Nigel Farage, Britain’s quintessential insider-outsider, has reshaped UK politics with bold populist appeals and sharp critiques of the establishment. Leading the Reform Party, he challenges the status quo with promises of sovereignty and economic revival, echoing Thatcherite grit. Can the grand simplifier translate his rhetoric into lasting reform?
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By Adrian Wooldridge ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
This has been a dismal year for Britain’s political leaders: most obviously for Rishi Sunak, who led the Conservatives to their worst defeat in the party’s long history, but also for Keir Starmer, who won a famous election victory only to fall flat on his face. Starmer’s performance as prime minister has been so dismal (“free gear” goodies, a bungled budget, incensed pensioners and farmers) that last week he was forced to relaunch his government with a series of speeches about “missions” and “milestones” — surely the quickest relaunch in our political history but, to judge from the popular reaction, not the last one he’ll need.
There are two exceptions to this story of failure: Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform. Reform only has five seats in parliament compared with the Lib Dems’ 72. But Farage is nevertheless the most significant of the two: The 60-year-old who did more than anyone else to deliver Brexit is the coming man of British politics.
Farage has pulled off a rare double — an international and a domestic triumph. Donald Trump’s victory in the US election means that he now occupies a unique position in Britain as “first friend.” In the coming years, the UK will devote immense diplomatic resources to trying to understand and influence Trump’s court. Farage is an honorary member, not only close to the man himself but also to his new “best buddy,” Elon Musk. Peter Mandelson, the best candidate for the British ambassador to the US, rightly urges Starmer to use Farage as a bridgehead to Trump.
At home, five Reform MPs might not sound like very many — Labour has 411 of the available 650 — but the number understates both the level of popular support for the party and its potential to turn British politics upside down. Some four million people voted for Reform in July — more than voted for the Liberal Democrats. (Paradoxically, Reform is a victim of the sort of British peculiarity that its voters usually celebrate: the first past-the-post electoral system). Farage is as well-known as any UK political figure and enjoys a higher approval rating, at 28%, than either Starmer (23%) or Tory leader Kemi Badenoch (21%).
What are Farage’s chances of delivering on his promise of leading Reform to victory in the next election? And what drives the man who has haunted British politics for years but has only just made it into the House of Commons?
Farage is the quintessential insider-outsider. He was privately educated at Dulwich College, P.G. Wodehouse’s old school, where his fellow pupils taunted him by rhyming his French-sounding name with “garage,” and followed a family tradition of going into the City, doing well out of the 1980s boom. He joined the Conservative Party while still at school after hearing a “limpid and beautiful” speech by Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s guru. But he didn’t go to university, let alone Oxbridge, like most right-of-center politicians of his generation; he joined the barrow-boy London Metal Exchange rather than blue-blooded Cazenove or Barings; and he left the Conservative Party in October 1990 when, in the dying days of Thatcher’s administration, Britain joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System.
There is a chippiness to Farage’s dislike of the Oxbridge-educated types who have long dominated the Conservative Party (both David Cameron and Boris Johnson went to Eton and Oxford). There is a grittier dislike of the status quo (he was, after all, completely right about the ERM). Farage echoes Thatcher’s belief that the British establishment, including the Tory establishment, is hopelessly spineless, addicted to managing decline and currying favor with the cultural left. His denunciation of Cameron in May 2015 summed up both sentiments: Cameron is “not a Tory,” he said. “He’s a socialist. Tory voters feel much closer to me than their own leader. His priorities are gay marriage, foreign aid and wind farms. They’re not mine.”
Farage spent decades venting about the European Union. He was not only convinced that the EU (as it became in 1993) was a danger to British sovereignty; he believed it posed a threat to any chance of restoring Britain to greatness. To his mind, the EU is an enterprise for losers — for small men and women who are presiding over a shrinking continent.
Yet here again, Farage is an insider-outsider. He worked in Brussels for much longer than he worked in Westminster (and enjoys a generous EU pension). He brands himself as the quintessential Englishman with his tweeds, pint and cigarettes, but his second wife is German, and his two children with her have German (and hence EU) passports as well as British ones. He favors the “European” proportional representation system rather than the “British” first past the post system.
What are the chances of this figure making it to the top of British politics? Farage no longer presents himself merely as an anti-establishment “bad boy” disruptor, but as the architect of a new political order. Daniel Hannan, a Conservative peer, recalls that when they were both in Brussels, Farage was fascinated by the 1993 Canadian election, when the Conservative Party was reduced to just two MPs, largely because they were confronted by an insurgent right-wing party called Reform. Reform then absorbed the Conservatives, and the merged party went on to win an election under Stephen Harper.
Make Britain Great Again, Farage’s new slogan, doesn’t have the same acronym resonance of MAGA, but the forces that blew Trump into the White House — and which are blowing populists into office across Europe — are present in Britain. The Labour victory on July 4 was a vote against the Tory incumbents rather than in favor of Labour, and now that Labour is tainted with incumbency that discontent is looking for somewhere else to go.
