“Can I get a selfie with you Nigel?”
Just over ten years ago I was standing outside a London pub with Nigel Farage, and we were talking about what he would do if Brexit was voted for, in the EU Referendum. Back then he insisted he’d do what he did, and “take a break. Celebrate. Job done”
I didn’t really believe him, though in a way he did just that, but I think we both knew he would struggle to walk away from politics – because remove the ‘admin’ and the ‘people management’ and he loves it.
At that moment a small group of fit looking Asian men approached. At first his ‘protection’ twitched, but didn’t do anything, and Nigel seemed perfectly relaxed about it.
They spoke to Farage and cheerily made it clear, without the slightest aggression that they did not agree with his politics. Nigel said he understood, that was fine, that was democracy, but joked that he hoped they’d understand that he wasn’t about to change them just because of that.
They laughed, shook his hand, explained they were just surprised to see him and then asked for a selfie.
I never forgot it because, like Boris Johnson, a comparison Farage won’t like, at the time many people profoundly disagreed but still saw him as a character, a man whose name you knew, and your friends would know – famous, whatever they thought – and consequently someone you might get a selfie with.
I’ve seen politicians I know deal with meeting someone who wants to tell them how much they disagree with them, not all of them are that good at it. I remember thinking that night that Farage was very good at it, and that if he could reach across outside of his base, he’d be a formidable opponent for anyone in the future.
Well I got that right!
However, I’ve been honest about my appraisal of him when, having stood back from Reform and lending voice occasionally to a party Richard Tice was trying to build, in 2024 he gate-crashed not only the Reform candidate list, but the leadership too.
It seemed some of the old ‘charm and humour’ had decided to take some time off. There was an angry edge, a dismissal of other views he saw as “Boring!” and a jarringly obvious edge of annoyance to scrutiny, particularly from female journalists, that was as awkward as he found the questions. Not entirely the man I’d known a long time, but the stakes were higher and some Trump tropes for handling media had clearly rubbed off – or been rubbed in.
Jump to today and the Makerfield campaign means Farage is unlikely to be our next Prime Minister.
Before Reform readers froth at me, I mean that literally.
Farage is possibly going to be Prime Minister; Reform have led the polls for months, maintained, to varying degrees a sense of momentum, ridden and driven a continued electoral aversion to the Tories, and to some degree, benefited from if not contributed as much as he could have to the tarnishing of Labour’s pre 2024 gloss, however, he’s less likely to be our next.
This is important.
If Andy Burnham wins the seat of Makerfield on Thursday, which I still think he will, then I suspect he will be the next Prime Minister, and if he runs to all the things he’s said or others have said about him, I suspect that anybody right of centre will end up having a renewed determination to get this Government out.
As Kemi Badenoch says the problem isn’t Starmer, or Burnham or Streeting, it’s Labour. Especially a party increasingly tacking left.
How that is achieved, and who is on the field of play achieving it, is now – whatever one thinks of the answers – very much in play.
I said at the very beginning of this year, that 2026 would be the year the Conservatives and Reform sorted out what they would do with the lingering question, in a five party system, of how to stop the left clinging on to the levers of power? The thing is, as Lord Ashcroft’s new book about Farage explains, that new political landscape is something Farage worked years to create, deliberately aiming to break the two party to-and-fro of many decades. It seems right then he should present us with an answer that stands up.
So far 2026 has provided just that tussle I outlined, and it seems right now there is very little appetite to share anything. The year is not done, things may harden further, but the questions won’t go away. For two years, and with Tories under almost constant Reform attack with claims of the Tories being ‘dead’ or ‘finished’ – battle lines have got static. Fire has been reciprocated for sure but views remain entrenched and even reinforced. Which may well be a good thing but any Mogg-memo for ‘uniting the Right’ seems to have fallen on stony ground with the two parties keen to take opportunities to say they want nothing much to do with the other.
Badenoch and Farage both seem at pains to stress this position and recent weeks have created bad blood, bad faith, and accusations of out right lying. Kemi was clear with Tim Shipman of the Spectator last week that it was no, no to a deal, no to talks about a deal, indeed a bucket load of ‘no’s – but she surprised him saying ‘yes’ to a very specific scenario that post an election she would have to consider if in a hung Parliament what best would stop five more years of leftward drift with any traffic-light coalition.
Myself, I’ve always said politicians are at the mercy of maths, more than anything, and it seemed an honest acknowledgement of that fact.
Farage maintains ‘the don’t want them, don’t need them’ pose but I wonder how true that is? He too is vulnerable to the power of numbers, and especially this week, whether he has enough of them to go really go it alone?
Those as interested as I am in the answer would do well to see Lord Ashcroft’s survey of Reform UK’s members where outright victory for the party is not the outcome they most expect.
Gorton and Denton, and Makerfield by-elections where an insurgent party has been the main rival to another party – a remarkable achievement by any standards, have not been the ‘walkovers’ many Reform supporters might have expected a year ago.
Tactically Reform had made so much of ‘vote for us and get Starmer out’ in May that when it looked to be working – and adding in Starmer’s unique ability to wind his own people up just as easily – that framing in the context of a ‘vote to beat Burnham’ who also wants to get Starmer out, has looked odd, and disjointed.
I didn’t like the snobbery on display in the Question Time audience about ‘a plumber… who’s sexist’ when it was the very profession the left loved when offered in Gorton – but without smearing Reform’s local lad candidate, that appearence for Rob Kenyon did not go as well as Reform had hoped.
Oh I know, the Tories. were in Gorton and are in Makerfield, nowhere – 2 per cent being leapt on as some revelation of national standing – which is naïve and silly frankly but go ahead don’t let me stop you – but that doesn’t disguise the warning signs to Reform’s most loyal followers, that this whole project is not going to be easy for them.
James Frayne was clear in an article for the Telegraph – and I’ve been in the room when he’s dropped some hefty reality checks on Conservatives who feel they are reviving their brand – that Reform aren’t yet doing what they’ve spent two years suggesting was inevitable.
You are already seeing the ‘it won’t happen because dark forces will do anything and everything to stop it’ from Reform supporters, members, even Dominic Cummings – and we don’t know, yet, if he’s either.
Farage has said the same launching a new Substack, and whilst I think in a recent interview with Nick Ferrari, he merely replayed a line he’s used before, he nonethless gave the odd impression – certainly to some he know him very well – that the project that might see him as PM, was getting to him, or at least proving frustrating.
Indeed the words ‘a walk in the park’ is much more likely to be used by Reform outriders, like Nadine Dorries right now, as the fictional shadowy moment Kemi Badenoch and Rupert Lowe hatched some plot to cause trouble in Makerfield – a by-election neither could realistically have predicted. So odd that Nadine should raise the issue of peerages in the process
It’s not that it’s a daft conspiracy theory – which it is – given Lowe and Farage are solely responsible for the founding of Restore, but more it’s the absolute apex of irony for a party that openly claims it was founded to ‘destroy the Conservative Party’ is complaining that Restore wants to ‘destroy Reform’.
Besides the whole point is a Burnham victory may not be the best scenario for the Conservatives.
As I say if Burnham wins, and then wins the Premiership, I think we will see further tough choices presented to parties on the Right of how they genuinely take on parties of the left and still maintain they won’t go near each other.
The likelihood of any deal seems to have greatly diminished. The question ‘why not’? – to which there are many good answers – doesn’t.