Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd
Waiting for the Barbarians is a satirical poem by C. P. Cavafy. It’s told from the point of view of an ancient city facing imminent conquest.
The business of state has come to a grinding halt — the senators have stopped legislating, the orators have ceased speechifying — because what would be the point? The barbarians are coming, and henceforth they will be the ones in charge. All that the elite of the city can do is don their finest regalia and hope to impress the invaders when they arrive… which will be any moment now.
But then comes the twist: night is falling and no one has come!
Indeed, reports from the border suggest that “there are no barbarians any longer” — a fact that the confused citizens lament in the poem’s final sigh: “those people were a kind of solution.”
Cavafy’s ironic ode to civilisational decline seems horribly relevant to British politics today.
Admittedly, our politicians haven’t stopped passing laws, nor have they ceased their prattle — but what they do and say is empty of purpose and inspiration. Less than half a year into its existence, Keir Starmer’s “mission-led” government has already felt the need to relaunch itself. The Prime Minister stood before the nation last week to offer us six milestones. I’m sure they’re meant to be more meaningful than the five priorities that Rishi Sunak set out two years ago, but the conceptual distinction escapes me.
Don’t get me wrong, Labour have done things — nasty, spiteful things — that a Conservative government probably wouldn’t do. But in terms of forward momentum (or rather the lack of it) the last five months resemble the aimless confusion of the last five years. From a distance, it’s as if the “Conservative government hadn’t gone down to defeat in July but had merely swapped Prime Ministers again.
The contrast to 1997 is jarring.
You didn’t have to be a Tony Blair fan (and I certainly wasn’t) to feel the jolt of energy he injected into British politics. From Keir Starmer, however, it’s all depressant and no stimulant. In theory, this is a void that a switched-on Conservative Party could fill — but its managers decided not to go for that. Meanwhile, Ed Davey — despite the Lib Dems winning their largest number of MPs in a century — can find nothing better to do than promote his Christmas single. It’s for charity, which is nice — but he’s a meant to be a party leader not a celebrity.
So what does a political establishment do when it finds itself exhausted — by which I don’t just mean tired, but utterly depleted? Cavafy’s answer is that it flings open the city gates and waits for the barbarians. The hairy brutes may not be civilised, indeed they may be downright destructive; but at least they’ll say the unsayable, do the undoable, and generally bring about change. Even if one isn’t so far gone as to positively desire such an outcome, the mere idea of it sends a frisson of excitement through an otherwise unresponsive body politic.
It’s an impulse that may explain why Rishi Sunak decided, against all logic, to plough into a premature election campaign. But as we’ve seen, Starmer is no barbarian, just a petty vandal. And so with the Lib Dems not even trying, that just leaves one option — the true outsiders of British politics, Reform UK.
Prompted by the re-election of Donald Trump — and the fall of the French and German governments — the shift in mood is palpable. Suddenly the Faragistes are being seen as a potential party of government. It’s hard to ignore the latest polls which show Reform gaining on the Conservatives — and in one case overtaking Labour. Run those sort of numbers (i.e. all three parties with a sub-30% vote share) through a first-past-the-post voting system and the next general election is wide open to extraordinary outcomes.
Back in September, Iain Dale wrote that “it is possible, rather than probable, that Nigel Farage could replace Keir Starmer as prime minister of this country”. Cautiously he gave it “less than a 10 percent chance”, but he was still mocked for entertaining the possibility. It doesn’t seem so unlikely now. It’s not just Right-leaning commentators like Andrew Neil taking the idea of a Reform government seriously, but also Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian: “If this Labour government goes down, what comes next will be Faragism, either as a Reform UK-Conservative hybrid or neat and undiluted.” An editorial in The Times takes a similar line.
So in the space of two months, the idea of Farage as the natural heir to failed Starmer government has gone from edgy to mainstream. With various degrees of trepidation, we’re all waiting for the barbarians now.
But will they ever arrive?
For a start, let’s not forget that Reform is Nigel Farage. He literally owns his party — and it stands or falls with him. In that respect it matters that he’s one of the least popular politicians in the country. Then there’s the divided Right problem. At the last general election, Reform was the spoiler that cost the Conservative Party scores of seats; at the next general election it could be the other way round.
It might be easier for the Faragistes to break free of the Tories if the two parties didn’t share key weaknesses.
In contrast to populist movements elsewhere in the world, Reform performs abysmally with young voters. In a different way, the party also has a class problem. Unlike, say, Marine Le Pen, who’s at home in her party’s post-industrial northern stronghold, Farage doesn’t quite fit with his party’s natural constituency i.e. the Red Wall seats that the Conservatives won in 2019 and then so carelessly lost in 2024. There is a mismatch of both values (i.e. soft libertarian versus instinctively authoritarian) and vibes (i.e. golf club versus working men’s club). Any reluctance to fully embrace the voters most open to voting Reform could limit the party’s gains in 2029.
Finally we come to Reform’s biggest problem. All political parties are either ‘policy parties’, focused on what they want to do with power, or ‘campaign parties’, focused on winning it. Reform UK is, unsurprisingly, a campaign party.
One can argue that the same now applies to the Conservative and Labour parties — they too are dominated by their communicators not their policy makers. However, that’s a much bigger shortcoming for a movement, like Reform, that wants to overhaul the system instead of tinkering around the edges.
It’s easy to think of Nigel Farage as an agent of change because he says out loud what conventional politicians are too afraid to admit. And yet pointing the finger at establishment failure — especially in regard to immigration — is the easy bit. Even an insider like Keir Starmer can’t help but express his frustration with the workings of Whitehall. According to the BBC’s Henry Zeffman, Labour officials are realising that “Dominic Cummings was right”.
The senior civil service really is an obstacle to the elected government’s ambitions, no matter how modest.
Farage would do well to listen to Cummings’ recent talk to the Pharos Foundation. What the former Chief Advisor to Boris Johnson describes is a thoroughly dysfunctional British state. Unless Reform UK lives up to its name and develops a comprehensive programme of reform, then its chances of getting into office and succeeding there aren’t just less than 10 per cent, they’re precisely zero. But, sadly, I detect no appetite or aptitude within the party for such a painstaking, mind-stretching task.
It’s been reported, and denied, that Elon Musk plans to give Reform $100 million. Supposedly, his aim is to shake up British politics. But if he were to be that generous, he should withhold the funds from Farage and give it to someone like Cummings instead.
Whether to be implemented by Reform UK, the Conservative Party or an entirely new force in British politics, the preparation of a real plan for change would be money well spent.