The most intriguing storyline of the upcoming UK election has to do with Nigel Farage. He has unretired onto the political scene, and his party has almost caught up with the ruling Tories in popularity. Who is this guy and what propelled him into the ranks of the most influential Brits?
Nigel Paul Farage is a British twist on the likes of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders with their trademark showmanship. In his showmanship skills Farage is second only to Trump who previously hosted a reality TV show, promoted beauty pageants, featured in WWE and even pitched his own cameo to film directors, which eventually earned him a star on the Hollywood Walk.
Nigel Farage’s track record may be a smidgen less impressive. He served as a broadcaster on GB News and made appearances in other networks’ and YouTube channels’ shows, including as a debating side. Last year he starred in I’m a Celebrity survival reality show. Although he was not victorious, the former British colonisers suffering in the tropical latitudes is always a thrilling sight to behold.
While Farage, a one-time political backmarker, blossomed into one of the most prominent fixtures on the British political scene, Europeans were not particularly interested in whatever it was he had to say or do, for that matter. He had never been fixated on global geopolitics and polarising international conflicts, and, truth be told, most countries have their own version of a Farage-esque figure.
His thespian body language, his on-camera antics and a vast collection of flamboyantly patterned and styled ties have always been the hallmarks of someone who was deemed unfit for high-profile government sinecures. But by the looks of it, he was quite happy with everybody else underestimating his capabilities. This may have even been part of his winning strategy all along.
In 1992, Farage, a rank-and-file member of the ruling Tory party at the time, made a very vocal exit as he protested his home country’s ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and joined a tiny political force that would go one to become UKIP. For years it was a patently unpopular – and, some would say, fringe – party. That is, until Nigel, the then-party leader, came up with a tactic to destroy the enemy from within and helped the Eurosceptics land a bunch of seats in the European Parliament.
In 1999, he was elected to the European Parliament for the first time. While holding the job, he was constantly railing against his employer, insisting that it was no good place for the Brits to hang around. After years of chipping away at his opponents, in 2014, the Farage-led party won the British national election to the European Parliament, without a having a single parliamentary representative back at home.
This had to do with the difference in the electoral systems. In the EU, the elections are contested by national parties as a single ticket, while the elections to the House of Commons are constituency-based. Across all of the constituencies, traditional parties, both right-wing and left-leaning, would be joining forces to denounce Team Farage as nationalists, xenophobes, populists and far-right firebrands, the same list of epithets that has been typically used to berate Trump, Le Pen, etc.
To be fair, Farage was indeed associated with individuals that looked the part of ultra-nationalists. That was part of the reason their upset 2014 European election win sent shockwaves through the UK. To sort out the identity crisis, haggle with the Brussels-based officials and come across as a rock-ribbed democrat, PM David Cameron decided to hold what would become known as the Brexit referendum over Farage’s call as he was cocksure the UK would stay in the EU. But the British people begged to differ.
Some four years later, on the night of 1 February 2020, the UK officially quit the EU. In actuality, though, the country had not been gearing up for that plot twist and the whole processes had been botched by the Tory majority, which led to huge domestic economic woes exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the outbreak of the second Cold War. Even though the word ‘victory’ was barely applicable, for Nigel Farage, victory it was as he had accomplished the incredible by successfully pushing his agenda without wielding as much as a shred of official power.
That had been preceded by the 2019 UK general election dominated by the Tories and their frontrunner Boris Johnson, a torchbearer of the unapologetic Brexit strategy. But they partly owed that triumph to Nigel Farage who at that point led a new political party with an imperative name, Reform UK.
The party decided against running in that election to avoid eating away at the Johnson-led Conservatives and let them rack up enough votes to enforce Brexit. In other words, Farage sacrificed his own political ambitions for the ultimate Brexit cause, after which he considered the job done and purportedly retired from politics.
However, he is unretiring now, except this time he is not out to lend a hand to the crumbling Tories. In fact, the opposite is true. Farage seeks to lay the party of Sir Winston Churchill and Baroness Margaret Thatcher to waste.
PM Rishi Sunak scheduled a snap election for July 2024. Come wintertime, he reasoned, things will go from bad to worse for us Tories. The current government is now being universally loathed and blamed for all the failures, both real and alleged, of the past 14 years. Although the Tories stand no chance of winning the election, they are hoping to salvage as many seats as they can, whereas Sunak is likely to move on to a lucrative job with a prosperous international corporation.
Farage, in turn, is on a mission to not let them off the hook. He could not care less about Rishi Sunak’s future, but according to Farage, the Conservative Party should tank in the polls as a bunch of traitors who plunged the country into the costly refugee crisis.
By staging his political comeback and returning to his Reform UK leadership role, Farage is gung-ho about giving the Tories a run for their money in every substantially large constituency. This scrap will most certainly result in a landslide Labour win that is going to see them win a record-high majority of parliamentary seats. Farage realises it full well, but his real goal is the 2029 election. In the meantime, he will be doing his utmost to replace the storied Tories with Reform UK as Britain’s leading right-wing party the way Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has taken over the Gaullists in the French parliament.
After Farage announced his run, Reform UK’s ratings have been catching up with those of the Conservative Party, with just two points down on them. It means they may indeed have a shot at destroying the UK’s centuries-old political behemoth. Much will depend on the success of Farage’s campaign, but campaigning has always been his wheelhouse. The question is: How many Tories will he be able to unseat and replace with his own Reform UK lot?
Nigel Farage’s longer-term dream still seems unrealistic. The Conservative Party is almost 200 years old. Granted, its current leadership has failed almost anything one could think of, but it is still backed by the royalty, the old money, the eminent British elite and the gritty stakeholders seeking to exert control over half the globe from Canada to Hong Kong. The latter are a very strong and exceptionally durable enemy to confront.
On the other hand, Nigel Farage was twice victorious in his seemingly insane endeavours and has proved himself as an efficient spin doctor. Not only did he destroy his own Carthage by pulling the UK out of the EU, but he actually made the Tories, who had thitherto never entertained the idea of leaving, pay the highest of prices for his dream coming true. Now he is looking to consign it to the dustbin of history and make the old money and the powerful elites repivot in his favour.