This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Nigel Farage: ist er der Mann? This is the only question in British politics. One need not admire him to admit that this is so. All turns on Nigel.
But as we have asked before, is Reform bigger than Farage? For if what’s held to be driving the party’s success is real, it must be: he represents, he does not cause.
What brought Farage to national attention was Brexit, yet he did not win it. Vote Leave were entirely justified in ensuring he did not run the campaign.
If he had done so, the referendum would certainly have lost.
Where too many of the triumphant Leavers of 2016 go wrong is to suppose that this battle was won nine summers ago. This conceitedness goes a long way towards explaining why the war for Brexit has turned out so unsatisfactorily.
Brexit was an accident. It was made possible by a cocky David Cameron, who thought life had given him one more jam to wriggle out of whilst George Osborne was too cowardly to resist the nemesis he correctly saw coming his way when the referendum was conceded.
But it was still an accident that it was won. But for the absurdity of Jeremy Corbyn being the Labour leader, Britain would still be in the EU.
Almost any other leader of Labour in 2016 would have been more popular than Corbyn, been determined to thrust himself to the front of the Remain campaign (thereby diminishing the salience of the already burnt-out Cameron) instead of shying away from it as the People’s Jeremy did, and any other Labour leader would have wanted us to stay in the EU. Offering none of the above, Corbyn was invaluable to Leave.
Leave was not fated to win. Yet, despite this lack of inevitability, we should be highly wary of supposing winning the referendum offers an adequate guide to how the problems left in its wake might best be solved.
Looking back at pre-2016 Farage, what do we see? Within the Tory party his name was invoked as a threat — either electorally or morally. He, and his opinion poll successes (which is what victories in the European Parliamentary elections really amounted to), were used as threats and weapons when Tories fought one another.
Practising politicians neither wanted to be him nor to follow him. He was something other. But all that is over now. After 14 years of Tory misrule, Farage and his party are currently the only viable form of right-wing politics in the UK.
We can go further. Farage and Reform are the sole form of conservatism that right-wing voters, in this dangerously bankrupt country, seem prepared to stomach. They don’t have to be enthusiastic for it or him, they just have to be seen as being plainly intolerant of the Tories.
Which brings us to Mrs Badenoch, the official leader of the official opposition at the time of going to press.
To the extent anyone cared, she reshuffled her top team in July. Out went such competent, trustworthy elements as she had. Gravity-defying party chairman Dominic Johnson was shuffled off to the side, his prodigious fundraising efforts notwithstanding. The ERG “Spartan” Lee Rowley — an honest man uniquely trusted across the party — departed as chief of staff.
In stayed shadow Foreign and sometime actual Home Secretary Priti Patel, presumably still looking for that apology she demanded from those criticising her for her part in the Boriswave. And in slinked long-time Michael Gove consigliere Henry Newman, replacing Rowley. His track record of failure, poison and trans-activism will no doubt do much for Mrs Badenoch’s strong third place in the polls.
We once more wonder whether Kemi Badenoch is a plant surrounded by toxic weeds, as Nigel Farage could not pick a better, more self-destructive rival. His own tendencies in this regard have been entirely eclipsed by the way Mrs Badenoch has led her party and the place she has taken it to — which is fourth in predicted seats come the next general election.
Perhaps the Tories will eventually replace her. Maybe Robert Jenrick will become leader and move to fight Farage for the ground left open to him by Kemi Badenoch.
In which case, would the right be stronger for that combat, or will it tear itself apart, destroying such residual strength it has left in a country where most people don’t earn the benefits they vote for themselves?
Thanks to the uselessness of Badenoch, that strong horse on the British right is Farage by default
These are grim democratic facts and the worry must be that what the opponents of socialism and liberalism need is to be strong still more than they need to be doctrinally correct.
As things stand, and thanks overwhelmingly to the uselessness of Kemi Badenoch and her backers, that strong horse on the British right is Nigel Farage by default. So, is Reform up to it?
In a brilliant essay in this issue, the deputy editor of ConservativeHome, Henry Hill, speculates on the sources of Toryism. Is the mainspring still there? Are there any other currents Reform could constitute? He is justifiably pessimistic.
It is complacent to imagine that the Conservatives’ suicidal tendencies on Badenoch’s watch will bring about a reincarnation in the guise of Reform that will do the painful things that the Tories left undone. There is no rule of politics which says that there must be a conservative party.
But let us suppose Nigel Farage and Reform were going to attempt to fill the void left by the Tories. What would that look like? How actually could they do it? First off, they’d need to avoid the guilty men and women.
Thus, for example, transparent ruses like “Fix Britain” would need to be eschewed. Advisors such as Munira Mirza and Douggie Smith are firemen who set the flames they now claim they’ll put out. Be done with them. Then there are the Tory think tanks. There is so pitifully little to say in their favour this century that the kindest thing to do is to look away, shudder and move on.
Therefore we come, at last, to the Centre for a Better Britain (CBB). Which is the Reform (yet also Tory) answer to so much of this. It appears to know all the mistakes it should not make: that it must not produce American-brained guff which won’t fly here, that coming to grips with the budget is still more important than Reform’s first King’s Speech.
Above all else — and here’s how sordidly the Tories let down the country — character is destiny. If Reform is to succeed, it needs good, able people. Leaders can be wayward, but followers must be competent: there can be no good or godly government without them.
We shall see what the CBB amounts to and whether it realises its noble aims. If it does, the world will not only be a better place, it will be a simpler one too.
When the deputy constituency chairman of your local Reform association — let us say, Stowe, Exeter University graduate, useful in a line-out, going places at KnightFrank — can put his political sidelife on his LinkedIn profile and not have to worry about doing so, that’s what victory will look like. Because winning in Britain is respectable, or it’s nothing.
There is no chicken and egg here: it’s not that Reform will win, and this will lend them respectability. It’s precisely by being worthy of respect that they’ll be trusted with power.
Reform’s historic opportunity is to be what the post-Brexit 2019 Tory government ought to have been. But they too could bluff instead and fail. Doing so has killed off history’s most successful political party.
Reform squandering their chance is likely to do a lot worse. We should all pray that they get and deserve better people, soon and in some quantity. Britain is in dreadful trouble if they do not.
