Nigel Farage's anti-immigration party Reform UK kicks off Britain's annual party conference season Friday, with the Brexit cheerleader and his buoyant supporters increasingly confident he could be Britain's next leader.

Farage -- who rebranded his Brexit Party as Reform in 2021 -- gathers his handful of MPs, local elected officials and members for two days in the central English city of Birmingham as the migration-fixated party surges in popularity.

Although the next general election is not due until 2029, Reform's wins in May local elections and its lead in most polls over the last six months has a growing number of people eyeing Farage as prime minister-in-waiting.

The sense that the party has the wind in its sails was fed further on Thursday when Nadine Dorries, a 68-year-old minister in the previous Conservative government, defected to Reform and declared her former party "dead".

"I am leading a political party that I think is going to win the next general election," Farage, a long-time ally of Donald Trump, told a crowd of the US president's officials and allies Wednesday in Washington.

In a welcome message penned to the thousands of members expected at their........

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