How Nigel Farage became leader of the Conservative Party

It was “common sense” for Britain to stay in Europe, Margaret Thatcher declared, launching the 1975 Conservative “Yes to Europe” campaign wearing her famous “Yes to Europe” jumper.

“It seems to me,” she said, “to display an amazing lack of self-confidence in Britain … to think that, when no other nation in the Community has lost its national character, Britain in some way will.”

But the seeds of her later bitter hatred of the EU were evident even in these early days—she was, for instance, sympathetic to Enoch Powell and his anti-immigrant and anti-European tirades.

Yet obliged by the Cold War and American expectations, she formed a triumvirate with Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand. At this stage she went with the “economic right” rather than the “nationalist right”; hence the single market—ironically, the one transformational British project in the UK’s forty-five years of EU membership. The aim was to create the largest, richest, single market. It was a breathtaking ambition.

Then, in September 1988, came her Bruges speech.

The catalyst was Jacques Delors, former French socialist finance minister under Mitterrand, who in 1985 became the most radical president ever of the European Commission. Delors pioneered “social Europe,” including new employment rights, which Thatcher detested.

Thatcher was okay with the EU while she thought it was about “markets,” but when Delors came to Bournemouth in early September 1988 to address the Trades Union Congress on the “social dimension of Europe,” she was appalled.

She promptly rewrote the speech she was due to give to the College of Europe in Bruges twelve days later, inserting the attack on Brussels as a putative superstate. It was the start of the anti-EU Thatcher.

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When Thatcher was forced from power in 1990, she fell partly because of her poll tax and partly owing to her bristling opposition to Brussels.

She railed against her moderate successor, John Major, for signing the Maastricht Treaty, even though Major secured an opt-out from its key tenet—the single European currency. Her last vote in the Commons, in 1992, was as the head of a rebellion against Major calling for a referendum on Maastricht.

The passage of the Maastricht Treaty into law, after John Major’s unexpected 1992 election victory, degenerated into hand-to-hand combat between Major and Maastricht rebels—led by Bill Cash and Iain Duncan Smith, and egged on by the Iron Lady herself.

At that point, the first-past-the-post voting system, Tory patriotism, English fear of socialism and the sure support of a powerful right-wing press made the Conservatives confident that they were there to stay. And they weren’t far wrong: since 1979 the Tories have won seven elections under four leaders, against three for Labour under one.

It helped that the mass media, led by the Sun and Daily Mail, went Eurosceptic solidly and early.

Enter Nigel Farage, stage right. He grew up in awe of Thatcher and joined the Tories in 1978 after Keith Joseph, Thatcher’s radical free market mentor, spoke at his south London public school, Dulwich.

A brash public school semi-rebel, self-confessed wind-up merchant, bloody-minded and difficult, Farage became a metals trader in the City—Thatcherism became his philosophy of life. He became active in the Bruges Group in the late-1980s, and through it Ukip. He took Thatcher’s line on Major: weak and useless.

In his early Ukip years, Farage trod warily on immigration, mindful of Enoch Powell. “He clearly lost the centre ground with the violence of his language. I have been very conscious not to make the same mistake,” he said candidly.

In 1994, aged 30, he stood in the Eastleigh by-election in Hampshire. He polled just 952 votes on the same day as European elections in which Ukip won just 1 per cent.

Ukip vied for attention with the billionaire financier James Goldsmith and his Referendum Party, whose sole objective was an in/out EU referendum. Goldsmith had everything Ukip lacked: money, connections, and a recognisable leader.

In the general election a few years later, Farage notched up only 3,332 votes in Salisbury. Then he had two strokes of luck.

The first was that, two months after Blair’s landslide, Goldsmith died and his Referendum Party disintegrated. The second was Blair’s decision to change the electoral system for the 1999 Euro elections from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.

The main beneficiary was the populist right. Ukip now secured seats, status and salaries in Brussels in a way they couldn’t at Westminster.

The first beneficiary was Farage, who got elected in 1999 and has been in the European Parliament ever since.

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In 2004, he had a further stroke of luck. When Poland and six other central and east European countries joined the EU that year Tony Blair—alone of leaders of the large west European states—did not impose the permitted seven-year controls on free movement of people from the new accession states.

“The Europhiles claim that an enlarged EU will bring economic benefits to the UK,” he remarked at the time. “I rather doubt this, though it will bring a flood of people from Eastern Europe seeking benefits.”

The number of their migrants to the UK—now to rise continually every year—was a gift to Ukip, which immediately attacked both Labour and the Tories for supporting EU enlargement.

