Nigel Farage may be resigning—yet again—as the leader of his party, but he is still the most successful UK politician who has never been elected to the House of Commons. He is not so much stepping down as declaring himself redundant because his job has become obsolete. Not only has he achieved his lifelong ambition of getting the UK out of the EU, but his values have also been completely absorbed by the Conservatives.
The Tory party is now the Brexit Party and the UK Independence Party rolled into one, led like them by a populist with a “posh everyman feeling” about him, in the words of one Conservative grandee. The pro-European moderates have been ousted from the House of Commons and the Tory grassroots are now dominated by Eurosceptic hardliners, which means there is not going to be a rebalancing of the party any time soon. Amber Rudd, the former home secretary—who quit the cabinet after 21 of her colleagues lost the Tory whip in 2019—is convinced that she would not now be able to get onto the Conservative candidates list, even if she wanted to do so. “It’s the case that people who have the same beliefs that I do can’t get selected to become MPs anymore,” she told me. “The Conservative Party has swallowed Ukip whole. I think Farage is a genius in many ways.”
It is extraordinary that Farage has stood for election to the House of Commons seven times and never won, although he was a member of the European Parliament for 11 years. But the truth is that Faragism is now in power. The cabinet is dominated by people chosen on the basis of their Brexit loyalties rather than their abilities. Britain, which has always prided itself on being a champion of the rules-based order, now ostentatiously threatens to break international law. The Conservatives have effectively become an English nationalist party, with potentially dire consequences for the Union.
There is an electoral imperative driving this trend. Boris Johnson owes his position in Number 10 to the working-class voters in “red wall” seats, who once voted loyally for Labour, then flirted with Farage. One former Tory strategist says Ukip and then the Brexit Party were the “gateway drug” for these voters—but now the takeover of the Conservative Party is complete.
In political terms, Farage has been like the little tug that turned the enormous Tory tanker around. David Cameron only agreed to hold an EU referendum to “see off” the Ukip threat at the 2015 election. Johnson won the Conservative leadership largely because he was more Eurosceptic than his main rival Jeremy Hunt. Then at the 2019 election he ruled out an extension to the Brexit transition period in order to secure the support of Farage in a “Leave Alliance,” under which the Brexit Party did not stand candidates in Tory-held seats.
Nicholas Soames, the former Conservative MP and Winston Churchill’s grandson, was one of those who lost the Tory whip, but he retains a sneaking admiration for Farage. “He’s had a huge influence on British politics and on the Tory party,” he says. “I don’t like Nigel Farage’s views on Europe at all, but people have to acknowledge that he did what he set out to do and he acted as a tremendous piece of grit in the national oyster.”
Farage famously quit after the 2016 referendum, saying “I want my life back,” then two years later formed the Brexit Party in protest at the way in which the government was conducting the EU negotiations. This time he claims to be serious. “There is no going back—Brexit is done,” he said at the weekend. “That won’t be reversed. I know I’ve come back once or twice when people thought I’d gone, but this is it. It’s done. It’s over.” Already, though, he has declared that he wants to “do battle” on two “very big” issues—the rise of China and what he calls the “woke agenda.”
His influence on the Conservative Party will also endure for many years to come. As David Gauke, the former Cabinet minister and another of the ousted Tory rebels, says: “The difficulty for the Conservatives is that the moment they seek to move in a more liberal direction, Nigel Farage becomes a threat once again. Even in ‘retirement,’ Farage will influence the Conservatives’ political strategy.”
