“A relationship is like a shark,” Woody Allen tells Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies.” Watching Nigel Farage trying to keep his Reform Party interesting on Monday, I found myself wondering if it might have a similar problem.
We had been promised, in a revealing turn of phrase from the Reform press office, that Farage would be “performing a Speech in the City of London”, which made it sound like he might be doing the soliloquy from Macbeth. It would hardly have been the first Reform event that was full of sound and fury but signified nothing. Or indeed to feature a tale told by an idiot.
Reform’s leader is far from being an idiot, but listening to his speech you were left with the question of why he had chosen to perform it. We’d been told it was a 25-minute “big economic speech”, but it turned out to be a 35-minute ramble around themes familiar to the many other speeches Farage has performed in recent months: true Brexit has never been tried; business is burdened with political correctness; politicians are awful. The news was that all the tax and spending promises Reform made at the last election had been junked, but if you ever believed any of those, I really can’t help you.
The Banking Hall in the City of London is tremendously grand, with a high, high ceiling and pillars and a grand staircase down which, in times past, debutantes might have swept in long ballgowns. We knew the moment we saw it that this would be where Farage would make his entrance, though probably in a suit. We should have known too that only Farage would be allowed to use the stairs. Zia Yusuf, who introduced him, was obliged to use the tradesman’s entrance, walking on from the side. Reform constantly assure us that they’re not a one-man band, but there are cult leaders who expect less deference from their colleagues than Farage.
If anything demonstrates the need for a strong human resources function, it’s Reform
He arrived late, and when he finally descended from on high to bless us mortals with his presence, he looked tired. It’s a Westminster truism that leader of the opposition is the hardest job in politics. If Farage is, as he claims, the real occupant of that role, then maybe it’s catching up with him.
“There seem to have been several misunderstandings of where Reform stands,” he said, making it sound like it was our fault. Farage operates in a media environment for which any other politician would kill: several sympathetic newspapers, a cowed BBC and a “news” channel so committed to his cause that it pays him a salary. If Reform’s polices are misunderstood, it is because he’s seen no previous need to clear them up.
He complained about the growth of compliance and human resources departments, and the way that bankers could no longer just hire chaps they knew from school. Though honestly, if anything demonstrates the need for a strong human resources function, it’s Reform. The party has had seven MPs in the last year, but has lost two of them and forced to send another one into hiding. (There continues to be no sign of Sarah Pochin, who is presumably being moved between safe houses to keep her away from any TV interviews in which she might share more of her thinking.)
Much of his speech seemed to be made up of memes from a particular part of the internet. There was the praise for Dubai, the complaints about solar power and HS2, the announcement that London is a crime-ridden hellhole. “You’re too scared to wear a watch walking down the street,” he said, which did at least explain why his events all start late.
And of course there was the prediction of imminent catastrophe. “The markets are getting nervy,” he told us. The only thing anyone in Westminster understands much about “the markets” is that they might turn on you at any moment, so this is the kind of pronouncement you can make without fear of contradiction. “I stand by my prediction,” he went on, “that there will be a general election caused by economic collapse in 2027.”
Why does he keep saying this? Perhaps a requirement of the Farage project is a sense of constant crisis in the UK. This is of course what we’ve had for much of the last decade, thanks in no small part to the activities of Farage himself. But the Reform argument is that Britain is so terribly broken that the only solution is to keep blowing things up in search of the one neat trick to fix our country.
More than that, if Farage concedes that an election might not come until 2028 or 2029, there is a danger that his activists lose interest. In the same way that the Scottish National Party has to keep promising that an independence referendum is just around the corner, Farage needs to keep his fanbase fired up with the promise of imminent triumph. Otherwise, what he might have on his hands is a dead shark.
