The party of rebellion needs to simultaneously appear to be the party of national interest
Nigel Farage, the German-born Dulwich College alumnus who keeps inserting himself into the national conversation, knows that he, and the people who are funding his party, need to convince the electorate at large that he is the man to grasp the levers of power. He’ll try to blame someone else if he can’t force through the agenda, but he needs to be in power, so let’s all Join the Revolt and vote Reform UK.
Look, I am under no illusions about how effective enfranchisement is not: much ado about Elon shows that if you have means to affect democracy, to bend the arc of government to your will, your lack of a vote matters more than my vote. I looked at the offerings from the main two parties in July 2024 and turned my nose up, but I did not abstain, as I did in 2019. Back then, on a wet December evening, I remembered Tory mastermind(!) Dominic Cummings and thought there was no way he and his shopping trolley – which is how he referred to the former Foreign Secretary and Mayor of London – would get Brexit done.
Nor was I particularly keen on the Labour leader, a career backbencher and ruler of Islington North, and his plan to work for the many and not the few. Labour would always take on board what the few (not the many) suggested, be they Tony Blair and his ID card plans, or corporate lobbyists looking after their own interests. The worker, for whom the party was founded to protect, always loses out to people who have money, power and influence.
Samuel Earle’s magnificent book Tory Nation told me precisely why the Conservative Party believe themselves to be the natural rulers of Britain. I’m working on a project about private schooling which, having been through it myself, is absolutely the teat on which future cattle suckle: Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster et al. all help nourish and nurture the next generation of leaders, who might not be good at leading but know how to get into positions of leadership. Exhibit A: Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, whose well-trodden path from Eton to Oxford to The Times to Parliament to City Hall to Conservative Party leader to ambushed by a cake is one I need not rehearse.
Instead, it’s all about Farage, the man who got into This Place at the eighth attempt in July 2024. I call him Father Farage, or Fr Farage, but the ‘Fr’ can stand for two other words that he is very keen not to be associated with. Is Reform UK a far-right party or just a right-leaning one? Are its politics dangerous or, as they call them, ‘common sense’? Is their TV channel, GB News, one which helps the propaganda effort as pensioners and the terminally bored watch that nice man talk about sovereignty? 4.5m people, as shown at the last election, were sold on it.
But 4.5m people won’t win you control of the legislature, which is what Farage wants. Zia Yusuf, the party treasurer, and Richard Tice, whose journalist partner is now an immigrant living in Dubai, are the other members of the triumvirate. Notice how Lee Anderson has hardly made a sound in 2025 so far, staying on message and probably helping his constituents in the deprived mining town of Ashfield. He might have benefitted from hoovering up Labour and Tory votes because he used to belong to both parties; hey, in a plural democracy, if people don’t like your principles, you can find new ones.
But what is the symbol of Fr Farage? It can’t be a red hat saying Make Britain Great Again, and it can’t be the sort of chainsaw brandished by Javier Milei, who convinced Argentina to vote him into power. We are watching Germany this Sunday – Sunday, not Thursday, because Germans are far smarter than the British – to see the results of their election, and whether the AfD party can overcome 80 years of self-flagellation to bring fascism back. Every National Socialist is dead, dying or senile, so it’s high time to return anti-immigrant sentiment to a country which has 76 AfD members of parliament.
There are several anglophone German-watchers (I bet they’ve got a word for that) who are updating UK readers on the rise of the AfD and their lesbian leader Alice Weidel. Musa Okwonga, the Old Etonian who emigrated from the UK to Berlin because we are a racist country, has been updating his social media followers on the threat of the far-right party, which is marching metaphorically upon the same city the Nazis did in the 1930s. I hope enough Germans look at the AfD and realise what they are potentially voting for, regardless of historical precedent.
After all, Britain stood up to Oswald Mosley at that time, and Farage is the closest thing Britain has had to Mosley in a century. He might not be calling his party the Union of Fascists, because that brand has been tarnished by the events of 1939-45, including 6m dead people persecuted in camps and murdered in gas chambers. But the more I read about it, the idea of populism is exercising me an awful lot: the Daily Mail were cheering on Mosley in the 1930s, and now they’re giving Farage a free pass. Why? Because they think their readers, who include the people that used to be called housewives and are now called Middle England, approve of it.
If Fr Farage can win over Middle England, he will win power. That’s why he cannot support Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who really is a nasty and contemptible bloke, and why Farage has to exclude anyone who says the loud part out loud. Farage knows he cannot be seen as racist, so he does what I call the ‘What’s All That About?’ routine. He is, in sum, Britain’s market leader in observational humour.
Can you think of another comedian who is currently leading a European nation, perhaps one who is at war with Russia and whose refugees Britain has taken in? If you’re thinking of Ukraine, who were invaded on February 24 2022, and their TV-president-turned-actual-president Zelensky, then you are correct. And which TV-host-turned-president, and friend of Fr Farage, is trying to appease Russia?
And which journalist-turned-Prime Minister was at Trump’s inauguration, in the employ of the Daily Mail because he had left a career in politics behind to make well remunerated speeches and write books for which he received seven-figure advances? It is my contention, perhaps to coincide with the paperback edition of his memoir Unleashed, that Boris Johnson will become Reform UK’s mascot.
He might not run as an MP because of, you know, the parties and the lying and the guidance that was not followed, but he will be an asset to the party as they chip away at the vote share of the Conservative Party, who rather threw the Johnson egg into their basket in order to Get Brexit Done.
Farage and Johnson will be the leaders of an Anti Elite Party that is actually funded by and operating for the elite. Let’s see if they get into power, and let’s see what they do with it. It’s a shame they can’t use ‘Britain First’ as a slogan, though.