What next for Nigel Farage?

After decades of campaigning to leave the European Union, Nigel Farage has at last got his wish. Is that it then? Will he quietly slip away from public view? Seems unlikely, writes Sean O’Grady

The war is over, arguably, but Farage spies more ‘battles to fight’ ahead and is making his preparations

Frog-faced pound shop Mussolini; Or saviour of Britain? Or, indeed, both?

By rights, Nigel Farage should be loudly feted for the culimination of his 27 years of campaigning for Brexit – from long before the word was coined, let alone taken seriously. Since he abandoned his career in the City for politics during the Maastricht crises of the early 1990s, Farage has had one unwavering objective. You could call him a visionary.  

Certainly, for his fan base he deserved a peerage in the new year honours, (another) boisterous party in Parliament Square, and a permanent place in the affections of the whole nation.    

And yet, when the moment arrived, the end of the transition period and the arrival of “global Britain”, it was a rather muted affair, and not just because of the Covid restrictions. Sat in his living room, Farage himself, in one of the home-made videos he posts on social media, declared he felt “relief not joy”, because “aspects” of Brexit were “dreadful” – the “shocking” treatment of fishing communities, the near hiving-off of Northern Ireland, and, therefore, trouble ahead for the union with Scotland. He didn’t even figure that much in the media coverage, or the brief parliamentary debates. Only his old comrade from the referendum campaign, Kate, now Baroness, Hoey (ex Labour MP), generously remembered him in the House of Lords: “One other man apart from the prime minister who’s been instrumental in where we are today is Nigel Farage, and the country and millions of people, whatever members of this house think, will forever hold him in its debt. Never has a man been more attacked and vilified, yet throughout kept focused, and today, as he himself said, ‘the war is over’. I am confident that if our government and our people show positivity, vision and enterprise, we can make our country great again, and even greater.” His Brexit allies in the Tory party prefer to ignore him.  

It was in other words, a bit of an anti-climax, even though on New Year’s Eve Twitter,  Farage allowed himself a drink and what seems like his first cigarette in ages, saying: “a big moment for our country, a giant leap forward. Time to raise a glass”.  

Yet for Farage, as for Boris Johnson, Britain and maybe Europe, the heady epoch-making moment took place more than four years ago, in the early hours of 24 June 2016, when he was the centre of attention. There is a vivid inside account of it – and it was a shock – by Farage’s friend and backer, the businessman Arron Banks, related in his raucous memoir, The Bad Boys of Brexit:  

By around 3am, we were pretty sure we’d win, but Nigel couldn’t risk calling it. He’d already had to do one handbrake turn, admitting his earlier declaration of defeat had been premature, and would have looked even more of a clown if he’d have to do a second.

But when the result for Birmingham came in and we’d won by a whisker we knew we were home and dry. The BBC and ITV decided to call it for Leave and wanted to go live to Nigel.  

Quick confab. Nigel: “Yep, we’ve done it. Time to claim it.”

And so, at 3.44am, he took to Twitter to declare: “I now dare to dream that the dawn is coming up on an independent United Kingdom.”

I have never seen him so happy or so emotional. Surveying the media mob, he tried to collect himself.

“I don’t know if I can hold myself together,” he whispered. “Course you can. Get out there,” I  instructed.

A second or two later, in a mad crash of microphones, cameras and long lenses, he finally gave the speech he had waited a quarter of a century to deliver.

“If the predictions are right, this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.  

“We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption and deceit. And today honesty, decency and belief in nation I think now is going to win.”

Nigel is a true British hero. It’s his life’s work and the most phenomenal political achievement of our time.

It’s hard to argue that point, but now look – it is Johnson’s beaming mug on the front pages of the papers, signing the treaty, getting all the credit. It is Farage who, though a touch triumphalist about his Brexit, is magnanimous towards his old rival on the Leave side. Farage now modestly plays down his own role, bigging up the “people’s army” ’kippers, reflecting that “if it hadn’t been for Ukip, none of this would have happened”. For years Farage berated Johnson for being an Establishment sell-out merchant who could only deliver his promises with a no-deal Brexit – but that he, Johnson, would never actually agree to that, whatever he said. Farage now offers the prime minister praise and credit: “Johnson’s Vote Leave Group, which included Michael Gove, just got us over the line” in the 2016 referendum, and now Johnson, in the big picture, has brought back an acceptable Brexit.