The standard criticism of Reform is that it is a single-issue immigration party. Yet the question of immigration is once more rising to the top of the country’s worries: Since 2012, net migration has added 4.26 million people to the country, the equivalent of four cities the size of Birmingham, far more than the government either promised or planned for.
There are also plenty of other worries for the party to latch on to. Growth has been nugatory since 2008, and far from addressing the underlying causes of this catastrophe, the Labour government has contented itself with taxing business and pampering the public sector. The London-based elite continues to be out of touch with the rest of the country despite promising after Brexit to be less insular. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for the environment, shows no sign of slackening his pursuit of net zero despite rising anger about energy prices across the country.
The number of people claiming long-term benefits for ill health has risen from 600,000 before Covid-19 to more than 3 million today. British institutions, both the public and private, have embraced “wokery” with as much enthusiasm as their US counterparts. The years after the Brexit referendum have been the most unstable since the late 1820s and early 1830s, with six prime ministers, political paralysis and two hung parliaments. It would be naïve to assume that this period of instability is over.
One objection to the idea that Farage is the coming man is that he suffers from the same weakness as the British economy as a whole: He’s good at startups but bad at scale-ups. Michael Crick nicely entitles his authoritative biography of Farage, One Party After Another, because his bibulous subject has so far founded UKIP, the Referendum Party and now Reform. Perhaps this is beginning to change. Musk’s sort-of promise to give Reform $100 million — an unheard-of sum in British politics — will probably never materialize. But even without this rocket fuel, the Reform spaceship is already taking off.
Farage is arguably ahead of all the mainstream parties when it comes to his command of the “new politics.” He is a shareholder in GB News, a relatively new right-wing TV channel, and a TikTok star with more than a million followers, half of them under 25. More 18-44-year-olds voted Reform in the election than Conservative. The party is also closing in on the Tories in terms of numbers, with perhaps 100,000 members to the Tories’ 150,000. It has attracted two high-profile recruits in the past week — the former Tory MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns and the Tory activist Tim Montgomerie, who founded the website Conservative Home and the excellent webzine Unherd. Montgomerie is well-equipped to provide the party with ideas for turning its instincts into governing policies, much as Keith Joseph did for Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s.
Farage is surrounded by people who are much better at institution-building than he is, such as Richard Tice, his closest advisor, Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth, and Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, all of whom have a background in business. He is keen to learn from the Liberal Democrats who won 14 times more seats than Reform on a lower vote share because of their mastery of local politics. Reform has now opened more than 300 branches and is trying to establish a “proper constitution.” He is also focusing on building support in Wales where Reform is the main opposition to Labour. This will give him a chance to make a series of news-making headlines before the next general election — in the council elections next May, on the by-elections that crop up from time to time, and on the regional elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (which use proportional representation).
A more serious criticism is that the first-past-the-post system is heavily biased against insurgent parties. The only one that has broken through is Labour — and that was more than a century ago in the aftermath of the Great War. Many right-of-center people think that the biggest impact of Reform will be to divide the right and keep an unpopular Labour government in power. Yet the Conservatives are already so frightened of Farage that some senior figures are talking about making pre- or post-election deals with him.
The question of what to do with Farage will inevitably raise the question of whether he is a racist. Here, the answer is complicated. He certainly plays on cultural memories of an older Britain before mass immigration. And Reform certainly attracts its share of out-and-out racists. But Farage has also worked hard to drive racist extremists out of the various parties he has started: He even resigned from the Brexit Party in 2018 because he thought that its new leader, Gerard Batten, was aligning it with right-wing extremists. It’s important not to use fear of racism as an excuse for not discussing immigration, particularly the pressure it is putting on public services and housing.
The real problem with Farage is that he is a grand simplifier: He finds simple solutions to big problems (the EU, the establishment, unprecedented immigration) and then cherry-picks examples to suit his prejudices. Grand simplifiers make good campaigners but appalling rulers. Farage’s policy instincts are a mass of contradictions — most importantly between his Thatcherite predilections (shrinking the state and deregulating markets) and his promise to bring people more economic security — that even the most talented policymakers won’t be able to reconcile.
By peddling simple solutions, Farage has made it more difficult to produce reasonable ones, and by taking Britain out of the EU, he has lowered our collective living standards and rendered us more vulnerable to the storms that are raging around the world. And I have no doubt that he will make it a much worse place still as he grows in power.
In one of the best political books of the year, Making the Political Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain, Vernon Bogdanor, a professor at King’s College London, points out that weather-changers (he chooses Aneurin Bevan, Enoch Powell, Roy Jenkins, Keith Joseph, Tony Benn and, indeed, Farage) are often more important in the long term than prime ministers.
It’s unlikely (though not impossible) that Farage will achieve his aim of replacing the Conservatives with Reform as Britain’s major right-wing party and hence place himself in the prime minister’s chair. But he’s already changed the weather of the country’s politics far more than any recent PM.
Read also:
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- 🔒 Farage’s Reform Party surges in Clacton, threatens Tory stronghold
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