There is a lot of speculation that Nigel Farage, now he is out of one jungle, will head straight for another. The prospect of Mr Farage as leader of the Conservative party is being heard in otherwise reputable circles. In a tellingly dreadful interview with Richard Tice on GB News – which surely infringes Ofcom’s guidelines on impartiality – Farage intimated that, as long as they do exactly as he wishes, he might conceivably be tempted to join – and by implication to run – the Conservative party.
Before he commits any further, Mr Farage should hesitate, for his own sake. It is commonly assumed, at least among people on his side of politics, that Mr Farage, as a highly successful political operator with Brexit to his credit (so the story goes) is just the tonic the Tory party needs. Even people who dislike him and what he stands for tend to be fearful of his prowess and his capacity to act as a tribune of the people. It will not surprise anyone to learn that I share none of Mr Farage’s politics but there is a more interesting point to be made about him than that I don’t much like him. The point is that he wouldn’t be very good. If the Conservative party wants to make the error of letting him take over, let them. It will do them no good.
There is an ideological reason it will do them no good. The one issue – Brexit – that united the 2019 Conservative coalition has gone as an issue on which it is possible to campaign. Boris Johnson killed off Nigel Farage by getting Brexit done. The Conservative party is trying to replace Brexit with immigration and hold the coalition together that way but this is a forlorn task. As John Burn-Murdoch has shown in the Financial Times, immigration is a major issue for people in the conservative camp but not as much for others. The political effect, therefore, of Rishi Sunak making “stop the boats” a salient part of the Tory plan is to draw attention to something his own supporters care about but which wins no new votes. In fact, it might be a vote loser as it is far from likely that Mr Sunak can actually stop the boats. There is one beneficiary of this position and that will be the Reform party. If Mr Farage wants a party to lead now he is out of the clutches of Any and Dec, the Reform party is the one he should consider.
That’s the obvious conclusion and not just for ideological and structural reasons. IT is also the obvious conclusion for personal reasons. Mr Farage is a natural leader of a small protest party who would be a terrible leader of a more ambitious, established party. Leading the Conservative party is no job for a novice and Mr Farage has never really had a job in politics before. He is a prominent, and you might also add a successful, figure but the game he has been playing is not democratic politics, it is single-issue campaigning. And they are not the same thing.
The key to Mr Farage’s appeal is that he is not trying to win a broad range of opinion. He takes a single issue – either the European Union or its surrogate sister, immigration – and he talks plainly about it. He thereby gains a reputation for candour and airs, in terms, some rather unpleasant views that a minority of the nation shares. This is a strategy for galvanising a committed fraction of a nation. It is not a strategy for winning power in a parliamentary democracy.
The pursuit of real power demands compromises with candour because the putative Prime Minister needs to command the support of 40 percent of the nation or more. Total clarity on a controversial subject inevitably alienates some of that audience. The more you appeal to the left flank of your possible vote, the more the right looks away, and vice versa. Assuming Labour wins in 2024, then a Conservative recovery in 2028 and 2029 would require the party to win back people who abandoned them to vote Labour. Nobody is switching from Tory to Labour on account of immigration policy and it cannot be expected to win them back. The Conservative party is losing its left flank – indeed it barely seems to care about those people – and Mr Farage is the last person who would win them back.
Politics is a completely different game from campaigning and Mr Farage has never done it. He doesn’t want to do it and he wouldn’t be very good at it. So, by all means let him try, but don’t be scared that he will be any good. In order to become good he would have to cease to be Nigel Farage and, if in the process of leading he loses the only thing that worked, what is the point?
Leaving aside his blokey ghastliness, Farage’s use of parties as personal business vehicles would bring the Cons a world of trouble beyond the usual donor scandals.