I am always astonished at how young Nigel Farage is. As he turns sixty, it seems he has been sixty forever. Some people are born old and take a lifetime to catch up chronologically with the age they reached culturally at once. It is hard to imagine a young Nigel. What was he like, in the streets of Farnborough, or in the rifle range at Dulwich College? Farage was born in 1964 so he would have been 15 when London Calling came out. Can you imagine him listening to it? Hard to credit, somehow. Farage doesn’t exactly seem like a man troubled by art. He likes, apparently, to relax by fishing alone at night on the Kent coast. Which is not to say that Farage lacks a culture because his political appeal trades on a deep sense of cultural loss. The question about Farage, after a political career devoted to describing and dismantling what he does not want, is whether he wants anything.
Thanks to Andrea Jenkyns, the winner in a tough contest of worst Conservative MP in the House of Commons, a picture has emerged of Farage’s 60th birthday party at a restaurant in Belgravia. Flanked by Jim Davidson, Holly Valance, a character from Made in Chelsea and someone called Liz Truss who was apparently once Prime Minister, what was Mr Farage thinking as he watched his mate Donald Trump fire up on the screen? Was he thinking that his life’s work was done, or is he contemplating one more hurrah? Will he retire to tend the Cornish gins that he introduced in September 2022, popping up every now and then as the face of a dubious investment vehicle and hosting his comically dull show on GB News, the retirement home for the synthetically angry campaigner who has lost the issue on which his career was based? Is this enough attention for this perennial show-off?
The problem for Farage is that he lost his cause by winning it. Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU) has drawn the heat from his politics. The Reform party, the latest name in the iterations that derive from Mr Farage’s various ventures, is doing well enough in the country to harm the Conservative party but not nearly well enough to win any seats. Richard Tice, the leader, exudes a sense of aggression that Mr Farage always cleverly avoided. Farage is the man in the boozer, but he rarely spoiled for a fight. Tice looks ready to head outside at the earliest opportunity and it is an unattractive look. One of the secrets to Farage’s skill as a politician is that he took the overt viciousness, even as a hint, out of right-wing politics. Perhaps he will return, but this time the only revolution on offer is a palace revolution. He can hurt the Conservative party, to be sure. Is this what Andrea Jenkyns is hoping for? Is this what Liz Truss wants? A significant Labour victory will send them all into irrelevance in any case.
The bare facts of Farage’s career tell a singular tale. He left Dulwich College in 1982 and went into the City as a commodity trader at the London Metal Exchange. He became the MEP for the South East of England in 1999, from which vantage point he began his eventually successful campaign to have Britain leave the EU. The great irony of his career is that the EU gave him the only political platform he has ever been able to win, to help to undermine it from the inside. The key to Farage’s success is that he has never been interested in the wider political waterfront. He is not interested in democratic politics as such, which demands attention be paid to many subjects at once. He is a pressure group activist, a campaigner on a single issue. The Maastricht treaty in 1992, which created the EU, gave Farage his sole cause. He left the Conservative party over the issue because he felt the Tories were insufficiently vigorous in the battle for independence that was needed.
In truth, although he is politically formidable, Farage is intellectually negligible. Apart from the occasional surprise, such as a libertarian position on drug legalisation, he takes the usual lines of the conspiratorial country-gone-to-the-dogs merchant of whinge. He has described EU bureaucrats as intent on destroying the nation-state, George Soros as a threat to the western world, wants to liberalise gun laws and attributes the war in Ukraine to NATO’s baiting of Russia. He wants to be able to smoke wherever he pleases, castigates NHS fuss-pots for badgering him to stop eating Easter eggs and he thinks that climate change is all made up.
That said, it would be wrong to dismiss this litany of defeated dissatisfaction as the sum total of his politics. Farage can veer over the line into a nasty, rather than a merely stupid, politics. He is not afraid to say that he thinks the basic idea of Enoch Powell’s “River of Blood” speech was correct. He asked Powell to join UKIP in 1994 but Powell refused. At the personal invitation of the deputy leader Beatrix von Storch, Farage spoke at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany party in 2017. In the same year he supported the racist Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, against Emmanuel Macron, on the grounds that she would be more sympathetic to the UK about Brexit. And then, of course, Farage has paraded his closeness to Donald Trump even to the absurd lengths of floating the suggestion that he ought to be installed as the UK’s ambassador to Washington.
Farage was married for a long time to a German woman; two of his four children speak fluent German. He bears a Huguenot surname and two of his great-great grandfathers were from Frankfurt. He is no straightforward racist in the manner of Tommy Robinson. Indeed, Farage resigned his membership of UKIP when his successor Gerald Batten invited Robinson into the fold. He is probably the victim of his own rhetorical tendency to make friends with whosoever agrees with him. Rather like George Galloway, Farage finds that the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend means that you end up with some very unappealing friends. A stranger to doubt, Mr Farage shrugs it off, indeed thrives off the attention. The title of his 2018 LBC show, Farage Against The Machine, is uncharacteristically witty and grimly apposite.
So where next for this singular crusader? I suspect Mr Farage’s hesitation in announcing his intentions is that he does not know what they are. He is smart enough to understand that his failures at conventional politics are telling. It is easy, in a sense, to be the old Nigel Farage. The plain-speaking and the I-tell-it-like-it-is schtick works when you are seeking to appeal only to a faction of the electorate. But straight talk repels as many people as it attracts and you cannot come on like Nigel Farage if you are trying to win an election. Look at the fate of Lee Anderson. He tells it like it is, first in one party and then in another and then in a small party because he is talking, very vociferously, to a minority of people.
Farage’s skill was that he found the one issue, the European Union, on which a style of politics that talks to a minority could go mainstream. Europe became a surrogate for all other political dissatisfactions. It is a notable victory and his has been a successful career. The best course might be to bank it and commit to a career on the showbiz trail. To replace the Conservative party as the right-of-centre offer in a democratic polity is an ambition far greater than seeking Britain’s departure from Europe. Far greater, and it will take more than Nigel Farage and his pints in the pub to achieve something like that, even if the outcome were desirable, which emphatically it is not. Happy birthday Nigel and let’s raise a glass to your retirement.
“The question about Farage, after a political career devoted to describing and dismantling what he does not want, is whether he wants anything.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that (as you say) he’s always looked 60 but has never shaken off the adolescent MO of self-definition merely by identifying oneself as being against something.
Also, I just can’t understand how Tice would attract anyone to anything. It’s sad to see Isabel Oakeshott playing Eva Braun. He has all the charm and charisma of the rather voluminous “thank you note” a seagull (or flock of them) deposited on my car overnight. Thankfully, though, my car is white, so the shit is less visible.