded that he feared Farage’s party could “con” its way to local domination.
Bagge is related to a family of baronets connected to Stradsett Hall, a stately home. A former high sheriff of Norfolk and a retired corporate lawyer who advised the Central Bank of Ireland after the crash, he lives close to Stradsett in a grand farmhouse.
We shared tea and flapjack bakes made by his wife Victoria, while their friendly dogs Humphrey (noted as a “gently farting retriever” in a previous newspaper profile) and black pug Percy sniffed around our feet.
Bagge was allied with the so-called “Turnip Taliban” of wealthy, tweedy, traditional local Tory supporters who tried to get Truss deselected in 2009 when she was parachuted by David Cameron into Norfolk.
Bagge’s election run against her as an independent 15 years later got him a three-year ban from attending Conservative Party meetings.
Now, even though he thinks Badenoch is doing a good job, he believes Reform is a big threat.
“I can understand why people want to vote Reform – mainstream democracy has let them down. It hasn’t delivered change. But the truth is there is no easy solution to the problems that we face,” he said.
“I don’t want to disparage him, but the previous Reform candidate (Toby McKenzie) was a pretty second rate performer. Yet he still got 3,000 more votes than I did.”
Whatever about Westminster elections, at a local level Bagge says people just want potholes filled and bins collected. “But they also must understand that at a national level, Britain can’t rule the waves any more.”
Meanwhile, Farage’s Turquoise wave is set to crash on Norfolk shores next month.