Stand down, worried Remainers: Farage has nothing to gain from a deal with Johnson

A grand alliance between Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage is the fever nightmare of Remainers. Uniting the Leave vote at a Brexit election while the Remain vote is split could sweep the Conservatives to their first comfortable majority in more than thirty years, giving Johnson the kind of power to reshape Britain that no Tory since Thatcher has enjoyed.

But while such a deal offers the prospect of Johnson commandeering Theresa May's rusting tanks and ploughing them through Labour's heartlands, few ask what the Brexit Party would gain from it. It is just assumed that the Tories would win in the south and the Midlands, while Farage would mop up Labour's post-industrial seats in the north.

The trouble is, the numbers don't support this. Evidence from the European elections suggests that Farage's greatest electoral clout is in the middle-class south—the beetroot-faced Beryls and Geralds of the Tory shires, hyperventilating at any wisps of progress that may penetrate their £300,000 houses. These seats are, for the most part, solidly Conservative. The Brexit Party would have to stand aside here in any deal with the Tories.

But many of Labour's heartland seats are also Tory targets. They were 'Redkip' territory once—UK Independence Party targets from the mid-2010s, when the party almost took Heywood and Middleton in a by-election. But Ukip's implosion ceded this turf to the Tories in 2017, and as a result, the Brexit Party finds itself on the margins.

Many seats where the Tories and Ukip were virtually level pegging in 2015 are now prime Tory targets. In Dudley North, for example, Ukip's vote share collapsed from 24 percent in 2015 to 5.5 percent in 2017, while the Tories gobbled up its support to slash Labour's majority from nearly 4,200 to just 22 votes. The Brexit Party can stop the Tories from winning this seat next time, but there's no way it would be allowed to challenge for it under any Johnson-Farage deal.

The same is true of other former Ukip targets such as Great Grimsby and Rother Valley—both now as firmly in Dominic Cummings' sights as they were in the 2016 referendum.

Instead, the Brexit Party would be left to chance their arm on constituencies where the Tories have made less headway—seats like Hull East, listed by the BBC as the most pro-Brexit Labour-held seat in the country. The Labour majority here is more than 28 percent: safe seat territory. The same pattern can be found in numerous seats where Ukip finished second in 2015 like Ed Miliband's seat of Doncaster North, Barnsley East, and Wentworth and Dearne. All three seats voted more than 70 percent to Leave in 2016; all three delivered Labour majorities above 30 percent the following year.

What can Farage gain from a deal that leaves him to fight for such crumbs, especially without established local party machines? Perhaps Labour will come out as unabashedly pro-Remain during conference season; perhaps this will alienate their Leave voters; perhaps those Leave voters will flood to Farage the way Labour's pro-independence voters surged to the SNP in 2015.

Perhaps Farage could gain a handful of seats this way—ten or more on a good night. But it's a long shot for little gain in return for an alliance with the Tories.

Johnson wavered between two Brexit costumes as he tried to calculate which would make him king; for Farage, however, there has only ever been one suit that fits. A teenage admirer of Enoch Powell, he left the Conservatives in his late 20s in protest at the signing of the Maastricht Treaty and became a founding member of Ukip, at that time a tiny and irrelevant grouplet.

Someone who gives their political life to fringe parties cannot easily be accused of seeking the quick way to the top. Whereas Johnson will say and do anything for power, Farage will say and do anything for the cause. If Farage is not chasing parliamentary seats—having failed so often to land one himself—then a deal with Johnson could help him secure his political ends regardless.

But given that Johnson is committed to the hardest Brexit imaginable, the Tories have little to offer Farage in exchange for his support. Without the parliamentary votes that Brexit Party MPs would bring, Farage cannot hold Johnson to his side of any bargain once an election has been and gone, especially if the Tories secure a decent majority.

If an election takes place after a No Deal Brexit, then Farage would have ostensibly got what he wanted. He would either accept the job was done and swan off to join the Fox TV circuit, or he would have to find some new demand to make of the Tories in return for an electoral alliance, maybe a promise not to backslide their way back to the Withdrawal Agreement. But how much Leave voters would care by that stage is debatable—they may simply surge back to the Tories, rendering any possible alliance with Farage irrelevant.

Farage's role in securing and winning the Brexit referendum will define him in the annals, but his role in an earlier referendum is less well-known—his entreaties to electoral reformers to let him join the Yes campaign in the AV referendum of 2011. He knew then that proportional representation was key to Ukip ever securing a meaningful parliamentary bloc.

What was true then could be true now. If all Farage wants is a No Deal Brexit, he may get that without lifting a finger. If what he wants is a seat at the table, he may never get that at all.