It’s often scathingly remarked that Farage never won a seat at a by-election or a general election. But missing out on a seat in Westminster—seven times in all—has given him the paradoxical advantage of making him constantly available to fight those who had one.

In 2005, David Cameron became Tory leader telling his party to stop banging on about Europe. But facing constant Ukip surges and strong Eurosceptic voices on his own side, Cameron was soon promising a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (which gave more powers to the EU) and pledging to reform or repatriate everything from the social chapter to free movement of people and the Common Fisheries Policy.

Jibes about Ukip—“a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”—were dropped. Then came Cameron’s pledge in his 2010 manifesto to cut net immigration to just “tens of thousands.” Net immigration from all sources was 250,000 by 2010.

In 2010, the lack of a Tory majority put an immediate Brexit referendum on the back burner, but it never left the stove. Brexit-lite endured—crucially in the form of a bill to require referendums on all future EU treaty changes, agreed with Cameron’s coalition partner Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats who, fearing a Ukip surge in their West Country heartlands, themselves wanted to sound tough on “Brussels.”

The continuing effects of the financial crisis, which spilled into a crisis of the Eurozone and later overlapped with the Syrian refugee crisis, became a backdrop of an EU crisis. The EU was caricatured as sclerotic, an economic corpse and, over Greece, heartless; Germany was accused of promoting EU-wide austerity policies, prolonging the European recession and imposing impossible economic terms on helpless Greece.

Cameron chose to indulge the critics and never made the counter case. Instead, he latched on to openings made available by the ongoing crisis of the eurozone to try to force concessions from EU leaders. (The only effect was to infuriate Angela Merkel, who saw this as student union politics and refused point-blank.)

Cameron’s announcement of a Brexit referendum in January 2013 was the logical conclusion of the Brexit-lite policy he had followed since 2005. But far from being appeased, Farage moved in for the kill.

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In the June 2014 euro elections, Ukip got its best-ever result: 26 per cent and twenty-four seats. The Conservatives came third, the first time ever in a national election that they had not come first or second.

Three months later, just after their party conference, two Conservative MPs defected to Ukip. Both held their seats in by-elections, provoking panic in Downing Street that more Tory MPs might defect at any moment.

Cameron tacked right, repeating his “tens of thousands” immigration pledge for the 2015 election and making a Brexit referendum a red line in any future coalition negotiations with the Lib Dems.

Yet Ukip still surged to 12.6 per cent—by far its highest poll in any general election. That was thanks, in part, to an extremely well-funded campaign supported by donors led by Arron Banks. Through the quirks of first-past-the-post, Cameron won a majority of seats on just 36.9 per cent of the vote.

Like Harold Wilson 40 years earlier, Cameron set out to secure a “new deal” with the EU. His problem was twofold. First, Britain had already secured almost all the opt-outs and concessions possible, along with greatly strengthened measures against further integration. Second, his party—and the media—had created impossible benchmarks for success that could only be achieved by leaving.

Cameron won some extra powers to limit immigration within the EU, but these fell short of the much-vaunted “emergency brake.” Another Syrian and North African refugee surge was looming, and his party was growing daily more “Faragist.” He thought time was his enemy.

On 20th February 2016, less than ten months after the general election, a Brexit referendum was called for 23rd June. From day one, Cameron was on the back foot. The argument about a reformed EU was not so much lost as never even made. The Mail ran anti-immigration stories on its front page on seventeen of the twenty-three days before the referendum.

Immigration decisively soured opinion. On the eve of the referendum, 63 per cent believed that refugees were one of the most important issues then facing the country.

The campaign to Remain was a disaster. The day after its launch Cameron lost the then most popular Tory in the country, Boris Johnson, to lead the Leave campaign alongside Farage. He took with him a quarter of Cameron’s cabinet, and spent the campaign on a bus emblazoned with “We send the EU £350m a week—let’s fund our NHS instead.”

A week later, 33,577,342 electors, the largest number in the history of the United Kingdom, voted. Shortly after dawn on 24th June, Cameron announced that he would respect “the instruction of the British people” to leave the EU.

As he resigned, Nigel Farage was having breakfast with Freddie Barclay, owner of the Ritz and the Telegraph.

On 13th July, Theresa May succeeded David Cameron as prime minister. But it was Farage who had become leader of the Conservative Party.

“Saving Britain: How We Must Change to Prosper in Europe,” by Andrew Adonis and Will Hutton, is published by Abacus. This is an edited extract