Nigel is a true British hero. [Brexit] is his life’s work and the most phenomenal political achievement of our time

Arron Banks

Farage hints that, after the aberrations of the David Cameron and Theresa May years, the Ukip/Brexit Party/Conservative “faultlines” can be smoothed away, and the tribes can now be reunited in some way, joined in a Eurosceptic return to a socially conservative Thatcherite grouping. Referencing Cameron’s famous 2006 dismissal of Ukip, and implicitly Farage, as “a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”, Farage smugly points out that “we were the fruitcakes, the loonies; now they’re all singing our song”. And where, one might well ask, is Cameron these days? In the deathless words of Danny Dyer, the “twat” is probably in Europe, Nice or somewhere “with his trotters up”.  

The war is over, arguably, but Farage spies more “battles to fight”, ahead and is making his preparations. He is about to convert his Brexit Party into the Reform Party (if the Electoral Commission can be persuaded), and, while the Brexit Party never had a manifesto or policy platform beyond Brexit, it is not difficult to divine what it will be campaigning on in the spring elections for county councils, city mayoralties, including London, and the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. It will – no surprise – have a populist flavour.

First, there’ll be a stand against the Covid lockdowns – “worse than the disease” –  though they should be mostly relaxed by polling day in May, which will blunt the force of the attack somewhat, and Farage doesn’t seem to want to become a full-on anti-vaxxer.  

So there might not be much mileage in Covid. Neither will the fresh appeal to the student vote deliver much new support – overwhelmingly Remainers, they despise Farage, and Labour would be their best bet to get their fees back. Immigration – always labelled “illegal” even where it isn’t – is maybe less promising than it used to be in the days when the EU policy of free movement meant “we cannot control our borders”. The pitiful, desperate, human cargoes struggling their way across the English Channel obsess Farage to the extent that he gets onto a boat to film them. Yet their continued attempts to evade UK Border Control merely proves that Brexit wasn’t ever going to stop them. In fact, outside the EU and its migrant conventions, it will be far more difficult to just “send them back to France”. Farage seems to be edging towards a policy of physical naval force to deter the boats, as the Australians have resorted to, but that is likely to be as cruel as it would be ineffective. Still, there’s a constituency for it. There’ll obviously be the usual attacks on “woke” culture, Black Lives Matter and the BBC: routine stuff.  

Apart from all that, there will no doubt be a policy package on traditional Farageist lines of low taxes, deregulation, creating a “Singapore-like entity” out of the UK,  moving the NHS towards a safety net for the poor, grammar schools, and continuing efforts to unpick the less palatable bits of the Brexit deal. Farage has even come over all environmentalist on fisheries, targeting European super trawlers and putting himself, bizarrely, on the side of the beleagured British porpoise in its heroic struggle against the fishy federalists of Brussels.  

It was the European parliament that presented Farage with an opportunity to win elections, gain legitimacy, momentum and, thus, a platform and public funds … It was a 20-year long display of clowning beyond even Johnsonian standards, but it got him noticed

Yet times change, and it is difficult to see Farage repeating his successes this time round, despite real past glories. It is worth recalling that he did, after all, win the European elections in 2019 with 31 per cent of the vote. Yet that is the ironic point; without PR and the European parliament there’d be no Brexit. He was first elected an MEP in 1999 in the first round of those elections in the UK held under a system of proportional representation. Subsequent Farage and Ukip breakthroughs in the Euro elections, including outright victory in 2014, added to the pressure on David Cameron to offer a European referendum. Farage was able to convert public disquiet about immigration from eastern Europe after EU expansion in the 2000s, into ever larger protest votes. Similar results came in local council wards where pockets of support could be effectively targeted. But the Commons was always beyond his reach.  

So it was the European parliament that presented Farage with an opportunity to win elections, gain legitimacy, momentum and, thus, a platform and public funds. He once said that he’d received £2m in expenses in his time as an MEP. He famously insulted the president of the European Council, Herman von Rompuy, as possessing “the charisma of a damp rag” an ex-leader from a non-country (Belgium). Farage sat on his hands when the rest of the parliament gave Prince Charles a standing ovation, for a speech on climate change; Farage rudely turned his back on the young musicians playing the European anthem; and he demeaned a whole nation by waving a little union jack at the slightest excuse. It was a 20-year-long display of clowning beyond even Johnsonian standards, but it got him noticed.  

Such successes were always denied him at Westminster, because of the first-past-the-post system and a Tory party determined not to allow him to get a foothold in the Commons. At the peak of his popularity, and at his seventh attempts to become an MP, at South Thanet in 2015, he was still narrowly defeated (the Conservatives were later criticised for spending too much in the constituency), and Ukip only ever held, briefly, two seats, basically via Tory defectors.  

