The exchange is evergreen, and goes roughly as follows. Interviewer (breathlessly): “Are you talking to Conservative MPs about defections?” Nigel Farage (coyly): “Well, you know, I can’t really say very much, but conversations are certainly taking place.”
Clear space for the story in the Daily Telegraph! (And in our newslinks, come to think of it.) Turn up the volume on GB News! Feel Downing Street’s pain and watch the Tory whips scramble! Is there a fifth column? Find the mole!
And all the while, watch Farage as he winds up the Tories and flies them like a kite. Nobody spooks them better. While Richard Tice talks of smashing the Tories, Farage hints instead that he might just, one day, rejoin the party he left over 30 years ago – if it ever became, you know, a real Conservative Party again. Remember the palaver over a Tory-UKIP pact?
Farage’s message is perfectly pitched at the kind of voter who backed the Tories in 2019, despises Keir Starmer, and is now flirting with Reform. Smashing the Conservatives could put Starmer in power for a generation. But merging with them, turning them Faragiste and thus mending them – what’s not to like? If you’re that sort of voter, anyway.
By the same token, Farage – now triumphantly reinvented as a civil rights campaigner (over bank accounts) and a fully-fledged celebrity (after his turn in the jungle) looks like the bloke you’ve just had a drink with in the pub, even if you somehow ended up paying. Whereas Tice, with his square chin and piercing eyes, looks like the boss who’s just fired you.
So will Farage return to front-line politics by fronting for Reform? Of course he will! He hasn’t survived being struck by a Volkswagen Beetle, enduring an inflamed testicle swell “bigger than a lemon”, a near-death plane crash and, most recently, “chomping on a penis pizza, topped with bull, pig, sheep and crocodile appendages” only to fade away.
But the deeper question isn’t whether he will twinkle at Reform rallies and manifesto launches. It’s about how much work he’s really prepared to put in. Sure, there will be more psyops of the kind with which this piece figuratively opened – more hints of defecting Tories, secret talks, new donors, possible mergers and, vaguely but powerfully, suggestions of the right recasting itself here as it did in Canada during the mid-2000s.
Nonetheless, keeping Reform at its present nine per cent, let alone getting it up to the 13 per cent or so that UKIP won at the 2015 general election, is far from guaranteed, to put it mildly. The Conservatives will warn “Vote Reform, Get Starmer”. It may work. It may not. But Farage would have to put his shoulder to the wheel, dialling down his other work and home activities, for the new party to deliver its potential.
Downing Street and CCHQ cling to three reasons why he might not do so. First, Farage seems to be enjoying life, flourishing at GB News, settling down domestically and making a bit of money. So he may want to sprinkle Reform with a bit of his stardust rather than put his shoulder to the wheel.
Next, there is America. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and the presidential election, who would be his man in Britain? Neither Keir Starmer nor other Labour politicians. Nor Rishi Sunak or a new Tory leader. Instead Trump’s interests here would be projected, surely, by his old mucker, Farage.
Remember when Trump tweeted that Farage would “do a great job” as Britain’s Ambassador to Washington? This time round, the latter could do even better. For rather than be Britain’s Ambassador to Trump (which is what the job may soon become), Farage would be Trump’s Ambassador to Britain. Take that, Foreign Office! Up yours, snotty Remainers. And all you pointy-heads with Oxbridge PPE degrees.
It wouldn’t be easy to reconcile working flat-out for Reform in Britain with pro-Trump activity in America – as in 2016 and 2020. Third comes a factor that Farage himself acknowledged only this week: “I’m still bruised by the 2015 general election, which I fought very hard for four million votes and one seat. I’m going to think very hard before I take on that system again,” he said.
Tom Stoppard once wrote that it’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting and, whether one likes it or not, British general elections are fought under first past the post. Which has tended since the Second World War, with the exception of the turbulent 1970s, to deliver longish periods of centre-right and centre-left government.
Even a collapse to 165 seats in the general election of 1997 – the Conservatives’ worst result since 1832 – failed to break the blue/red duopoly and open the door to a fourth party. Some claim that the Tories will go down even lower at the next election – to 100 seats, say. Even if so (and it’s rather a big if), that would be 100 seats more than Reform is likely to win.
Throwing all his energy into the next election would make sense for Farage if he simply wants to pulverise the Conservatives (assuming that Reform takes more support from them than from Labour). But what would follow? Most likely a long, messy, protracted and inconclusive back-and-forth between a party with seats in Parliament and one with none.
According to Tim Bale and David Jeffrey, the bigger a Tory defeat – assuming it happens – the larger the proportion of Conservative MPs who voted for Sunak in 2022’s leadership elections. One can imagine a post-election scenario in which many Tory activists clamour for a deal with Farage, most Tory MPs oppose one, and the right-wing entertainment industry pushes for a new, right-wing party.
My reading of Farage is that the gregarious facade conceals a bit of a loner. No entry into politics via journalism or Spad-dom for him: no internship, A-list, think tank service – and no university degree. Instead, he worked his way up from village halls via Europe to reality TV over 30 long years, making and then moving on from UKIP and the Brexit Party.
Perhaps it would all be different if he had been given the knighthood or peerage which, after Brexit, he should surely have had. For like it or not, campaigning for Leave was no less public service than campaigning for Remain. Farage devoted over a quarter of a century to persuading Britain to leave the EU. It wouldn’t had happened as it did if he hadn’t been there.
But a word of warning to Conservative MPs. The good fortune that Farage has enjoyed in his journey to celebrity doesn’t seem to rub off on those drawn into his orbit. Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell quit the Conservatives to become UKIP MPs. Today, the first has since changed party a further three times, and the second no longer lives in Britain.
Farage is 59 – a rubbery, ebullient 59, but 59 nonetheless. Does he really fancy a decade’s prospective work to recast the right, with no certainty of elected office at the end of it? Or will he chuck his oar in this year for the sheer fun of smashing the Conservatives up – if that happens and if he can?
No wonder Farage is so popular, at least in some quarters: he’s never been in government and so has never been responsible for anything – though even he might find a second term Trump presidency a hard sell here in Britain. But, whatever happens next, he will continue on his merry way – trolling the Tories, spooking their leadership, upending their conferences by simply turning up. Oh Nigel, you’re such a tease.