It is not necessarily a mark of approval to point out that, whether or not he wins Clacton on Thursday, Nigel Farage must be regarded as the most consequential political figure in the Britain of this century.
Having bamboozled the UK into a referendum on EU membership, he won the vote. His influence brought down two Tory leaders (we shall see if he can bag a hat-trick on Thursday). And he personally delivered a stunning victory to Boris Johnson in 2019 by withdrawing his candidates in Tory held constituencies.
New Labour types will protest that Tony Blair pacified the Labour Party, instigated the minimum wage and negotiated a ceasefire in Northern Ireland. But all that took place before the turn of the century.
No wonder Farage was by far the breeziest Sunday-morning interviewee I’ve faced in this campaign. Asked the Mrs Merton question (“What do you think first attracted racists, antisemites and homophobes to your party?”) he brushed away the bigoted remarks of his activists as a minor hazard of political life. Whatever happens, his project to reshape British politics remains on track.
• Farage or no Farage, this seaside town is rooting for Reform
One aspect of the Reform leader’s success is the consistency with which he is underestimated by his opponents, for whom he is a baffling contradiction. Posh Conservatives deride him as a pub bore and are nonplussed when more drinkers want to buy him a round than his Tory rival. Earnest lefties denounce him as a racist only to discover that his largest donor is a person of colour.
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It is true that the policy proposals advanced by his latest vehicle, the Reform Party, are wafer-thin; you wouldn’t want to blow your nose on them. Reform’s plans to squeeze £50 billion out of Whitehall spending would not survive a vigorous workout by any sixth-form economics class. But Farage’s prospectus does not pretend to be a programme for government. It is merely a signpost to the kind of Britain he favours. As has been said of Donald Trump, we should take Farage seriously, though not literally.
For an avowed nationalist, Farage’s vision owes much to what he has seen on foreign shores. Economically, it looks like the United States — free-wheeling, ultra-competitive, buccaneering. Socially, he hankers after the classlessness and matey lack of deference of Australia.
Most powerful is his cultural landscape, which also evokes a foreign country: the past, where they do things differently. To be precise, somewhere before 1948, pre-Windrush, when men were men and ethnic minorities were where they belonged. His account of Britain’s decline — stifling bureaucracies, government overreach, moral failure and Marxist infiltration of beloved institutions — carries enough resonance with the public to drown out inconvenient reality. For example, Farage brushes aside the fact that Brexit has turbocharged net migration, now running at roughly three times its pre-2016 rate.
Not only would his plan for “net zero” migration decimate social care and health services; it would accelerate change in the composition of the UK’s population, and not in the direction that many who voted for Brexit wanted. Since 2019, migration flows from the EU have been reversed. Five years ago 80,000 people arrived; last year, 75,000 left. By contrast numbers from India were up from 72,000 to 250,000; from Nigeria up from 14,000 to 141,000; Zimbabwe, 2,000 to 36,000; and Ghana, 5,000 to 35,000.
When Farage claims to have done more to tackle the far right’s influence in the UK than anyone else, he may be right, though not in the way he believes. He has, in fact, become the patron saint of multicultural Britain. I don’t think that is what his followers who complain about the “f***ing P***s” had in mind when they signed up.
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• Tories under threat from tactical voters and unpopular leaders
All the same, his success in splitting the right is undeniable. And just as in 1983, when the SDP-Liberal alliance divided the left and gave Margaret Thatcher a huge victory, the result is a certain Labour ascendancy for as long as that division endures. The strategic tasks for the Conservatives and Labour are now clear. For the former, to heal the schism between true conservatives and national populists.
For the latter, to keep punching the bruise. The Tories’ task is the more straightforward.
Whoever succeeds Rishi Sunak may think they have a choice — either to merge with Reform or to fight the takeover by Farage’s forces. In fact, they have no choice. The union will take place sooner or later.
In France, Emmanuel Macron’s rash decision to call a snap election almost guaranteed that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally would gobble up the traditional Gaullist conservatives within days; a choice between a share of power with populists and dwindling into irrelevance is no choice at all. Our first past the post system may delay the inevitable; but the point about the inevitable is that it does eventually come to pass.
But Farage presents a far more vexing dilemma for Labour. Sir Keir Starmer will enter Downing Street with no credit in the bank, financial or political. With a net approval rating of minus-19, he will be the most unpopular opposition leader elected to office on record. As challenger, Starmer benefited from an electorate that is grumpy and volatile. As premier, with no money to give away, he can expect no honeymoon and no mercy from the voters in 2029.
Labour’s best bet for more than five years in power lies in keeping its opponents divided — no easy task. The temptation simply to demonise Farage will be almost irresistible; there will always be party members who once belonged to unsavoury groups to expose, but the attempt to establish guilt by association has failed everywhere. So has quibbling over language. And the habit of left-wing lawyers to try to silence opponents by use of the courts has galvanised populists — in Trump’s case materially and spectacularly.
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As is often the case, the Thatcher years are instructive. In 1983, she won a huge majority of 144 seats delivered by an almost even split in vote share between Labour and the SDP, and embarked on a programme of radical change: sale of council houses, financial deregulation, privatisation of utilities and trades union reform. She made an example of the miners and more or less eliminated opposition within her own party. Each and every step wrongfooted the opposition.
Starmer looks about to confound all of us who urged him to be less cautious on the road to power. But Labour may have only one term to prove it can deliver, and baby steps won’t be enough.
With Farage lurking wolfishly in the wings, ready to gobble up disillusioned voters, the Labour leader should think about adopting what might be called the reverse-Cuomo doctrine: if you really want change, then, sure, campaign in prose — but get ready to govern in poetry.
