Farage is a conman and Suella Braverman is just the latest to fall for his silver tongue

The controversial Reform UK leader has made a career off his everyman persona and populist rhetoric, writes Sean O’Grady. He won’t be our next prime minister, but British politics will always find room for men like him

Nigel Farage says Reform UK will become the ‘real opposition’ to Labour (PA Wire)

The news that Suella Braverman, former home secretary, future Tory leadership contender and permanent embarrassment, wants to embrace Nigel Farage and welcome him into the Conservative Party puts one in mind of those strangely compelling nature documentaries about parasites.

Nature, like politics, can be a cruel world, and one of the most unpleasant of parasites is leucochloridium paradoxum, a worm that can turn snails into zombies. Once inside the unlucky gastropod, it takes over the snail’s nervous system, and makes its eyestalks throb with vivid colours, such that it is eaten by a bird and the life cycle of the parasitic worm continues. Eurgh.

So also, it would seem, have the snail-like mental processes of Braverman been taken over by the Reform UK mind virus, she herself now pulsating away to attract Farage to swoop down and take control of her party.

She thinks it “a real shame” that Reform UK and the Conservatives are fighting each other, and, that there’s “not much difference” between Farage and the Conservatives on policy. She obviously hasn’t read Reform’s draft manifesto with its raft of unfunded spending and tax commitments, let alone relegating the NHS to a safety net for the poor.

To our deranged Tory: “We are a broad church, we should be a welcoming party and an inclusive party and if someone is supportive of the party, that’s a precondition and they want Conservatives to get elected then they should be welcomed.”

The truth, of which Braverman is painfully ignorant, is that once inside the Conservative Party Farage and his allies will destroy it from within.

Whether you think him evil or not, Farage is undoubtedly a smooth political operator. He is, to many of us, a fascistic demagogue; but not every wannabe authoritarian leader gets very far, and it still takes skill, as well as luck and some judgement, to get as far as he has for as long as he has. After all, he first emerged as leader of Ukip in 2006 and has been part of the national scene, from Brussels to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, ever since. Whether we like it nor not, he is a force in British politics.

The Farage factor can be surprisingly easily measured – a few percentage points at least. Though his return to the leadership of Reform UK (successor to the Brexit party and Ukip), coincided with the usual chaos in the Tory campaign, you could see the boost in its poll ratings, attracting most of its support from “traditional” Conservative voters. His presence in a non-leadership role and ubiquity in the political life of the nation for two decades has also helped Britain’s hard right find a voice to exert its influence, most obviously in forcing David Cameron to concede the promise of an EU referendum in January 2013. Of course, that only emboldened Farage, but that’s slightly another story.

The point, for now, is what followed that pledge simply proves that someone such as Farage will never be satisfied (even now, we haven’t “done Brexit properly”) and that the Conservatives, as a serious party of government, cannot ever outflank Farage on the right. You can’t out-Farage Farage, no matter how hard you try.

Farage, in other words, has been at this game far longer than any of his current main rivals. He brings to this election the sheer weight of his experience at “making a bloody nuisance” of himself, as he puts it, and taking opportunistic advantage of his opponents’ weakness, as now in the case of Rishi Sunak’s floundering campaign. Now the majority shareholder of his own party – this is Reform UK Limited – he can do what he wants, and sensing the chance to make a further breakthrough first cancelled plans to put his campaigning for Trump first, and then to seize back the leadership from Richard Tice (who sadly lacked Farage’s profile).

Second, Farage has created a political persona. It’s no doubt authentic in at least some respects, and “relatable”. He does like a pint of English ale. He adores cricket. He does (or did) smoke too many Rothmans. He does genuinely have the kind of usual views and prejudices of the man in the saloon bar or the home counties golf club.

His accent and background show him to be a public schoolboy. He went into the City rather than bother with university. He was an enthusiastic Conservative in the Thatcher era, who became disillusioned by John Major and the speed of European integration. His political philosophy is a pretty straightforward one that owes much to Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell (and something to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump). He’s a social conservative with a suspicion of immigration. He, like it or not, thus speaks for many in his generation (he’s 60 this year) who feel a little bewildered in modern Britain.

For his fanbase of all ages he is, to adapt an old phrase from the 1980s, “one of us”: a simple patriot of uncomplicated tastes and “common sense” views on everything from the economy to the war in Ukraine to trans rights – all expressed in “man of the people” terms.

It takes one to know one, as they say, and Boris Johnson once summed up Farage like this: “A rather engaging geezer. He’s anti-pomposity, he’s anti-political correctness, he’s anti-loony Brussels regulation. He’s in favour of low tax, sticking up for small business and sticking up for Britain. We Tories look at him, with his pint and cigar and sense of humour, and instinctively recognise someone fundamentally indistinguishable from us.” Johnson was obviously taking notes…

Like Winston Churchill’s cigar, Harold Wilson’s pipe or George Galloway’s fedora, Farage has also cultivated his own trademarks – the pint of beer, (more rarely these days) a cigar or cigarette, the fawn overcoats with the velvet collar, the red cords, Barbour jackets and other bits of faux-posh gentleman’s outfitting, the throaty nicotine-coated laugh. His enemies have also added the McDonald’s banana milkshake to the inventory, with the counterproductive effect of getting him even more publicity (and some sympathy from his more devoted supporters).

