Politics: peak Farage?

By Richard North - June 18, 2024

You could hardly get away from it yesterday, not least on Twitter where we were regaled with the legend, “Britain is broken. Only Reform UK has bold, common sense solutions to save it!”.

So, I read the thing, all 28 pages of it – not that that took very long because the document is largely a rehash of the draft which has been up on the website for some time now, which I had already studied.

As for a critique, Pete has done a respectable job, including a YouTube video which addresses some of the fundamental defects.

Pete has been assiduously dissecting the Reform offering for some months, his initial criticisms framed as a constructive attempt to prompt improvements in a lacklustre, incoherent policy bundle. The key defect is that it lacks the overarching intellectual framework which would turn it from a disjointed collection of recycled, generic tropes into something useful.

Unfortunately – and to the surprise of absolutely no-one – Reform was not in listening mode. But that was never going to be any different. Pete was simply going through the same tedious process that I rehearsed more than 20 years ago when I worked with Ukip.

Then as now, Farage (who is the primary actor here) didn’t do detail. Eventually, all those years ago, at my own expense, I set up a policy unit within the party, inviting volunteers from all over the country to attend monthly meetings in the European Commission office in London where we laboriously started to construct a coherent policy framework.

Farage would have none of it. He refused to read any of the drafts we prepared and was dismissive of the entire process. But even after I left, the process continued, with the eventual emergence of a formal manifesto for the 2010 election.

Famously – having taken absolutely no part in the process Farage went to dismiss the entire document during an interview on BBC2’s Daily Politics programme.

“Under the last leadership and in the 2010 election” he said, “we managed to present a manifesto that was 486 pages long. So you can quote me all sorts of bits of it that I will not know. That’s why I’ve said none of it stands today and we will launch it all after the European elections”.

And that, if anything, typifies Farage’s approach, arbitrarily dismissing months of work by dozens of unpaid volunteers, without him having done the courtesy of even reading what they’d drafted. And he’s doing it again this time, having already arbitrarily ditched three elements of policy since he resumed the leadership of Reform.

It is no accident therefore that, as Ukip went into the 2015 elections, there were far more ex-Ukip members than there were on the then active list. Significantly, none of the original team who had helped him on his way to becoming an MEP in 1999, or those like myself who saw him through the lean years, were still with him.

As the Guardian noted recently – in a rather tawdry piece – he counts among his many enemies those who have worked closest with him and now want nothing to do with him.

That number must include some of the many Brexit party candidates who stood in the 2019 election, having paid their own deposits and financed their electoral addresses and other campaign expenses, only to be summarily stood down by Farage, who decided – without consultation – to give Brexit-supporting Tories a free run.

It is rather ironic, but very much par for the course, that after Farage decided to fight the election in this current election, he peremptorily ousted the already designated candidate, Tony Mack, telling his followers that “tough decisions” had to be made.

After an amount of reflection, when he had said that he would continue to support the party, Mack went on to announce that he was standing as an independent against Farage, complaining that he had only been given 15 minutes’ notice before Farage had publicly declared that he was going to contest the seat.

One should also recall that when Farage contested the South Thanet seat in 2015, he was up against the Conservative candidate Craig Mackinlay who previously had been Ukip’s party secretary and one of the most senior officials in the party at the time.

It is a truism that, had Farage been able to retain the people who had joined his various parties through the years, he would by now have a truly formidable army to support him.

Instead, much of the laboriously-built Ukip party structure has collapsed or withered away, leaving – as I remarked earlier – the Reform party to recruit an out-of-area novice for my constituency, while experienced campaigners are sitting on their hands, uninvolved.

Fortunately for Farage, he has the charisma that enables him to recruit an endless supply of “fresh meat” for his enterprises, who naively gush over their new messiah, while the old hands look on cynically at the repeating cycle, having seen it all before.

However, there is a sense that this “manifesto” – and indeed the whole campaign – is Farage’s last hurrah. If he doesn’t succeed now, he will be an eight-times loser. Having burnt the candle at both ends for so long, and as a heavy smoker and drinker, he will struggle to maintain his health and vitality into his 65th year, when the 2029 election comes round, and he has to start over in yet another attempt to get elected as an MP.

As to the manifesto, this could actually prove to be the turning point. After weeks of unrelenting Farage mania, with the British media having lost its collective mind, this document should bring the hacks down to earth with a bump, demonstrating that which the more sanguine of us already knew – the Farage is a man of straw.

If anything, Pete has been too kind in his critique. Farage’s has “bold, common sense solutions” are garbage, many of them so lacking in detail that they come straight out of the “the solution is simple, something must be done” playbook.

If fact, I heard Farage talking about immigration policy on one of the many video clips produced, where it said that it would be up to the Civil Servants to work out the detail. That’s exactly the same line he took with Brexit, setting his face against a detailed exit plan. The man has learnt nothing from his experience.

As it stands, the usual suspects have savaged the document. But while one would expect that, even The Times is lukewarm, pointing out the many flaws.

Crucially, though, where Farage might have expected for his support to be strongest, in the Telegraph, it too is lacking. The paper gets Conservative Home assistant editor, William Atkinson to do the hatchet job, a task which he goes about with gusto.

Under the title “Nigel Farage must believe in fairies”, Atkinson observes that for those hoping for a serious policy prospectus, “the document has the imagination and incontinence of a back of a fag packet doodle after a hearty lunch”.

Clearly, he has the measure of the man as he describes Farage as “great at identifying problems” – long after most sentient beings have been complaining about them for years, I might add.

Farage thus has a handle on stifling taxes, ridiculous immigration levels, and climate lunacy – but, says Atkinson, “providing genuine solutions would be too much like hard work”.

If Reform UK ever got into power, he says, the Sir Humphreys of the Whitehall Machine would stump him within a week. Rather than resolve Britain’s problems, he’d soon decamp from Number 10 to drown his sorrows in The Red Lion.

The vacuity of this document may take a little time to sink in as some people, and especially Farage’s fanbase, are terribly easily pleased. But when enough people see the Reform leader for what he is, a noisemaker rather than a serious politician, the publication launch may be seen to have been “peak Farage”, marking the start of his decline.

If that is the case, it won’t be before time.