Nigel Farage has just made his first huge mistake

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas past, with a retro Brexit row in prospect. Like Dickensian ghosts, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker have risen from their political graves and are wailing about what Keir Starmer’s “surrender squad” of 100 civil servants working on negotiating a reset of EU relations might mean for their precious project.

Yet this discredited trio, all dumped by party or public, are no longer the threat they once were and opinion polls indicate there is likely to be little outrage at Starmer’s attempt to put lipstick on a pig. The Brexiteer to watch and worry about is Nigel Farage – and he has just made a big mistake.

Despite a general election breakthrough in 2024, Reform’s leader and his new treasurer Nick Candy know the party is still some way short of justifying the subsequent hype, including Farage’s assertions that it will win “hundreds” of seats in 2029. There have been 173 council by-elections since July 4, and Reform has won only six of them. According to the seat predictor model of Oxford professor Ben Wansell, its current polling average of around 20% would result in a total of only 13 seats.

No wonder then that Farage – who needs no excuse to get away from the tiresome business of his day job in Westminster and Clacton – has been in Mar-a-Lago, prostrating himself in front of Elon Musk. The world’s wealthiest individual is said to be in “open negotiations” to give Reform a substantial sum of money, filtered through the UK arms of X or Tesla in order to sneak around rules limiting donations from foreign nationals. Labour may seek to close this loophole, increasing the likelihood of Musk doing something soon.

Even if Musk were to stump up the $100m (£78m) that has been widely discussed, this would count as Farage’s first serious political mistake. No doubt he will enjoy spending Musk’s cash, but he is unlikely to relish questions about why he is suddenly so keen on allowing unelected foreigners to buy political influence in Britain. It is the sort of thing he once railed against, and will prove an unwelcome distraction from what Farage should be doing – moving Reform away from moaning about small boats and copying the Trump playbook with unfunded but tempting promises to somehow steer his country out of the cost of living crisis.

Then there is the matter of Musk himself. Britons, anecdotally less impressed than their transatlantic cousins by gaudy wealth, have a largely negative view of a conspiracy theorist who stoked the flames of the summer’s riots in the UK and has turned Twitter into a troll-ridden cesspit inhabited by racists and bots. Musk’s net favourability rating in Britain, according to YouGov, is -46%. That is even worse than Farage’s, which is rising but still badly underwater at -31%. Musk’s money could give Farage lift-off, but ironically the man himself could drag Reform down.

There is no reason to suspect that Musk’s role in the new Donald Trump administration will change this. He has been given a role in cost-cutting, which he is likely to take on just as recklessly as he did the leadership of Twitter. The result, if it gets past Trump and Congress, will be an unpopular massacre of US civil service jobs, leaving tens of thousands unemployed and departments unable to function.

If Trump wobbles, will he dump Musk, who has done his bit already by getting him re-elected and keeping him out of jail? As Farage admitted to our own Alastair Campbell recently, “there can only be one king”. Who does he back in the event of a split that seems almost guaranteed to happen at some point in the next four years?

The upside of Musk’s cash is obvious to a start-up party with limited funds and no ground game to speak of. But its dangers are evident too, especially when they are likely to dominate the questioning of a notoriously tetchy man who hates any sort of scrutiny and was recently seen losing his rag over why he has failed to ditch Reform MP James McMurdock, once jailed for repeatedly kicking his former partner outside a nightclub. Nigel Farage is about to learn that money can’t buy you everything – even at Christmas.