Nigel Farage is one of this century’s survivors. A man who walked away from not just a plane crash but any number of iterations of parties carved in his image. Rising from near-death experiences time and again. The last cockroach standing after a nuclear holocaust.
In Reform, Nige has found his most successful reinvention yet. You’ve got a grievance? Then Farage is there to verbalise it and sell it back to you. Always on hand to spot division and feed on it. The politics of the far right may be his preferred habitat – he’s never yet come across an asylum seeker he didn’t want to deport – but he’s nothing if not the consummate opportunist.
Sensing he might have maxed out his fanbase among the right, he’s happily dipped his toes into the politics of the left, championing the nationalisation cause. He will be whatever you want him to be. He’s not fussy. Anything to ramp Brand Nige.
And now it feels as if his time may have come. Previous triumphs have always felt transitory – ships in the night – but the results of Thursday’slocal electionshave a patina of permanence. The possibility at least of an end to a politics dominated by Labour and the Conservatives. A new multiverse where Reform – for now – has the most public support. The more Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch try to mirror Nige, the less popular they become.
The danger for Farage is that with success comes obligations. An expectation to deliver. A problem Nige has never encountered before. He’d only ever carped from the sidelines. Trash-talking the governing parties while offering no real solutions himself. Someone you wouldn’t trust with his own debit card, let alone to run the finances of the entire country. His only real tangible achievement in the past 25 years was to front one half of the campaign to reduce the UK’s GDP by 4% by leaving the European Union. And then to disown his part in it by claiming Brexit hadn’t been done in the way he had imagined. Shape-shifting avoidance of responsibility.
But all this could wait for another day. Friday was Nige’s personal triumph. His new MP, Sarah Pochin, and Lincolnshire mayor, Andrea Jenkyns, may have been the winners on the night but everyone knew they were only there out of an act of kindness granted by Farage. Decoration. Largesse. Nothing more.
This is the faultline that runs through Nige’s entire career. Nige is only ever about Nige. He can’t do collaboration. His team are primarily followers – devotees – rather than MPs or mayors. Satellites to his lodestar. Anyone showing any sign of independence of thought is crushed. There can be no challenge. Nige is the centre of his own universe. A little man with grandiose narcissistic ambition. Dicky Tice and Lee Anderson are only tolerated because they understand the rules. Their ambition is to collect the crumbs that Nige drops.
So no surprise that for Reform’s victory lap in Durham, it was Farage alone to take centre stage. You might have thought that with the hint of power would come some kind of leadership. A willingness to reach out to those who hadn’t voted for him. Reassurance, even. But Nige has no personal charm. His smile is only ever a veneer. Behind it there is an anger born of the fragility of a man who believes he has been hard done by. He is the establishment man who feels he has been ignored by the establishment. The millionaire masquerading as the little people.
You might have thought Nige would want to thank his proxies. As an unheartfelt courtesy if nothing else. But no. He was rushing on his run. This was his triumph and no one else’s. He owed nothing to anyone.
“We are the agents of change,” he said. The royal we. Then he went to his familiar bugbears. Diversity. There was too much of it. Time for middle-aged white men like him to be given a chance. Too many foreigners. He’d make sure there were no asylum seekers in any council Reform controlled. They would be eradicated. Not just in tents like Andrea had promised. As for net zero? Forget it. Let the planet burn. Drill, baby, drill.
Elsewhere, Starmer was out and about at a drone factory in Luton. For him the biggest story of the day was defence manufacturing. It took a while, but eventually a journalist got a word in edgeways. What about the elections? Keir looked baffled. Elections? What elections? Oh, those elections. He had completely forgotten about them. They were mere nothings, really. A meaningless distraction.
But the message Keir wanted to take away was that what the country really wanted was for him to keep doing exactly what he had been doing. Only doing it a bit faster.
That might spell bad news for pensioners and farmers, but Starmer was adamant he knew what he was doing. His victorious mayor, Ros Jones, and several MPs from the left of theLabourparty saw it differently. They reckoned their traditional voters were sick of a party that was Reform lite. Why would anyone vote for that when they could have the real thing?
If it was a bad day for Labour, it was a crushing one for the Tories. Near annihilation. No wonder then that most of their MPs took a vow of silence. Nigel Huddleston popped up on the radio to say that the message he was hearing from voters was that people really liked Badenoch. You dread to think how badly the Tories would have done if they hated her. The only people who visibly loved Kemi were the Reform candidates. As for Kemi, she contented herself with a brief note on social media. Sorry, not sorry. I’m going nowhere. Other views are available.
The last word went to Nigel. “I will be the next prime minister,” he said. It’s a depressing possibility. A UK that has lost hope. Lost its moral compass. A country that no longer believes in itself. “Take me or leave me,” Nige snapped. “I just don’t care.”
And he doesn’t care. He never has done. About anything but himself. We have been warned.