There is a good chance that Nigel Farage will be leader of the wreck of the Tory party by the end of the year. Formal leader, that is, for he has been the party’s spiritual leader since the Brexit referendum of June 2016, which is why it has become a wreck.
Farage’s destruction of the old Conservative party will be a wonder to historians.
It wasn’t Farage’s work alone. Thatcher, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak were also major contributors to the astonishing transition of the Tories from right-of-centre party of sober government to hard-right party of wild populism. But the issue that drove that transformation, over the course of 25 years from the early 1990s, was populist antipathy to the European Union as a supposedly alien federalist project putting Britain at the mercy of foreigners and migrants. And Farage was the campaigner above all responsible for making Brexit a populist cause which ultimately won, in the 2016 referendum, and then entirely took over Britain’s dominant Conservative party, the party which had taken Britain into the EU in 1973.
The fundamental problem with Brexit is that it spectacularly doesn’t work once implemented. It is decimating our trade and blighting the life chances of the younger generation in particular. It isn’t even reducing immigration, as the flow of economic migrants from beyond the EU rises to record levels. So the precarious coalition of “red wall” in the north and “blue wall” in the south, which gave Johnson a majority to “get Brexit done” in 2019 because the far-left Corbyn was the Labour alternative and Brexit still hadn’t happened, has now ruptured irretrievably.
Keir Starmer and Labour are the main beneficiaries. But Farage may be able to use his media profile and the extremely poor, marginalised and alienated constituency of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex to propel himself into the Commons through his latest Reform UK party. He doesn’t now talk about Brexit, of course. His populist issue is now immigration alone, and after the election that may propel him to the Tory leadership as the darling of Tory grassroot members.
He would have to win in Clacton and switch parties after the election for this to happen, and neither is straightforward. But far stranger things have happened in the earlier phases of Farage’s career, and the Tory party is likely to become a small and shattered entity ripe for takeover.
Could a virulently anti-immigrant Faragist Tory party get anywhere in a 2029 election? It all depends on Labour’s success or failure in office, and whether Farage could find a way to appeal to affluent southern voters who are educated, non-populist and are likely, where they don’t support Labour, to be flocking to the Lib Dems in this election and thereafter, in revolt against a Tory party which has deserted them.
I can’t see how this is possible. The best Farage could do as Tory leader in a 2029 election, it seems to me, is to replicate a weaker version of the “red wall” of disgruntled and poorer voters in the Midlands and the north of England, while the Lib Dems—also in opposition—surge in the south. But even that depends on Starmer’s Labour government becoming very unpopular very quickly, and I suspect that memories of the 14 years of Tory catastrophe won’t dim so quickly, however disappointing a Labour government is.
Yet the fact that we can speculate like this just demonstrates the extent of the current Tory implosion and the extraordinary sway of Farage over the remnants of the Tory party after nearly a decade of Brexit. His damage to the body politic is not finished yet.
