Nigel Farage and his comrades cannot grow complacent about gaining or using power
It is now approaching six months since Reform UK began their consistent lead in opinion polling for the next general election. There are another four long years until that election must be called, and many challenges facing Farage’s insurgents along the way. Barring some dramatic reversal of fortunes for either of the established parties, though, it now seems probable that a century of Conservative/Labour duopoly has finished.
Perhaps another personality clash could see Farage give up control of the party, triggering another schism. Perhaps a major reordering of the Tories could see the grandest and oldest of parties reassert itself among its traditional voters. Or maybe, another insurgent force could emerge to Reform’s right and take the wind from her sails. While all theoretically plausible, none of these scenarios seems as likely as that the Labour government continues to grow steadily more unpopular, while Mr Farage continues to offer voters an alternative to letting the Tories back in so soon after they were packed off in disgrace.
This puts Reform into an unprecedented position in British political history. Other than the short spell during which the SDP-Liberal alliance implausibly led the polls prior to the Falklands War, never has a party held the status of presumptive victor of the subsequent general election, without being either in government or constituting the official opposition in parliament — let alone doing so from a standing start of only five MPs. Whilst this is a daunting prospect in terms of forming a new government, it offers immense freedom to manoeuvre in opposition — especially during an era in which both of the two established parties are plumbing the depths of their historic levels of popularity.
By the time the first minority Labour government took office in 1924, the party had been in existence for nearly a quarter of a century, and had enjoyed a small but steadily growing presence in the House of Commons for eighteen years. Yet still, it felt like a crossing of the rubicon, short lived as that administration was to be. If nothing else, it represented a very different type of person holding office than people had been used to.
Reform, on the other hand, will be barely a decade old come the next election, and will have been in parliament for no more than five years. Its existence is the ultimate expression of the career of one man, with two political missions in life — both of which will have been firmly accomplished the moment the exit poll announces Reform UK has won the largest number of seats. Mission number one was obviously to get Britain out of the European Union, and the other was to temper the arrogance of a Tory Party that regarded itself as Britain’s government-by-default.
Before Brexit, Nigel Farage spent his political life dealing with the trade-off between motivation and appeal. His main causes — euroscepticism and, later, immigration control — were broadly popular with at least half the public. Yet he was dependent on a highly-motivated but politically unappealing band of devoted supporters to man his ground campaigns. This ultimately capped his practical political reach to between five and fifteen percent of the electorate who were willing to be associated with the desperately unfashionable set of oddballs and obsessives drawn to activist euroscepticism in the 1990s and 2000s. But those percentages were often just enough to make the Tory leader of the day sweat, and to offer concessions. Thus, though often bemoaning its vicissitudes for smaller parties, Farage became an extraordinarily effective player of the first-past-the-post system.
Over the years, Farage came to associate success with the degree to which he could marginalise dissenting elements among his base and maintain operational control within a narrow circle of people he regarded as competent. For a long time, though, the deck was stacked firmly against him. UKIP’s internal constitution was based quite deliberately on that of the Labour Party, with a National Executive Committee elected by members, reflecting the sensibilities of the generation of constitutional anoraks and hobbyists who originally founded the party.
As with any voluntary organisation, people who give their time to small political parties want to see their own values and preferences reflected in the organisation. Major parties can engender loyalty among their footsoldiers and staffers by their sheer size and the desire to be part of something much bigger than oneself, but also by the merest hint of future reward in government. They can also pay people salaries. A small party cannot do that, and a leader is obliged to hear people out, and do his best to accommodate their wishes; including, often, wishes that are at odds with those of much of the electorate. Thus, Farage and UKIP’s many other leaders over the years, dutifully turned up to the NEC meetings, and listened to the men with packed lunches.
Farage resigned as UKIP leader on three occasions, and has so far resigned once as Reform leader. He understood the need to build lean, professional platforms to compete in the political arena, but the actual leadership of them mainly consisted of fighting with people internally, which got in the way of campaigning. So, he stepped down in 2009 to concentrate on his bid to unseat John Bercow as MP for Buckingham. He announced his resignation as leader again following the 2015 election, presumably to clear his schedule for campaigning in the EU referendum which the election result unexpectedly made inevitable. He stood down again in 2016, with the referendum result having deprived UKIP of its raison d’etre.
Returning to politics in 2019, he made damn sure to finally be rid of UKIP — of its tedious constitution and its ill-disciplined membership. The Brexit Party was established as a private limited company, which Reform UK as its successor, remains. Supporters were welcome to sign up, hand over their contact details and fees, and sit back and enjoy the show. Much to the surprise of the kind of people who usually join political parties, this suited a lot of Farage aficionados down to the ground. As far as they see it, they have signed up to Reform as the organisational embodiment of Farage’s personal brand, and their political objective is to watch the British establishment — all of it — getting a thoroughly deserved shoeing.
Reform UK has now transcended UKIP’s limiting trade-off, whereby it was reliant on a hardcore of highly committed supporters who were liable to put off normal people. With Reform now regularly exceeding a 30 per cent headline figure in voting intention polls, supporting the party is slowly becoming the default option for the middle-aged and middle-class with middle-of-the-road opinions. Such people have limited time or interest in getting involved in internal factional politics of their chosen party, and are content to leave matters of policy to Mr Farage and his appointed lieutenants.
