Politics: the things to come

By Richard North - March 12, 2025

Even though Ukraine is cooking up a storm, events are still very much in the melting pot, and we have yet to see a coherent narrative.

I am, therefore, going to stay with the Reform story where the Twitter firestorm shows little sign of abating, with a steady drizzle of legacy media reports and opinion pieces keeping the controversy in the public domain.

That’s not to say that we’re seeing an entirely coherent narrative develop around Farage’s attempts to defenestrate Lowe, with a spectacularly shallow offering from the Telegraph’s star columnist, Allison Pearson, who completely misreads the situation.

Her headline says it all, expressing her view that “Reform’s alpha males need to shut up and get on with the job”, as she asserts in the sub-head that the “preposterous” civil war engulfing the party is essentially “a battle of male egos”.

What she misses, of course, is that this is not a “battle” as such – or, at least, it didn’t start out that way – so much as an attempted political assassination on the part of Farage, who is rolling out a tried and tested game plan in order to see off what he sees as a potential rival.

As such, it is partly because Lowe is doing his job, better and more diligently than any other MP in the Reform pack – including Farage – that the Golden Boy has been moved to intervene, as he has done so many times before. Lowe is doing a job that Farage does not want done, not least because it shows up his own inadequacies.

In fact, Pearson’s piece is a veiled eulogy for Farage, illustrating how so many of the legacy media “stars” have fallen for the Farage schtick, and don’t really understand why events are showing that their Golden Boy has feet of clay.

One of the best – and certainly succinct – explanations comes from Lowe himself, articulated in an interview with “rightwing” commentator Dan Wootton, retailed by the Guardian.

Here, Lowe is cited as suggesting that he was being forced out of Reform because he posed a threat to Farage, saying that “as in the past, a poppy that stood up too tall has been chopped down”.

“You’ve got to look at the pattern of relationships with Nigel throughout his career”, says Lowe. “Almost anybody who is in his view either threatening him or is capable enough to take over from him, he tends to fall out with them”.

In a staggering lack of self-awareness, though – or perhaps as an example of feline dissimulation – Farage tells Channel 4 News: “I don’t fall out with anybody, they fall out with me”, adding: “Most of the team I work with in this party are people that have been around me for over a decade. I am a team player, I do work with people, I do it for the long-term”.

Yet Farage has been active in politics for over 30 years, and none of the people who started down the road with him are any longer by his side – many would have nothing to do with him. That he can only stretch his timeline to a nebulous “over a decade” tells its own story, as do the bodies littering his career path.

But that’s Farage for you, forever turning reality on its head in an attempt at self-justification, but now his past is catching up with him and he is being confronted in Lowe with a “body” that simply won’t lie down.

Another commentator who gets it spectacularly wrong is Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, who asserts that one of Farage’s deepest beliefs is that he is surrounded by idiots, saved from political disaster and racist faux pas mainly by his own political savvy.

He notes, says Finkelstein, that one particularly dangerous form this idiocy takes is for some party rando to start believing that they, rather than he, should be leader.

He observes, usually correctly, Finkelstein goes on to say, that his rival is comically lacking in political skills and was only there in the first place because of Farage’s own charismatic appeal. “And he invariably acts against such people, however messy it gets”.

It is more than a little irritating that such “talking heads” can sound off from a position of profound ignorance yet still maintain a reputation (and a career) as great sages who are somehow worth listening to.

But if you reach back into the history of Ukip, you will see in Farage a man whose career is littered with regicide. The party’s first leader – and founder – Alan Sked – was railroaded out of his own party by Farage.

Then, the leader who took the victorious party into the European Parliament in 1999, Michael Holmes, was spectacularly deposed by Farage, who engineered a raucous emergency general meeting to force him out of office.

In 2004, Farage recruited Robert Kilroy-Silk to the party, a former Labour MP and one-time shadow home affairs minister and then a well-known television presenter with his own show. This was on the promise – which Farage later denied – that Kilroy-Silk would take over leadership of the party.

During that year’s European Parliament election campaign, Kilroy-Silk’s involvement massively raised the profile of the party. He presented one of the party-political broadcasts, injecting a degree of professionalism into its production which had been previously lacking.

He further helped by enlisting actress Joan Collins who attended a Ukip press conference at Kilroy-Silk’s invitation, delivering a rush of publicity of an intensity of which Farage could only dream but never attained.

But, after the party had won an unprecedented 12 seats under the leadership of former Tory MP Roger Knapman (up from 3 in the 1999 elections), Farage found that Knapman would not stand aside and he could, thus, not deliver on his promise. After Farage switched sides, publicly backing Knapman and leaving Kilroy-Silk isolated, this led to a rancorous break-up.

Kilroy-Silk peeled away to form Veritas, his own party, taking some good people with him, who were never to come back. UKIP’s membership declined by a third and donations dropped by over a half. In 2006, Farage then deposed Knapman in a bloodless coup, to become, for the first time, leader of Ukip,

This was not the end of Farage’s regicide as he stood down in 2009, to be replaced by Malcome Pearson, who was taking a far more robust line on immigration and the Islamification of British. A hereditary peer with substantial estates in Scotland, Pearson lack the popular touch and was systematically undermined by Farage, who took back the leadership in 2010.

All in all, the history of Ukip was nothing if not chequered, and a common factor throughout its turbulent history has been Farage, who was there from the very beginning, only for him to desert the party after the EU referendum, having failed to work up a plan which could serve as a template for the exit settlement.

Now, as leader of his third party, Farage is no less controversial and no better at managing the leadership than he has ever been, failing consistently to develop his enterprises beyond the protest stage into mature political parties capable of government.

Now, it seems, with the Runcorn by-election in the offing, Farage faces what amounts to an existential threat, as he confronts the prospect of carnage in his current party on the scale of 2005, after Kilroy-Silk’s departure.

Keeping up to the times, as always, the Financial Times argues that the Runcorn by-election could be the “proof of concept” for Reform, giving Farage the opportunity “to hone its election-winning machine”.

However, although it is early days – with the date of the by-election still to be set – there are disturbing signs for Farage, with the Mail reporting on a YouGov poll, showing slipping two points since last week, taking 23 percent of the vote, compared with Labour’s 24 percent (also down two).

Labour has its own problems, it seems, with volunteers unwilling to canvas for the party, while there is no evidence of Starmer’s Ukraine stance feeding into increased electoral support.

Despite this, the New Statesman reckons that Labour will hold Runcorn with 33 percent to Reform’s 30 percent. The Conservatives, it is anticipated, would languish on third on 20 percent.

That 30 percent prediction for Reform is a good marker against which to measure the effect of the Lowe assassination attempt. If the party performs significantly worse than that, the obvious inferences can be drawn. And it is a long time to the general election in 2029, with many more by-elections to come.

Reform is on notice, with many thinking that the party will struggle to recover ground. The Runcorn contest will give us the first hard clues as to what the future holds.