Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf announced yesterday morning that a Reform Government would solve the small boats problem “within a fortnight”.
It would perform this astounding feat by ordering the Royal Navy to stop all boats laden with migrants as they crossed the Channel.
The migrants would then be landed back in France or Belgium, if possible at a port, which Yusuf said would be “more dignified”.
But if necessary, the Royal Marines would disembark the migrants on the beaches from which they had just a few hours earlier set out.
Olivia Utley, of GB News, asked Farage: “Have you had any assurances from the French that they’re up for this?”
Reform, it became clear during the press conference, had received no such assurances, and within a few hours the French Interior Ministry issued a statement which sank the new policy:
“This would constitute a violation of French sovereignty, as well as a violation of the law of the sea and international law.”
Farage must have known the French would take that line. The idea they would allow the Royal Marines to land on their beaches in order to bring back hundreds of migrants is preposterous.
For Farage to proclaim such a policy suggests a degree of desperation. “The air is slowly going out of his balloon,” as one Tory yesterday afternoon observed.
Politics is often cruel to front-runners. In December 1981 the newly formed Liberal-SDP Alliance reached a high of 51 per cent in a Gallup poll. Here is the Liberal leader, David Steel, in September of that year, when the new allies already had the wind in their sails:
“I have the good fortune to be the first Liberal Leader for over half a century who is able to say to you at the end of our annual Assembly: go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.”
Those preparations turned out to be superfluous. At the general election of 1983, the Alliance won 25.4 per cent of the vote, but a mere 23 seats.
Reform too has had a period of dominance in the opinion polls, peaking at 35 per cent in September last year.
So it began the perilous attempt to turn itself from a party of protest into a party of government.
But Farage is by instinct a protester. With blokey charm he expresses the discontents of the man in the saloon bar who cannot bear the condescending priggery of the liberal intelligentsia.
Farage has a genius for expressing the kind of opinions which flow so easily from his angry voters after the third pint:
“I tell you what, we’ve still just about got a Royal Navy, let’s get them and the Royal Marines to arrest every migrant mid-Channel and take the whole lot straight back, no questions asked. The French wouldn’t even know what hit them. Within a couple of weeks we’d have it sorted, just like the Aussies did.”
That was the tenor of Farage’s remarks yesterday. He performed, as he so often does, the valuable task of expressing popular fury at the sight of inflatables laden with migrants crossing the Channel.
But when it came to proposing a policy to stop this, he fell to pieces, and turned into the schoolboy who has not done his homework, and hopes he can get away with it by making a joke: see the picture of him above, flashing a mirthless smile, or plea for help, at yesterday’s press conference.
With perhaps a quarter of the electorate, this sort of thing goes down extremely well. In Farage they find a tribune who expresses their pain.
But among a somewhat larger proportion of the electorate, including many on the Right, the joke has palled, or was never all that funny in the first place.
At the next election, a considerable number of people will be motivated primarily by the desire, if he is still around, to stop Farage. He is simultaneously Reform’s greatest asset and its greatest handicap, and this was true even before the damaging row about undeclared donations, from which he has taken refuge in a superfluous by-election.
Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, is one of many people who have fallen out with Farage over the years, despite agreeing with him about most things.
Farage and Lowe cannot resist insulting each other even as they discuss the possibility of making peace.
Margaret Thatcher was greatly assisted, in the 1980s, by a divided Opposition.
Andy Burnham is no Thatcher, and needs to do something about those boats, but he too must feel a glimmer of hope as he contemplates the divisions among his opponents.