If Nigel Farage is unable to hold together a gang of five like-minded pub bores, it is quite a stretch to imagine he could successfully lead a cosmopolitan country of 70 million demanding and often quite cantankerous people. There was a time, for example, when I interviewed him for GQ magazine 11 years ago – which was when he first publicly expressed his admiration for Vladimir Putin by the way – when he happily admitted that his role in politics was to be an agitator, and he found the idea of prime minister Farage as laughable as I did.
But a number of factors have shifted his mindset towards believing that the laughable might become a serious possibility so that, the last time I saw him, in the BBC Question Time Green Room, he had moved from “no way” back in 2014 to “who knows?” today.
First, two years after our GQ chat, he played a key role in getting the UK out of the EU, which though a huge loss to the country, established his credentials as a winner. Then there was his election to parliament last year, which, after a string of losses, did the same.
More significant was the election of ludicrous figures to positions of actual power, most dramatically his friend Donald Trump in the United States; the growth of right wing populist parties across Europe, with some of them, including in traditionally sane and sensible countries like The Netherlands and Sweden, making it to government; a widespread belief that mainstream parties anywhere near the centre ground are the old and tired establishment, in an era when major disruption is called for; a changed media eco-system, which Farage studies closely and manipulates well; a steady rise in the polls, so that in some it is currently hard to separate Labour, the Tories and Reform.
You know all this, and so does Farage, and he rides these waves of change skilfully, armed with his loving embrace of the 3Ps I bang on about all the time… populism, polarisation and post-truth. Having seriously wealthy backers hasn’t harmed him either.
The Rupert Lowe meltdown, however, is more than just a personality spat between two large egos, one who has run a succession of parties like a personal fiefdom, the other who did much the same with a football club. The reason it poses a real problem for Farage is this: the more that he and his party project themselves as future prime minister and future government, the greater the scrutiny that will fall upon him (up until now he has had extensive coverage, which is not the same thing as scrutiny); added to which Lowe’s central complaints – Farage’s Messiah complex and a lack of actual policy positions – are not without justification, and his very public airing of those complaints will increase the scrutiny on these specific Farage weaknesses.
There was a very funny diatribe about Farage on a Radio 4 comedy programme last week – I hope the comedian concerned will forgive me for not remembering his name, but I was driving and didn’t make a note. He said of Farage that he was “all diagnosis, no prescription;” that if he was a doctor, he would happily tell you that you had a succession of life-threatening illnesses, but when asked what he intended to do about them, would simply exclaim: “The whole thing is a FARCE,” blame sundry causes for your sudden collapse into multiple sickness, and do absolutely nothing to cure them.
Lowe is right that Farage wants to avoid actual policies, because for the Reform leader, politics is all about positioning, process, talking points, and noise. We know he is right wing, because that is what he wants us to know about him, because he hopes to perform a reverse takeover of the Tories (he told me that in the Green Room, too).
But we also know that he doesn’t want to be seen as an out and out extremist, which is why the so-called Tommy Robinson is PNG in Farage-land. And yes, it is quite something that there are MPs like Lowe, who are even further to the right than Farage on issues like immigration.
Farage is finding out the hard way that, outside the more binary nature of two-party America, any party that wants actual power has to build an enduring alliance between real true believers and people who just fancy lodging a protest vote with you. On his actual views and ideology, Farage is closer to Lowe than his former friend would have us believe.
But Farage is politically savvy enough to realise that if we all knew that, and saw it as clearly as Lowe does, his chances of getting to Downing Street would be back in the bad joke zone.
When Rupert Lowe was chairman of Southampton Football Club, he invited me for lunch in the boardroom ahead of games against Burnley. Following one of these encounters, I recorded in my diary that I had rarely met anyone with views so far to the right, and so I was quite relieved when kick-off neared and I was able to head out to the away end.
But even then he wasn’t on the “mass deportation” end of the hard right spectrum, showing that however far to the right someone leans, they can always find a way for their dial to turn even further.
Sticking with the Gang of Five, now Gang of Four, I mentioned last week that I was due to be the comedian Matt Forde’s victim in his live show at the Duchess Theatre. Matt is a left-leaning, politically obsessed comedian and impersonator, still trying to work out how to “do” the key figures in the Labour government, who have gone from being well known in Westminster to well known in the whole country.
His two best impersonations, however, are not Labour. His Trump, both the voice and the body language, is excellent. But best of all is his Lee Anderson, the Gang of Four’s chief whip who, channelled by Forde, asked me out for a fight. I was tempted, but Forde is still recovering from a very serious cancer, so I just let him have his fun at my expense.
Following my piece on China last week, former British Council chair Neil Kinnock sent me some stark facts about the extent to which the Chinese are investing in soft power at a time when we are at risk of moving in the opposite direction, while Trump’s US is taking two shotguns and firing one through the foot marked “soft” and the other through the foot marked “power”.
For the UK, this pattern goes for broadcasting, on which China and Russia spend billions while we starve the BBC World Service of funds, as well as bodies like the one Neil used to chair, the British Council, currently surviving thanks to a Treasury loan, complete with interest.
During the Tory years, the council became increasingly dependent on Overseas Development Agency funding, so that £130m out of the council’s Grant-in-aid of £160m is ODA money. That means the Labour government’s cuts to aid, to fund the necessary increase in defence spending, will eat further into one of the most important vehicles of our soft power, just as a new Soft Power Council is being established.
PS: The British Council was established in the 1930s specifically to help combat fascist and communist authoritarianism. Communism may feel less of a threat right now… fascist authoritarianism not so much.