It’s all part of building Farage as a colourful character, in contrast to what he thinks of the boring (if more powerful) figures he competes with – Cameron, Miliband, Sunak and Starmer at home, and the likes of Donald Tusk and Herman van Rompuy from his days in the European parliament. He likes to contrast his own “tell it like it is”, sometimes unguarded language with their opaque bureaucratic circumlocutions. It’s nonsense, and a cover for “dog whistle” extremist messaging, but people seem to be attracted to it.

His latest remark, that Sunak “doesn’t understand our culture” is only the latest disgraceful example of his technique. Almost everything he says about Britain’s Muslim community is equally pernicious and Islamophobic. He is, in truth, a dangerous fellow, no matter how personable he can be.

He is good in debate – he won the seven-way contest a few days ago – but you get the impression he’s too slippery and tiresome for our front-line politicians to take him on direct. Certainly neither Penny Mordaunt nor Angela Rayner did so, and did their best to ignore him. The leader of Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth, rather towering over Farage, called him a bigot, which just allowed Farage (for whom this cannot have been an unfamiliar jibe), to mock him: “Is that the best you can do?”

Some people, it’s plain, want to hear this stuff, and like it. Like any populist, Farage tells people precisely what they want to hear, and does so with a certain plausibility. The EU means “open borders” so getting out will reduce immigration (it didn’t, in reality, and migration is higher than ever). The housing crisis is down to the “population explosion” – ie immigration – though we’ve known homelessness, house price booms and a failure to build homes since long before recent crises.

He wants “net zero migration” but those with skills can come in. He wants to take millions out of tax but improve public services. He says we spend more on the NHS and have a worse service, even though it’s efficient, underfunded, suffers an ageing population and is getting over Covid. He seems to forget it was left in a relatively healthy condition when Labour lost power, as recently as 2010. This working-class hero wants tax relief for private school fees and private healthcare.

Farage, I think it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say, is a highly skilled conman, and he operates best when people are, so to speak, troubled, looking for answers and some hope, and thus susceptible to being conned. When both the main parties are delivering, to use that awful expression, Farage hasn’t much to go on: extremist nationalist movements tend to do badly in boom times.

When Tony Blair and New Labour proved that economic efficiency and social justice were not mutually incompatible, the likes of Ukip and the BNP were more an irrelevance than a threat, even as EU migration started to rise, and GDP with it. Two decades ago, in the European parliament, Blair famously crushed Farage and his pretensions, as few have dared to since:

“You sit there with our country’s flag – but you do not represent our country’s interests. This is the year 2005, not 1945. We are not fighting each other any more.”

When Cameron and George Osborne imposed austerity and hit poorer communities in northern towns and coastal communities hardest after 2010, they created the ideal petri dishes for Farageism, and the powerful protest vote that, essentially, was the 2014 European elections, which Ukip won, and then the 2016 referendum result. Nick Clegg, unhappily, by joining the Tory-led coalition, destroyed the ability of the Liberal Democrats to continue as a safe receptacle for protest votes. Extremism loves a vacuum.

Nor did the main opposition party rise to the challenge. When Labour under Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn seemed to patronise and ignore them, people turned elsewhere, and, eventually, for a time to Boris Johnson’s similar brand of populism and the lure of “levelling up” – the failure of which has since disillusioned them still more.

It is not something uniquely British or down to Farage’s personality. The dislocations of globalisation, despite its long-term benefits for all, disappointing economic growth and stagnant living standards have given rise to periodic populist insurgencies in most Western nations, from Donald Trump’s America to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Like Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders and the neo-Nazis of the German Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), Farage is the product as much as the progenitor of the failures of his counterparts in mainstream parties to win the arguments, and the votes.

It is not so much that Farage is uniquely gifted, but that most of his opponents, with the partial and temporary exception of Johnson, have been so weak at taking him on or stealing his appeal. By the way, in the UK context, it is no great surprise that these conditions and a deeply divisive referendum also spawned the rise of the Scottish nationalism, which propelled the SNP’s populist leader, Alex Salmond, to power. Farage was and remains poison north of the border.

All that said and done, the fact is that, even if he overtakes the Tories in vote share, Farage and Reform UK are much further away from ministerial power than any of their continental equivalents. This contains another terrible irony. Farage did very well, in all sorts of ways, from the EU gravy train he’d been denigrating for years – not least because the European parliament’s system of proportional representation gave Farage an easy way to win a platform, as well as a fat salary, exes and (continuing) pension. The Westminster system of first past the post (to which Farage was presumably devoted when Mrs Thatcher enjoyed huge majorities on a minority vote) has long excluded fascists and communists from power. It is one thing the British have done well.

The other great irony here is that Farage’s great achievement – Brexit – has damaged the economy, living standards and public services so much that it has helped create even more propitious conditions for Farageism to grow. Had it been the transformative success promised by Ukip in 2015 and 2016, and by the Brexit Party in 2019, we would today be in paradise with no need for Farage and his bogus policies.

Instead, he is offering us yet another false prospectus, once again blaming foreigners and minorities for all of Britain’s problems. He has even turned anti-science, with his well vented scepticism about climate change and sympathy for the anti-vaxxers. We would do well to remember what happened last time Farage told us he had all the answers.