Like him or loathe him, Nigel Farage will go down in history as among the most noteworthy figures of our age

Whatever you think of our departure from the EU, Brexit was largely – if not entirely – the work of one man, says Mary Dejevsky

Farage on stage in Parliament Square as the UK formally leaves the EU (AFP/Getty)

It would appear that Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party (Ukip), former MEP and leader of the Brexit Party, is not on Boris Johnson’s “reconciliation” list of those to be elevated to the peerage. Kenneth Clarke and Philip Hammond – yes; Ruth Davidson, too. But not Nigel Farage. Which will probably be fine with his supporters, and maybe Farage himself, as a robe trimmed with ermine and a seat in the House of Lords might have suggested that this die-hard rebel had finally sold out.

But where does Farage go from here? He has his radio talk show on LBC and promised, at the Parliament Square party he threw on Brexit night, to keep his beady eye trained on the next stage of talks with Brussels, to ensure no backsliding on the part of Boris Johnson and his government. Other than that? It is probably fair to say that Farage’s job is done. Indeed, he said as much himself.

This, he told the flag-waving throng of Brexiteers at his party, was the culmination of his “fight over 27 years”. “We took on the establishment,” he went on, and “we won the war. It’s over”. After 11 o’clock struck, he led a rendition of “God Save the Queen” – then everyone dispersed, quietly, into the night.

Maybe it was the enormity of the occasion for him personally, but as host and hero of the party, Farage came across as strangely subdued. But a certain change could have been observed also in the previous weeks: the closer Boris Johnson came to “getting Brexit done”, the more diminished Farage seemed.

If Farage does now fade from the political scene, however, his relatively low-key departure will belie his significance. When the history of the past 50 years comes to be written – and the distance of years creates a truer perspective – Farage is likely to be seen as one of the most noteworthy figures of the age.

Farage was not the UK’s first campaigning Eurosceptic; Alan Sked, the founder of the UK Independence Party in 1993, and the late Sir James Goldsmith, with his Referendum Party, came before him. But the origins of the discontent he reflected were the same: unhappiness with the first (1975) referendum, which was seen by Eurosceptics as merely endorsing membership of the then-European Economic Community, and hostility to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, seen as turning an economic grouping into a potential political union.

This is where Farage came in. It was Maastricht that prompted him to leave the Conservatives and join Ukip. He was elected member of the European parliament for South East England in 1999, and held that seat, latterly for the Brexit Party, until the UK’s MEPs filed out of the EU parliament for the very last time.

That could have been the end of the story. Everything changed, however, when Farage became Ukip’s leader in 2006, and the party’s call for the UK to leave the European Union started to gain momentum.

There were other reasons why Ukip might have amplified its call for Brexit at the time: Tony Blair’s Euro-enthusiasm, the introduction of the euro, the EU’s sudden expansion to the east, all of which had their detractors. But someone had to be able to harness that Euroscepticism in campaign form – and that someone was Farage.

Crucially, and unlike either Goldsmith or Sked, he had a popular touch. Despite being a former public schoolboy (Dulwich College) and making money in the City, Farage – with his easy manner, signature tweed jacket and predilection for a pint – came across as a “regular bloke”.

In the 2009 European parliamentary elections, Ukip emerged as the UK’s second largest party; five years later, it topped the poll, displacing both the country’s major parties. This in itself was a big achievement. It also gave Farage a platform in UK politics that he would otherwise not have had.

The far greater achievement, however, was how Farage managed to use this platform in a way that has changed the whole course of British policy – in fact, turned it on its head.

For the best part of 60 years, the whole focus of UK domestic and foreign policy had been to join, then work within, what became the European Union. The widespread assumption, once the UK had joined in 1973, was that this is where it would be in perpetuity, or for as long as the EU survived.

There were spats, of course: Margaret Thatcher’s handbaggings, privileged opt-outs (the euro and the Schengen treaty, to name only two). But the whole trajectory of the EU was about growing, not contracting, and the UK had been an enthusiastic part of that. Nonetheless, in June 2016 the UK became the first EU member to vote to leave; on 31 January 2020, that vote came into effect.

Like it or not – and 48 per cent of those who voted in the referendum to remain certainly did not – this was largely, if not entirely, Nigel Farage’s doing. And he did it from outside the UK’s political system. Despite his best efforts, neither he nor his party (except via a Conservative defector) ever won a seat in the UK parliament. They could not buck either the first-past-the-post electoral system nor the way in which established parties joined forces against them.

In France, it was possible for a politician to set up a new party, whip up a campaign and soar to win the presidency in the same season. In the UK, a parallel to Emmanuel Macron’s rise to power is unthinkable: the electoral system militates against new parties and there are no direct elections for head of state whose impact could reverberate down to parliamentary elections.

Nigel Farage, however, won elected office in the only UK-wide polls that use proportional representation, and gained a public voice courtesy of his EU parliamentary platform. Cameron’s decision to call an in/out referendum, with no threshold or margin required for victory, allowed Ukip and the Conservative Eurosceptics to join forces as Brexiteers, then for Boris Johnson to become prime minister.

And while Johnson’s 11th-hour decision to back Leave campaign may have tipped the balance, it has to be doubted whether the necessary support would have built up behind Brexit without Farage’s two decades of hard graft. When he boasted on Brexit night that he had “taken on the establishment and won”, this was true: the battles in parliament over the three-plus years between the referendum and the actual passage of the Brexit bill were ample proof of that. A majority of MPs detested the idea of Brexit, but the popular vote had spoken. It took the third election in four years and a frankly populist Conservative leader to bring parliament and people back into alignment.

They are now aligned, however, and facing the opposite direction from the one the UK has faced for more than half a century. How much this country’s identity and priorities will come to diverge from those of the European Union has yet to emerge. But divergence there will be, and when history is written, that divergence – for better or worse – will be attributed to one man: Nigel Farage, an insurgent who took on the system, and won.