Nor is Farage likely to ever again have the opportunity to win a national referendum. The very trauma of the 2016 experience and its aftermath has probably killed it off as a constitutional device, and with it the best hope of turning Farageist populism into policy, say on immigration or hanging. He will have to be content with pushing the Conservatives from the outside, though in reality they need no encouragement to be populists these days.  

It may also be true that the frenetic, exhausting high-emotion wave of populist nationalism that swept so much of the democratic world since the financial crisis of 2008-09 is at last subsiding. The defeat of Donald Trump is the most obvious sign of that, and it was a severe blow to Farage (who had a £10,000 bet on a Trump second term, at the good odds of 15/8). Not so long ago Trump publicly called for Farage to be made UK ambassador in Washington, and Farage was still appearing on a platform with the outgoing president a few weeks ago. That’s gone. In Europe the rise of Emmanuel Macron (though presently stumbling), and the longevity of Angela Merkel indicate the populist right is in retreat, and the EU, against many Brexiteers’ predictions, has obviously survived its multiple crises. Farage still hopes that Brexit will lead to the EU’s disintegration, but for the moment there is no sign of it. He may say that “there is no way back” for the UK into the customs union, single market or EU, but so long as this vast body of 450 million exerts its centripetal force, he must know it is always a possibility. Demographic change too may mean that Brexit is never going to be the settled will of the people.  

There is, too, the problem of Farage himself, and the questions of judgement that surround him. He has a great deal of baggage, and a divisive quality not well suited to a country looking for a bit of a quieter life. Even in 2019, for example, Farage was still, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, defending the 2016 Leave.eu “Breaking Point” poster, with its images of hordes of refugees, unveiled a few days before the murder of Jo Cox MP: “It was the truth, and If you think about that poster it’s transformed European politics, it’s changed Italian politics. Mrs Merkel made a very big mistake.”  

The founder of Ukip, Alan Sked has stated that Farage once used the N-word when, in 1997, discussing the party’s attitude towards far right voters – Farage has denied he used such words and always insists he is not racist. Farage is on record as saying: “Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.”  In the leaders’ TV debate in 2015 he stated: “You can come into Britain, from anywhere in the world, and get diagnosed with HIV, and get the anti-retroviral drugs which cost up to £25,000 per year per patient.”

Farage has also had some talkative female former acquaintances chatting to the press, sometimes in amusingly graphic terms. This has not enhanced his dignity. A glamour model by the name of Valerie Fox has recounted how she’d had a snogging session with Farage on a Virgin Atlantic flight, and that Farage referred to his wife in ungallant terms (“She’s f***ing huge. She’s so big”). Another glimpse into the Brexit Party leader’s tender side was provided by Annabelle Fuller, a Ukip aide. She claimed to The Sun that the pair had an affair that lasted more than a decade. In her account Farage complimented her the morning after their first night together by letting her know that her “ass looked beautiful in the moonlight”. Such tendresse; but he was not going to leave his German wife Kirsten and their two children for her. (Though the marriage – Farage’s second – eventually did collapse). There are other reports about his private life over the years; Farage has always denied the claims and rejected that any impropriety took place.  

Despite such gossip, Farage deserves to be placed in that small group of politicians who “made the weather” without ever holding one of the great offices of state. Compared to the others in the category, Joseph Chamberlain, Aneurin Bevan, Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, Farage’s achievement is even greater. Unlike Powell, who spent much of his later career campaigning against Europe and immigration, but unsuccessfully, Farage has actually won. Like Powell, Farage too was a disaffected – if traditional – Tory type, unashamedly nationalistic, with a mystical conception of the British and their place in the world. Like Powell too, he did his old party and its leading personalities great damage over the years. Both were mistrusted for their fruitcakey extremism – a major reason why Dominic Cummings, Johnson and Gove kept Farage out of their (relatively) respectable Vote Leave operation in 2016, fronted and staffed by Oxford graduates.  

Yet they would not be where they are today without Farage and his guerrilla campaign aimed at Labour heartlands, with Ukip, the referendum and the Brexit Party as transit points to them voting for Johnson’s Conservatives. But Farage’s Brexit would probably equally not be there were it not for Johnson’s wider public appeal. The mutual suspicion seems undiminished, and Farage remains a pariah. The war may be over, but for Farage there seems no way back to political power, still less respectability.