Kingmaker or King? Farage’s Next Move

2,858 words

Here was a population not convinced that old England was as good as possible.
George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical

 In October, 2009, I was ranked No. 41 in a list of the 100 most powerful right-wingers in Britain. I am not sure about the “right winger” bit, preferring to consider myself a Whig.
Nigel Farage, Flying Free

The bookmakers’ odds against Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister of the UK in 2029 have shortened dramatically, and these syndicated pollsters are increasingly more accurate than their supposedly professional competition. Of course, the number of people placing a bet on an election five years away is going to be small and easily rigged, but we are in a time of political semiotics, signals and messages of which this is one.

It’s interesting that Farage should describe himself as a Whig, a political party which was a transatlantic phenomenon. This reflects Farage’s current dual interest both in his own country and that in which a good friend of his has just been elected the leader of the free world, if the phrase still has meaning. I suggested some time ago that Farage should become the UK’s de facto man in Washington, and this move would be a stroke of political brilliance on the part of both men. Trump gets to snub Starmer and his uppity black sidekick, Foreign Secretary David “Marie Antoinette won a Nobel Physics prize in 1903” Lammy, and Farage gets to thumb his nose at Starmer across the floor of the House of Commons because he has the ear of the President and the President has the keys to the trade-deal drawer.

Farage himself is still far from being kingmaker, let alone king, in his own country, but time is on his side and can have a lot of fun at court until any electoral reckoning. For now, he can play a waiting game. As Donald Trump discovered recently, when your enemy is making mistakes, then let them get on with it, and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government are certainly making mistakes. The question there is, are they the political mistakes they are deemed to be, or do they represent a strange failure, not of democracy, but of technocracy? And this prompts a further consideration; Were Farage to gain power, to what extent would he, could he, stay outside the political machine he has so criticized? He doesn’t know where he is going, not yet, only where he has been.

Born in Kent in 1964, Farage attended Dulwich College in south London, whose former students include P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. Farage may need the former’s sense of humor and the latter’s detective skills as political time progresses. I’ve played rugby many times at Dulwich, a building that stays in the memory, for Sir Keir Starmer’s old school. Farage elected not to go to university, taking the route favored by go-getting Canadian businessman Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, in which he states that going to university “just means you start three years behind the other guy.” And the universities to which Rex would have been referring were not then the Marxist finishing-schools they are now. Instead, Farage made a name for himself in the financial bear pit of the London Stock Exchange. He showed an early flare for keeping an eye on culture when he slyly noted that, “1980s pop stars dressed like brokers”. Heaven 17, among others, I think Nigel was looking at you.

Farage’s political career was effectively signed into being when John Major appended his Prime Ministerial signature to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, opening the way for full British entry into the European Union. Major was very much an interim PM, in place purely as an antidote to Margaret Thatcher, whose brand had become too toxic for that of the Tories. In the 1980s, the British deep state had yet to emerge from the mist as it would after Brexit a quarter of a century later, but Thatcher’s staunch opposition to the EU was almost certainly a key factor in her defenestration. Major’s timid acquiescence to the new European gauleiters spurred Farage into action, and by 1999 he had been elected into the European Parliament. It was the beginning of a tempestuous career in which he attacked leading members of the EU Commission by name and in person. He was, as the English used to say, a very rude man. But he was also the first politician to go into the belly of the Brussels beast and report back.

Farage’s mingled sense of disgust and impatience with the Brussels machine was obvious in everything he said about the EU once inside its sprawl, and this candor rang an empathetic chime in British Conservatives just beginning to question their old faith. Farage has shifted his attention to immigration in recent times, but a quarter of a century ago he had a different focus. Farage understood fully that ceding sovereignty to the EU would actually be a danger to democracy, something about which we hear so much today, although mainly false-flag rhetoric. The European Parliament is not a parliament, it’s a committee. It can neither instigate nor repeal legislation, and it is a ratification apparatus not unlike the old English Star Chamber, used and abused by Charles I (among other monarchs) as a legislative plaything to endorse whatever the king wanted endorsed. The European Parliament is essentially a vastly expensive, technocratically designed rubber-stamp. What this means is that, as the sovereign power of nation-states wanes and the technocratically devolved power in Brussels waxes, European law is increasingly being made by functionaries who have never been elected. Their mandate has been conjured up from the thin air, ex cathedra, and Farage not only saw this, he tried to tell the British populace what it was they were surrendering to, and forced a referendum. This was Farage against the machine.

