“This is the inflection point,” warned Nigel Farage last month as he assumed the reins of power at the incarnated Reform UK party, standard bearer of the often inchoate group known as the hard right of British politics. “The only wasted vote is a Conservative one. We are the challengers to Labour. We are on our way.”
On July 4, an important stop was made on that way. A figure who had exerted more influence on British politics outside the houses of Parliament than any other this century, a figure who had conspicuously failed in getting elected despite seven previous efforts, had finally convinced voters he was electable.
The new member for the Essex seat of Clacton had unseated the Conservative candidate, Giles Watling, who had held the seat since 2017. The margin was impressive: 21,225 votes to Watling’s 12,820.
To keep him company in the House of Commons will be such colleagues as Richard Tice, Reform’s chair, along with former Southampton football club chairman Rupert Lowe, and former Conservative deputy chair Lee Anderson. They now form a snapping rearguard of politics that is not so much nipping at the heels of Britain’s oldest party as tearing it apart.
As the Tories contemplate their ruin and richly deserved defeat, the new Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer will find little time to relish the joys of victory. Farage is already promising rapacious raids into enemy territory. “We are coming for Labour … be in no doubt about that.” While eschewing notions of working with the Conservatives, he offered an olive branch by way of invitation: Tory members could join Reform if they wished.
Commentators on Farage’s life have noted a streak of luck suggesting the blessings of the devil. He has cheated death, surviving car crashes, a plane crash and a misdiagnosis regarding testicular cancer. The party that caught his eye, the UK Independence Party (Ukip), would have vanished into the suffocating arms of the larger Referendum party of James Goldsmith had the latter not perished to cancer 10 weeks after the 1997 election. “Farage takes his chances, and though things often blow up – planes, parties, countries – he walks away and on to the next caper,” writes David Runciman.
Reform UK is certainly one such caper, and its somewhat anti-democratic operations, often chaotic, poorly organised and lacking any institutional framework, make its electoral returns even more remarkable. But even on Farage’s side of politics, it is hard to mistake the fact that he has treated the party much like a political start-up, where he has assumed the role of director and majority shareholder. Reform will, in time, require reform if it is to be a durable force. Farage has admitted as much. “We have a structure. We do have a constitution, but to build a branch structure, we have to give people the ability to choose candidates to vote.”
Durability, however, may have nothing to do with it. As with many charismatic buffoonish party goers, he may leave when required to help with the cleaning up, leaving the washing to the snarling and fractious functionaries who fight over the leftovers and break the crockery. This may well be Starmer’s hope. It is certainly the assessment of Fraser Nelson in The Spectator. “Whatever his intention, Farage has ended up serving as a purely destructive force. He has become the nemesis, not the rejuvenator, of the causes he purports to care about.”
Otherwise, the threat is palpable, and comments by the new Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds about Reform’s policies being like “Liz Truss in terms of the economy” and similar to “Russian positions in terms of … the war in Ukraine” are unhelpful. Labour’s lack of clarity on how it will deal with the Channel crossings of irregular migrants is something Farage is salivating over.
Concerned about such matters, Tony Blair, Labour’s longest serving prime minister and overly remunerated circuit speaker, has been willing to offer the sort of advice in the Sunday Times he charges obscene amounts for. His typically soupy ideas all go to trying to blunt the effect Reform will have in the next election. “We need a plan to control immigration. If we don’t get rules, we get prejudices.”
Showing his recurrent fascination with surveillance (as the Coronavirus pandemic raged, Blair suggested adopting a “Covid Pass” to distinguish the anointed from the unwashed), a “digital ID” could be used to maintain the integrity of borders. Law and order matters, another favourite of the New Labour era, also needed to be dealt with. “At present, criminal elements are modernising faster than law enforcement.” To round off the trifecta, it was also important that the Starmer government not succumb to “any vulnerability on ‘wokeism’.”
Farage is now in the temple of Westminster and, in time, hopes to bring it down. He will woo, seduce and despoil, as he has done to a string of lovers and prominent figures he has lured to his camp over the years. He will be remorselessly destructive. For Labour and for those more progressive than Starmer’s stiffly starched set, the threat has been truly enlivened.
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The English version of the ridiculous narcissistic psychopath convicted felon and traitor to his country. And they call each other “friends” LMAO!!
5 Seats when he was predicting 13 to 15 on polling day. 5 out of 650.
He is not a threat to anyone and should be treated as the contemptible weasel he is.
A boil on the bum of British blathering political poltroonish pontifical porcipophagic putridity, Farage remains a glaring inconsequential irrelevance, and a lazy useless bludger using wordiness to create hate, mischief, disquiet and unrest.
Farage the mirage.
An actual useless bent-light optical phenomena, serving no purpose whatsoever. He might say he’s readying for his place in the sun. When one thinks of answering that he already has one on flattened deserts, one is suddenly struck by logic …
“What! A mirage that talks!
Completely unsure as to why someone pointing out that Farage & Reform have a relatively pro-Putinist viewpoint regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be considered “unhelpful”, but I have faith that the author will clarify in comments.
Firstly, guess who was behind the Tories’ “Stop the Boats” campaign? Tone the Botty. Clearly the British believe he’s as big a fuckwit as we do! And Keir Starmer tore up the Rwanda Solution.
Nigel Farage and the Reform Party are a Rump in a Labour Majority and Keir Starmer will be highly unlikely to pay him much attention.
