As Rishi Sunak seeks to solidify Conservative support, Nigel Farage’s return to politics looms large. His dark charisma and populist rhetoric threaten Sunak’s delicate electoral balance. With Farage’s appeal to disaffected groups, including Brexit supporters disillusioned with the establishment, the Tories face a reckoning. As polls forecast a Labour landslide, Sunak’s team ponders a rightward shift. But Farage’s resurgence signals a deeper crisis, heralding a potential Trumpian transformation of British politics.
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By Adrian Wooldridge
Rishi Sunak’s bed of nails just got a lot more uncomfortable. The prime minister’s electoral strategy has focused on consolidating the Conservative base — hence, his ideas for national service and a quadruple lock on state pensions. But as Sunak was campaigning in the Conservative stronghold of Henley, Nigel Farage announced that he is taking over the leadership of the Reform UK party and standing as MP for the fading seaside town of Clacton. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Farage is Sunak’s nightmare made flesh. He is a darkly charismatic figure — a “regular bloke,” with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other, who is willing to say what “everyone is thinking.” (In fact, he was educated in an expensive private school, Dulwich College, and arrives at meetings in a chauffeur-driven car.) Farage is a consummate political operator who knows how to make the political weather: Yesterday’s surprise announcement that he is reentering politics is being followed by a noisy launch of his campaign in Clacton at midday today. The right-wing media is infatuated with him (he has his own show on GB News), and the liberal press is infatuated with hating him.
Farage is catnip to the two groups at the heart of Boris Johnson’s winning 2019 coalition: prosperous retired people and the white working class — or the landed estates and the housing estates, as they are sometimes christened, or the red-trouser brigade and the leisure-suit mob. He will play right-wing theme tunes about immigration and cultural decline far more skillfully than Sunak could ever hope to. But he will also add two tunes that the leader of a ruling party can never sound: the “betrayal of Brexit” by the political establishment (aka “the secret state”) and the sense that the country is falling apart. Farage provides a vent for people who want to vote for change but don’t like the Labour Party or the even more left-wing Liberal Democrats.
The Brexit champion’s announcement came on the same day two big polls showed that Sunak’s base strategy is not working: YouGov’s MRP poll predicts a wide 194-seat Labour majority, with a host of big-name Tories, including Jeremy Hunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Penny Mordaunt, losing their seats. A More In Common poll predicts a still crushing 114-majority for Labour. It would have been far more sensible to focus on middle-class worries that Labour is a tax-and-spend party that will penalize ambition rather than throw red meat to elderly radicals.
The Conservatives will be tempted to move yet further to the right to staunch the Farage bleeding. Bloomberg reports that Sunak’s team is considering a tougher stance on Britain’s membership in the European Convention of Human Rights to show how determined he is to stop the boats ferrying migrants across the English Channel. But a further move to the right might well alienate Tory moderates such as Hunt, David Cameron and James Cleverly, who are opposed to leaving the ECHR and unhappy with the general tone of the election.
The mood in the Conservative Party could hardly be gloomier. Tories who had reconciled themselves to defeat are now worried about a wipeout. Tories who defended Sunak against internal critics are having second thoughts. The decision to hold the election in July rather than November now looks dumber than it did before. Farage would have been in the US in November campaigning for his friend Donald Trump. But a summer election has caught him with time on his hands and trouble on his mind. Expect Tory activists to give up or even transfer their allegiance to Reform (the Tory Party’s house-organ, The Daily Telegraph, puts a flattering portrait of a merry-looking Farage on its front page). And expect the sounds of internal fury with Sunak to get louder despite the first adage of politics that you unite behind your leader during general elections.
Much worse is to come for the British right. Not just because they are about to lose the election badly. Not just because a big defeat will lead to bitter infighting. And not just because some of the most creative minds in the party such as Michael Gove will no longer be in parliament. But because a Farage-flavored defeat will hasten the Trumpification of the Conservative Party.
When Trump won the 2016 election, Farage roared that he “couldn’t be happier” and would do what he can to ensure that the victory is repeated in 2024. Steve Bannon, Trump’s one-time consigliere, is “my kind of chap,” he once said, whereas Barack Obama to him is a “loathsome individual.” Farage’s style of politics is thoroughly Trumpian. Reform UK is a Farage vehicle — it is organized as a private company rather than a regular political party, with the man as it’s the largest shareholder, and its fortunes rise and fall with his interest in politics.
Farage specializes in denouncing a hidden establishment and evading responsibility for his own decisions: Thus, according to him, Brexit, a policy that he did more than anyone else to foist on Britain, has proved to be a disappointment not because taking the UK out of the world’s biggest trading zone as the global economy was fragmenting was foolish but because the hidden elite subverted a great plan.
The idea that a single politician might be responsible for the Trumpification of one of the world’s oldest and most successful political parties might seem like a stretch. Farage certainly has a good chance of winning Clacton despite the fact that it has a 24,702 Conservative majority. In 2014, Clacton voted for euroskeptic UKIP’s first-elected MP, Douglas Carswell, and the citizens remain disillusioned with politics-as-usual. But, even if he does, he is likely to be Britain’s only Reform MP. The first-past-the-post electoral system is as hard on rebel parties of the right as of the left. Aren’t Farage and Reform both illusions beloved by the media rather than real political forces capable of producing deep-seated change?
I think not. The Tory Party is more of a hollow vehicle than it has been in its history: It only has about 170,000 members, increasingly relies on maverick businesspeople for its funding, and outsources its thinking to think tanks and right-wing newspapers. Many of those funders and newspapers are as Farage-friendly as the party membership. And the Party has been dragged inexorably in a populist direction by the logic of Brexit. By creating an impossible dream of “taking back control,” Brexit has condemned the Party to a toxic combination of disillusionment and growing radicalism. The logical end of this is Trump-style populism.
The election of a Labour government on July 4 now seems as certain as anything can be in politics. This leaves only two questions: How big will the Labour majority be? And what sort of opposition will we have? Farage’s entry into the race not only makes it more likely that Labour will win with a significant majority. It makes it more likely that a defeated Tory Party will shift to the right in order to recapture Reform voters — perhaps parachuting Boris Johnson into a safe seat, perhaps regrouping to incorporate Farage, but certainly adopting a Make Britain Great Again politics.
If a healthy polity depends on having a responsible opposition that can hold a potentially over-mighty government to account, then Britain is about to get a lot sicker.
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