Nigel Farage, the unpopulist

On LBC on Monday, Farage was left trying to blame Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for last week’s Oval Office altercation – a difficult task given it all unfolded on television and voters have eyes – as part of his bid to keep in with MAGAworld. 

He hemmed and hawed on Ukraine, uncertain how much to condemn or defend an invaded country, and with seemingly nothing to say on Putin and Russia. At a time when almost every other political party in the country is united – and on the same side as overwhelming public opinion, Nigel Farage is left caught out. The man who intends to be the voice of the British people is stuck in the new and unwelcome role of the unpopulist.

It is a particularly miserable role for someone like Nigel Farage, who has a lifelong history of leading minor, populist parties. With little to no prospect of forming the next government – and so no chance of being held to your promises – politicians like Farage are usually free to say what sounds good to the voters, even if they know it wouldn’t work.

A populist can promise to lower taxes and increase spending on popular services (like police and nurses) by cutting the salaries of public sector fat cats and slashing red tape. They know the sums won’t add up, but they also know no-one will check. Life is thus easy for the political opportunists who choose populism – find out what the public like, offer it, and don’t worry about whether or not it’ll actually help.

How, then, has someone like Farage – who plays politics on easy mode thanks to this trick – ended up stuck defending such unpopular and unconscionable positions on Trump, Russia and Ukraine? The short answer is that when compared to voters of the UK’s other major parties, Reform voters are, not to put too fine a point on it, quite weird.

Recent polling from YouGov helps to illustrate how Reform voters aren’t like those of other UK parties. When asked who is more to blame for the Oval Office bust-up, for example, fewer than 3% of Labour, Lib Dem or Tory voters say Zelensky – but 26% of Reform voters say it’s him. 

Around three-quarters of Labour, Lib Dem and Tory voters say Trump is handling Russia/Ukraine “very badly” – compared with fewer than half of Reform voters. Reform voters are the most enthusiastic supporters of Keir Starmer’s plan to cut aid to fund more military spending – but also by far the most likely to say the UK should not send troops to Ukraine, suggesting they want the UK to have a large army that doesn’t do anything.

In an irony that Labour veterans of 2016-2020 might appreciate, Nigel Farage has ended up trying to manage a party whose voters are divided on an issue that’s dominating the headlines – just when the other parties are united. 

Labour struggled for years during Brexit because its voters split relatively evenly between those who supported Remain and those who backed Leave. By 2019 or so, Lib Dem voters were overwhelmingly Remain and Tory voters were overwhelmingly Leave – making the politics easy for them – while Labour had to try to manage two implacably opposed factions.

Farage would be in a difficult enough place managing the split in his existing voter base, but there is another factor at play, too. Farage and those around him have played up their US connections. 

Farage, his on-again-off-again pal Arron Banks, and others in their orbit have relentlessly briefed stories in the British and international media based on their ties to Trumpworld. Several of the stories planting the idea that Trump was furious over Chagos and would reject the deal came from this circle, as did those saying the president would reject Peter Mandelson as ambassador.

Notably, neither of those stories was anywhere near being correct. The reality is that Nigel Farage’s connections to Donald Trump are far more tenuous than he makes out. There is very little to suggest he has spent any more time with the president than on the few occasions where he’s managed to grab a photo. 

A recent video showed Trump barely recognised him. It seems clear that Piers Morgan speaks to Trump far more often than Farage does.

The dangers of those fragile ties – and their ability to lead to public humiliation – were shown up in Farage’s recent spat with Elon Musk over his support for Tommy Robinson. Without any actual deep relationship, Farage is as vulnerable to the mercurial men running America as everyone else – but he’s staked much of his sales pitch and credibility on these largely imaginary relationships.

Nigel Farage is having to face publicly a flaw that has quietly eaten away at every political project he has ever led. Many of his own views are, in the view of the British public, weird and unpopular. 

He would like to replace the NHS. He wants sweeping tax cuts that the public don’t support. He has a loyal following of fringe political obsessives who follow him from party to party and form the core of his support.

Around that small core, he attracts people disillusioned by the major parties on the big issues of the day – who are usually aware of the niche positions held by some of their new bedfellows, let alone the party’s leader. 

A swirling, ongoing news story about Trump and Ukraine unites most of Britain, and showcases the strengths of an unflashy politician like Keir Starmer. It does the opposite for a man like Nigel Farage – bringing to the fore his lack of substance, seriousness and his total absence of a plan. 

His US alliances are in doubt, his coalition risks fracturing, and he’s on the wrong side of public opinion – which is presumably what led him to call JD Vance’s remarks about European troops “wrong, wrong, wrong”.

After all, what is left of a populist without the people?