It’s been rather overtaken by events, but during last month’s party conference in Manchester Nigel Farage garnered a bit of attention by suggesting that he might, at some point, rejoin the Conservative Party.
Now at the start it’s worth saying that this probably isn’t a proposition to take too seriously. Farage has always possessed a great genius for securing free lodging in the Tory imagination, which helps explain why he was able to cast such a long shadow over the past decade without having ever been returned to Parliament.
The former UKIP and Brexit Party leader seemed retired comfortably enough, ensconced with his own show at GB News, even before setting off for the jungle in a jaunt which ought, surely, to close the door on even the slenderest chance of a return to frontline politics.
But the course of events over the past few years cautions against betting too hard against the merely improbable, and Farage himself has stepped away from politics, or at least tried to play a smaller role, several times over the course of his career, but proven time and again unable to resist the urge to return to centre stage.
Moreover, if the Conservative Party gets trounced at the general election – which is what current polling indicates – then it might prove more receptive to the idea of a Farage comeback than it would likely be at the moment, especially if it prevents (or is seen to prevent) a split on the right. As I wrote back in June, he seems to be the secret ingredient that determines whether a party is a viable insurgency or, well, Reform UK.
Setting aside the tactics and speculation, however, there is the more important question: in the event that his application ever crosses the desk at CCHQ, should the Party allow Farage to join? Or ought his past political associations rule that out?
Certainly, there is sufficient material for a case against should the Tories wish to block him. Leading a party to the right of the Conservatives inevitably led to Farage having associates who either held unsavoury views (e.g. Catherine Blaicklock, the original founder of the Brexit Party) or actual far-right connexions.
Perhaps the most serious instance of the latter was Mark Deavin, a former head of research for the British National Party who infiltrated UKIP and with whom Farage was infamously photographed alongside convicted bomber Tony Lecomber in 1997.
Yet as Michael Crick explores at length in his excellent biography, Farage’s arguably deserves as much credit as anyone for preventing the far right – the actual far right, that is – becoming an established force in British politics.
Back in the late Noughties, the BNP was making headway in local elections and returned two MEPs at the 2009 Euro elections; in the absence of UKIP, there’s a real chance it would have been the beneficiary of voters’ hunt for a new protest party after the Liberal Democrats joined the Coalition.
(The BNP recognised the threat, too – that above-mentioned photograph was latterly admitted to have been a setup, by them.)
It’s ceiling would certainly have been lower than UKIP’s, which by coming second in 100 seats in 2015 was poised for a genuine breakthrough had we not had the Brexit referendum a year later. And being both much more toxic and less skilfully led, the major parties would have likely maintained a cordon sanitaire around the BNP which would have prevented it achieving anything as significant as the role UKIP played in our leaving the European Union, at least in the short term.
But as Germany is learning with the AfD, there is only so long you can simply lock such a party out once it gets established; far better that it did not happen here.
Moreover, allegations that Farage himself has previously been involved in far-right politics have never been stood up, and often come from individuals (such as Dr Alan Sked, the founder of “the U.K.I.P.”, as was) with obvious personal axes to grind.
And whilst UKIP certainly had unsavoury allies in the European Parliament during its time there, there is an extent to which that is simply the price of doing pan-European political business; the ECR group, which was co-founded by the Conservatives, is currently led by Georgia Meloni, who’s Brothers of Italy party has post-Fascist origins, and counts both Spain’s Vox and the Sweden Democrats, both regularly described as far right, as members.
For all the controversy, therefore, a fair assessment doesn’t suggest that Farage would be considered beyond the pale were he already a Conservative member or backbench MP. It’s thus not surprising that when we asked our panel in our most recent survey, seven in ten respondents thought he ought to be admitted were he to seek membership.
But then, a future Conservative leader might have more prosaic grounds for letting his application moulder in an in-tray. Farage said at conference that: “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by ‘26. Very surprised.” Even if he was joking (and he insisted he wasn’t, at first), that’s the sort of jest that’s never entirely a jest.