Free-range Farage begins his demolition of the Tory party
It begins. The Immigration Election – the real election – was launched by Nigel Farage, at Dover, on Tuesday and it confirmed the worst fears of the more realistic Conservative commentators. Farage looked more like a prime minister than Rishi Sunak and more like a leader of the opposition than Keir Starmer. His communication skills are formidable.
Farage admits quite straightforwardly that, on the assumption of an October/November election, he was preparing to launch his parliamentary candidature this week, with the prospect of six months in which to assemble a team, nurse his constituency, acquire at least minimal local data and raise funds. He also concedes that Rishi Sunak caught him unawares and, by springing a surprise election, made it impossible for him to prepare adequately to fight a seat.
All of this is demonstrably true. Reform UK’s greatest disadvantage is that it lacks a network of constituency bases across the country and, in an age of electoral electronic warfare, has little or no data – beyond the Brexit party’s minimalist records – as to where its supporters are located. Even Nigel Farage would have been courting defeat if he had embarked on a six-week campaign in a constituency where he had no campaign organisation.
However, while Farage’s explanation for his abstention from the parliamentary fight is true, it is not the whole truth. His disarmingly frank admission that Sunak had caught him on the hop concealed the guile of the practised politician, of which there are few more adept in this country than Nigel Farage. Yes, he was preparing to stand as a candidate, because that was what was expected of him, but he was doing so very reluctantly, for two reasons.
The first was that the obvious disadvantages under which he would have laboured, even during a six-month campaign, would very possibly have ended in his eighth election defeat, with its consequent demoralising effect on his party. The other reason for his reluctance was the fact that being a parliamentary candidate would largely have confined him to his chosen constituency, with little opportunity to campaign on the wider stage, the role in which he could most effectively spread his message, raise his already high profile and increase the Reform vote.
Rishi Sunak obligingly freed him from that incubus. While those in CCHQ and Number 10 were exchanging high-fives over Rishi having shot Nigel’s fox, it does not seem to have occurred to any of them that Sunak’s version of Baldrick’s cunning plan had rendered Farage ten times more dangerous, while leaving the startled Conservative party with 158 seats to fill with candidates by 4pm on 7 June – significantly more than Reform still had to select.
But that did not daunt the ideologues in CCHQ; in fact they loved it, because the different rules obtaining at an election have given them the opportunity to parachute into constituencies a large infusion of Cameroon social democrat candidates. These, being from the bottom of the barrel, will be even worse than the duff MPs from previous gerrymandered intakes who have brought a Conservative party filleted of any traces of Toryism to the verge of wipe-out. That will ensure the rump of survivors post-election will be of the deadbeat One Nation stamp that will surrender the right-of-centre ground to Reform UK, as Britain’s new conservative party.
The earliest collaborators in Nigel Farage’s six-year plan are Rishi Sunak’s advisers, in Number 10 and CCHQ. Farage has been hinting at and talking about this long-term strategy for some time, but only in the past week has he publicly defined it. The calculation is that, in the current election, Reform will gain millions of votes; if, by good fortune, it also wins several parliamentary seats, that will be icing on the cake, but it is not essential to the plan.
Farage has correctly diagnosed the situation: the public viscerally loathes the Tories and deeply distrusts Labour, but it will hold its nose and vote Labour, for the sole purpose of euthanising the Conservative party. That is Reform’s objective at this election: any ex-Labour votes will be gratefully received, but the goal is to remove the Tory party permanently from contention. More and more psephological studies are showing the startling extent to which that is a practical proposition.
For years now, the extent of voters’ disillusionment with and alienation from politicians of all stripes, due to their relentless lying, has been increasing. In this election, uniquely, the electorate is likely to imitate the tactics of the black widow spider: after Labour has served its purpose by driving the Tories to extinction, the electorate will then devour Labour. There will be no honeymoon period for Starmer: the public is visibly preparing to hate Labour, in place of the Tories, from 5 July onwards.
Nigel Farage has divined that and, knowing the weakness of the Labour team, coupled with that party’s talent for antagonising the public, is preparing to position himself and Reform, from 2025 to 2029, as the real opposition to Labour. That is why he is currently repeating the mantra that, after the election, “the Conservatives will be in opposition, but they will not be the opposition”.
How could the Tories be the opposition to Labour when you could not put a cigarette paper (still available, since Sunak’s precipitate election declaration extinguished his “legacy” statist, authoritarian ban on smoking) between Conservative and Labour? There is every indication that the incoming Labour government will be fraught, accident-prone and disastrous.
If Farage can draw the voters alienated by its failure and, almost certainly, dictatorial tendencies under the Reform umbrella, then that party, despite the trip-wires of the first-past-the-post electoral system, could perform at a 2029 general election beyond the wildest imaginings of commentators today. It is only a possibility, but the fact it is possible is an indication of the tectonic shift in British politics, almost certainly mirrored by a similar movement across Europe.
Meanwhile, Farage is playing games, telling the Sun’s Harry Cole he has done big favours for the Tories in the past (obviously referring to standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory seats in 2019) and saying to the Conservatives: “Give me something back. We can have a conversation”. He made it clear he was not suggesting any personal reward, such as a peerage. Realistically, the only offer the Tories could make that would create a ceasefire between them and Reform would be a commitment to proportional representation.
But Farage knows Rishi Sunak could not concede that; and Richard Tice is adamant Reform will not stand aside again. So, what is Farage about? Fairly obviously, he is casting a fly over the Tory party, in the hope that a few desperate trout will rise to it, starting an internal squabble within Conservative ranks. It is pure mischief-making and we can expect to see more of that before 4 July.
History is leaving the globalist technocrats, the decline managers, the open-borders fantasists, the green obsessives and the WEF acolytes behind: national sovereignty is the returning reality. That requires national leadership. Watching Nigel Farage at Dover, the direct addressing of topics other politicians obscure, the straight answers to journalists’ questions – he made a complete fool of the Guardian correspondent – and, above all, the forensically articulated statistics on immigration, terrifying and existential in their significance for this country, the contrast with his opponents was extreme.
Like Farage, most of us cannot absorb a Sunak or Starmer speech or remember afterwards anything they have said. Starmer resembles the chap in the pub, wittering on about something, whom one greets genially before quickly moving on. Sunak is pitiful and looking more so with every day that passes. Yet that insignificant Gawd-’elp-us brought 685,000 net immigrants into Britain last year (1.2 million gross), an influx he could have prevented with a stroke of the pen, and must now be held to account for it.
The previous year, the net figure was 765,000, under the government of a party that, years ago, promised to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”. If the Tories had any absurd hope of tiptoeing through a six-week election campaign without being confronted with that betrayal, they should have confined Nigel Farage to a constituency, instead of releasing him like a bird of prey to harry them mercilessly with the record of their own dishonesty and indifference to the national interest.
Farage has just introduced a new argument into the election campaign and it is this: the election is over, the Conservatives have lost, so, instead of vainly trying to prop them up as a barrier to Labour, why not recognise that fact and simply vote for what you believe? For many voters, after six weeks of a campaign in which the Conservatives are almost certain to remain visibly doomed, that could become a very potent argument by polling day, toxic to Tory hopes.
The Conservative party has, as used to be said of effete Chinese imperial dynasties, exhausted the mandate of heaven. In terms of another oriental culture, its death is due to seppuku, not to enemy action. Labour has not laid a glove on the Tories: they have destroyed themselves. It will be interesting to see if Farage and Reform can rise to the occasion and displace them as the national expression of conservative opinion. Six years is a very long time in politics.
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