Say what you like about the Brexit Party, but it certainly knows how to organise a rally. I covered my second, held in Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre, last Friday. Technically it wasn’t actually a rally. It was part of the Brexit Party’s “conference tour”, a series of ten events held across England and Wales in lieu of the traditional mass gathering. A conventional party conference would have posed a challenge to the Brexit Party, which still doesn’t have a formal membership scheme. This, allegedly, is to avoid infiltration by the far-right. But it does also make it very difficult for Nigel Farage’s leadership, or any of his policy decisions, to be challenged by the grassroots.
The rally, because that’s what it obviously was, had a very American flavour.