The labyrinthine EU building in Brussels is like going through a modernist reimagining of the castle of Gormenghast in Mervyn Peake’s trilogy of the same name. I had a girlfriend who worked there as a lawyer in the 90s. It is both grandiose and sinister, and if you are familiar with the Gormenghast books, Farage is Steerpike. He always seems to misbehave on EU premises, taking a film crew into the chamber against EU rules, smoking in its strictly smoke-free offices, making scathing ad hominem attacks in the chamber and generally behaving as he describes his boyish self; Argumentative, perverse, normal.

Back on home shores, Farage set in motion a machine of his own, the so-called “Brexit vote” of 2016, the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU the government was fated to lose. With his party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) performing well, Farage was learning the ropes in the eye of the storm. And he sailed through it, the surprise “Leave” result not least shocking to PM David Cameron, an ineffectual booby of a man who resigned on the spot in a rare occurrence of a politician doing what he ought to do.

Two aspects of the Brexit vote have become totemic since 2016. The view from the left is that those who voted to leave the EU didn’t know what they were voting for, which is either disingenuous or evidence of crass stupidity entirely standard for many on the left. For the right, the Brexit vote was an ill-disguised referendum on immigration, which unmasked the left’s real fears over the ballot because that’s exactly what it was.

Farage was also learning about the nature of politics as optics, as the spectacle, and the media predictably made much of him as a cross between a pantomime villain and a threat to democracy, that old chestnut. It didn’t take long to get the flavor of the type of political attacks Farage would become used to (at least, the ones that didn’t involve milkshakes being thrown over him), based as they are on race, as everything must now be. A journalist had been haranguing Farage at a UKIP conference because the party had produced an electioneering pamphlet which featured a crowd of smiling UKIP supporters. Sadly, and in direct contravention of various unwritten rules demanding “civic nationalism” (ie., plenty of swarthy people and women in your promo material) the pamphlet featured no black faces. Farage ignored the man but curmudgeonly old MP Godfrey Bloom did not, swatting him over the head with a newspaper as though he were an errant schoolboy. But it was Bloom who was expelled, forced by Farage to resign. There have been other dismissals recently over old social media comments, the ephemera that now has the power to end political careers. Enoch Powell said that all political careers end in failure, but I doubt he was referring to rogue Tweets.

Now, with Brexit in danger of being reversed by Starmer’s government, Farage can at least fight Westminster from within, just as he had done in Europe. He was elected as MP for Clacton-on-Sea in July’s election, for the new party he now leads, Reform UK. He has wasted no time in being everywhere at once, a good player of the media as evinced by his stint as a presenter at GB News. Apart from his dalliance with the Trump campaign, Farage has visibly and vocally backed farming, and the current dispute gaining traction – and tractors – in the UK. In the wake of European farming protests, the UK is a little late to the game, but similar protests in Europe were so successful that a farmers’ party won a political seat in the Netherlands. With farming being an industry with a naturally Conservative base, Farage has picked Tory pockets here, and there has been if not a stampede of Conservatives defecting to Reform, then certainly a shuffle of feet which is picking up. Farage has to decide whether these ship-jumpers are acting from political conviction or considerations of job security. Reform are, after all, on the rise if not yet in the ascendant. So, Farage has the impetus, but does he have the prospectus?

Reform are light on policy, it is often noted. But so what? The election isn’t for five years, so this is chess, not checkers. Broad-brush policies will do for now because the future is so uncertain. Farage’s mode of delivery, his literal rhetoric, certainly connects with the voter in a way that Starmer’s quasi-autistic, AI-sounding aspirational platitudes do not. Farage has made it clear that he is opposed to the (globalist) government’s ruinous “Net-zero” environmental program, has been vocal on crony capitalism, and there can’t be any adults in Britain who don’t know Farage’s opinions on immigration. As policies go, with half a decade till nationwide hustings, that will do.

Veteran journalist Peter Hitchens rather condescendingly referred to Farage as “not a deep thinker”, but that is a feature not a glitch. Deep thinkers may well have got us into this mess, if the Frankfurt School are any indication of malevolent influence. Trump is hardly Voltairean in intellect, but he gets things done, something the globalist Death Star does not want to see. They require Bezmenovian destabilization, Harris’ anarcho-tyranny, misrule, dysfunction, not white men with carefully selected brown accomplices clearing up the mess the left have made. When Bush the Younger used to talk about the “New World Order”, he well knew that he meant “Disorder.”