It’s almost become a cliché among commentators to suggest that Farage’s ego cannot stand sharing the limelight, and that anyone in his orbit who starts building their own independent profile automatically puts themselves on a collision course with the larger entity. There is clearly some truth to this, but it’s hardly a disqualifying or even a particularly rare trait in a successful politician. Nigel Farage’s ability to project an authentic and likeable persona was genuinely indispensable to the eurosceptic cause, and he has established himself as a once in a century counterweight to the balance of political power in this country, mainly by sheer force of personal charisma. Yet what truly makes him the everyman that his critics insist he simply cannot be, is that he genuinely seems to share the suspicion of the average man and woman in the street of anybody who is too interested in politics.
In modest doses, this would be an admirable, healthy instinct. People who are obsessed with politics tend to be wrong about it a lot of the time. Ideally, this scepticism would be accompanied by a similar wariness of other kinds of people bearing markers of political unreliability; brash, self-promoting young businessmen in shiny suits, or flamboyant ex-television presenters with complicated eyebrows, to pick a couple of examples entirely at random.
Over the next four years, people will grow steadily accustomed to the idea of Reform UK as a major party
This seems to be the contradiction at the heart of Farageism, now that the imprimatur of getting out of the EU has vanished. Today, it’s a movement that draws its support from the sort of people who dislike the rigmarole of party politics, but lacking anybody with any real interest in policy, that’s all it seems to be left with. It’s an effective campaigning organisation if you want to bury Labour and the Tories — and why not. But what then?
Over the next four years, people will grow steadily accustomed to the idea of Reform UK as a major party, and of Farage as a potential prime minister. After a year or so, people will start to forget that there was a time after the general election when a Reform lead still felt improbable. Steadily, the prospect will lose its absurdity to parts of society that wouldn’t have countenanced the idea a year or so ago. Of course, there are huge areas of the professions and the media among whom Reform will remain anathema, but the party’s general acceptability will creep up through the middle classes and into elements of the British establishment. Inescapably, it will start to resemble those bits of the upper middle classes and the establishment as it does so. The party has already taken steps to cultivate a slightly bland, corporate personality, complete with an inoffensive colour scheme and abstract logo. At this rate, by 2029, Reform’s looming ascendancy over the institutions of state will start to feel less like a political revolution, and more like a private equity firm preparing to restructure an insolvent chain of care homes.
In this atmosphere, Nigel Farage is going to have even less incentive to sit and listen to politicos and egg-headed wonks; particularly given that so many of these people are associated with failed political projects of the all too recent past. The fruitcakes of the early UKIP era may have been politically unappealing, but at least they were his fruitcakes. Now he is feeling his ankles getting nipped at by a generation of self-styled thinkers who look an awful lot like the sort of people who spent the last 20 years calling him “swivel eyed”, but who are now apparently ready to charge off the reservation way to his right. He has spent his entire political career distancing himself from anybody who even whispered about things like ethnonationalism or mass deportations, and he is not about to let his guard down now when he might be on the cusp of a hitherto impossible victory.
A Farage government is going to find itself constrained within the legal architecture that New Labour put in place
But once in office, a Farage government is going to find itself constrained within the legal architecture that New Labour put in place to prevent any future government deviating from the chosen path. Shaking itself free of these railings is going to require a degree of ruthlessness unknown to any British government since 1940. If done properly, “reform” will sound like a playful euphemism for what will have been done to the institutions. If they fail, Farage and his followers will be damned in the same terms as they now condemn Sunak and Boris — and the acolytes of the positivist state will resume full power after the subsequent election. The last chance to put the nation back on the right track in a peaceful and democratic manner will have been lost.
Thinking about the sort of people who now seem likely to be elected as Reform MPs at the next election, it feels difficult to discern the basis upon which that unity and singularity of purpose might be built. Will a caucus of regional tier property developers, former Tory councillors, faded entertainers and genial ex-REME officers be able to hold their nerve? Perhaps they might — but they are going to need to see the script written down, clearly, in order to follow it. Moreover, their voters are going to need to be able to wave it in their faces, in a manifesto, to be able to hold them to it.
The Conservatives failed in government because of personnel. Quite a lot of the blame for this lies with David Cameron and the people around him in opposition, who reconfigured the party’s recruitment mechanism to select for social liberalism above all else. But the party had been riven for a long time by a split between those who regarded it as a vehicle for competing sets of ideologies, and those who saw it as the power base for those of their own precise level of social prestige. Unless the party had a very large majority, and a very assertive leader, it found itself beholden to the ill-defined whims and hang-ups of polite society.
A Reform government will have no choice but to be far bolder; not only in taking radical action, but in insisting on their legitimacy in doing so. This is going to require an assertive posture, and a very relaxed attitude toward controversy. Farage’s thirty years in politics have given him a sense of exactly where the establishment’s boundaries are, and the confidence to strut right up to them, but no further. In a few short years, he is going to need to marshall a force that is ready to smash right through them. With a bit of luck, his current approach is a clever tactic to send his opponents to sleep while he makes the preparations.