Ugly depraved bastard. I mean his character, beliefs and politics. I loathe loathe loathe super creeps like this, like Trump, like Putin, like Murdoch, like Morrison, like Dutton. Who will rid this world of these gross pompous, delusional, malicious hate spitting misfits. However did we get here after the Renaissance, French and Industrial revolution, modern scientific, social, humanitarian enlightenment and post world war political reformations?
Trump’s private turd ball in the UK, and sat as he did for nearly two decades in the European Parliament unstitching Britain from Europe against the interests and prospects of all the people he represented and who paid him handsomely from the public purse to betray them. He should be tried for treason!
The same Farage who with others of the ‘far right’ liaised with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy i.e. 2017, leaving only the questions, when and/or how often had they met, and why?
‘And that was how the world found out, by accident, that the founder of WikiLeaks, the organisation which published Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails – a decisive advantage for Donald Trump’s campaign – and Farage, a friend of Donald Trump, were mutually acquainted.’
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/23/when-nigel-farage-met-julian-assange
Farge in parliament will have all the affect of a fart in a vacuum.
Meanwhile, across the chunnel, a Putin regime spokesperson expressed disappointment at Le Pen’s 2nd round stumble in the French general election.
https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-sees-no-strong-political-will-france-restoring-ties-2024-07-08/
Not sure if this relates to the authors assertion that a UK Labour minister pointing out pro-,Putinist aspects within the Farage/Reform agenda was “unhelpful”, but here is one source of common report regarding UK electorate responses to Farage’s Reform running the role of chief apologist for Putin’s military atrocities in Ukraine:
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/support-farages-reform-uk-party-drops-after-ukraine-comments-2024-06-27/
I guess that “unhelpful” is, upon consideration, a highly subjective term.
CB,
Your focus on the “unhelpful” adjective does illustrate the power of the MSM.
The same MSM which insists that someone switched off the Israel survailance system on OCT 7th by mistake.
I recall wondering how the UK voters would treat this information from Nigel, after I heard it.
Suppose, just for a minute, that Nigel is a chap who has done some critical thinking and knows that US provocation kicked off the Ukraine “invasion”, because Putin was sufficiently provoked.
Then he shares this.
The media storm is then set in motion because even he cant nurse the voters into looking carefully at the chain of historic events which defines who set this war off.
Our attention span is just too short, and MSM trades on this.
Putin, and Donald work on doing what is best for their nation (Make US/ Russia great again), so I can understand how they could find some commonality in their agenda.
The Empire prefers conflict.
I dont think Nigel is good for UK but when he does present a gem, the “Empire” will have its way.
I sometimes think those who are not bothered about who is leader, and dodge voting, are maybe the smart ones, and happy to hand over their wealth to the weapons industry.
Douglas,
Not sure why you put quotation marks around the word invasion.
I realise that Putin’s multi-divisional hostile deployment is also euphemistically referred to as a “special military operation” by people in Russia who wish to avoid custodial sentencing, but we strayans are under no such restrictions.
Still, good for you that you are familiar enough with Mr Farage to be on a first name basis, and that your “critical thinking” allows you to understand that Donald, like Vlad, really only wants what is best for his country. .
Well, this will be bound to send Noxious Fartrage into a rabid screaming fit:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/10/uk-will-give-ukraine-3bn-a-year-for-as-long-as-it-takes-says-starmer
GL, yes, I can just imagine the weasel hissing and shrieking away in his burrow.
Interesting how the human animal so easily anthropomorphises; this man’s a weasel, that one’s a pig, she’s got a face like a horse, he’s as dumb as an ox, or stubborn as a mule, stinks like a skunk, is fishy, cunning as a rat, dangerous as a snake, and much much more. I’m certain the animal kingdom doesn’t behave similarly.
FWIIW, all creatures are beautiful, all have their right place in the grand scheme of things and none are malevolent except that we make them so.
Weasels, dear things, are just one example that’s been given a bad rap because it doesn’t conform to human expectations as to how it should look or behave. And for the record, they don’t hiss or shriek.
Canguro,
Fair to say that Michaela Cash has the squawk of a galah blown backwards into an electric fence, or is that an offence against cockatoo tongues?
CB, for Ms Cash, we will accept any similes that have an appropriate fit. As for an actual galah being blown backwards into an electric fence, I’d like to see that. They seem to be a bird with an almost mythic status of toughness; examples abound… cooking one in a billy with a stone or axe-head, then .. well, you know the rest.
I’ve seen them drunkenly rolling around on the ground, too pissed to fly after consuming spilled wheat grain that’s fermented over several days of exposure to nocturnal dew. Hilarious to witness.
This yarn from a former boss, a manager of a sheep station south-west of Broken Hill; he’d gone up to the Hill on a Saturday to do some shopping and was barreling home on the Barrier Highway in his Chevy Impala, fast, as you could back in the day, and he hit a flock of galahs. Some casualties. He didn’t stop. A wing kept flipping above the engine bonnet… he figured a dead bird stuck in the grill. He got to Yunta, turned off and onto the dirt for the thirty miles to the station, and got to the first gate. Walked to the front of the car, saw the galah unpicking itself from the grill, it dropped to the ground and walked away. Tough bird. Tougher than Michaela. She wouldn’t have done that.
Good yarn.
Michaela could also be known as,
The regrettable catalytic combination of a seventh glass of fruity lexia with a well-powdered nose.
Cya bruvvah..
Cash will always be a screeching harpy to me.
Considering the negative impact it has made on most aspects of the UK a quick reminder that Farage was the force behind Brexit should blunt most of his attacks on the Government.