Financially speaking, Farage brings the expertise of the City of London to the table, a fierce financial arena where he traded in gilts and futures. British politics has long been coming to resemble its American cousin, and the necessity of large-scale financial backing has now come out of the shadows into plain sight. A businessman called Nick Candy was a major donor to the Tory party for years, but has just taken his cheque-book elsewhere. To Reform. It’s lamentable that Mammon should triumph so mercilessly over the democratic process, but triumph it has, and doubtless we will soon be seeing “BlackRock funded” High Court judges sitting on the judicial benches of England, just as “Soros funded” DAs lurk in and bedevil many Democrat-led American cities.

Reform are starting to attract high finance. It is notable that just before Candy’s ship-jumping along with his doubloons, one of the biggest British political rumors washing around was that Elon Musk – surely Sir Elon Musk, should Farage ever have the ear of the Lord Lieutenant post-29 – was going to give reform UK $100M. It wasn’t true, and I think it was top trolling by two of the best trolls in Christendom, but it was a rumor that spoke of an underlying truth. Elon Musk holds a lot of political power now. Perhaps he and his new boss might want a transatlantic ally, but maybe Musk might hold off to see how far Farage can get without the aid of the world’s richest man. A sort of job interview.

To return briefly to Peter Hitchens and the subtle aroma not of hypocrisy – a scent favored in and around Westminster – but of being a sore loser. The phrase you tend to hear most from Hitchens Minor these days is, “As I predicted”, like he’s some smug Gypsy telling fortunes on a pier. But Hitchens has long predicted and wished for the destruction of the Conservative Party, something Nigel Farage has done far more to expedite than Hitchens P. Conservative supporters look likely to switch allegiance, sensing as they do that Reform may have kept the flame of Conservatism alive. But there is another faction of committed voters currently causing Farage to pause and check where the pieces are on the board.

Farage has played himself into a bit of an impasse concerning Tommy Robinson, and this is partly the fault of his Number 2, Richard Tice. I have called Tice a chancer and he is also a loose cannon, which Farage very definitely is not. But Tice’s dismissal of Robinson’s supporters as “that lot” was sloppy politics, risking electoral alienation of a big voting bloc, that being the British white man. Farage is a white nationalist by default, whether he wants to be one or not, and he needs to whip Tice into line as Robinson has backed Reform, no small vote-winner. Farage should also, in my view, go after HOPE Not Hate, a British “anti-fascist” stage-show funded by the usual suspects. Trump should go after the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League with the same vim and vigor. But what is Farage’s next move?

Farage is acutely aware that he will always be James Bond to a certain vestigial stratum of Conservative voter, while remaining a Bond villain to the traditional left. So, he is very sensibly not wasting time “reaching out” to various minorities who would never touch him or his party with a long pole. That said, Farage recently seemed to offer a placatory olive branch – if Muslims will forgive the Biblical reference – to the Islamic Council of Britain, effectively the Islamic caucus in the UK, about how Islam needs to be “respected” and worked with. But then he and his sidekick Tice recently bearded the lion in his den – again, sorry for quoting from the Good Book – by bringing a private civil action against two Muslim men involved in a controversial incident at the UK’s Manchester Airport and who have not yet been charged after many months.

It was fascinating in some older footage to see Farage seated next to Peter Oborne. The great lobby journalist is not the architect of the modern political class, but he is the architect of its critique. The book, The Triumph of the Political Class, was the subject of the first piece I ever wrote for CC, almost seven years ago. The book is essential to understanding Blairism and its consequences, which the UK is now seeing.

But there is a tendency on the right to a “defund the political class” attitude, although having a political class is not bad in and of itself. It was good enough for Plato in The Republic and it ought to be good enough for a civilization supposedly far advanced from the cradle of democracy. Like the police, the concept of the political class is not the problem, it’s the caliber, the sheer quality of human being that currently represent that class who are the problem. Like the communists, we wish for a new man, the difference being that those of the right don’t believe he can be created by his fellow man, but by something less robotic, more organic, and more in tune with the natural order at the heart of conservatism.

The last point to be made about Farage as he approaches yet another historical electoral crossroads is not one for him to answer, but for the British political right in general. The question is simple; Who else is there? Farage never looks scared of being politically incongruous, of rubbing the establishment’s fur the wrong way. But is he bearding the globalists in their den, or are they making plans for Nigel? Farage wants to be in the political class and yet not of it, and that may be a greater test than the political moves that await him.