Well, stone me. Nigel Farage says he’s going to do “something that’ll stun all of you”. Stun, what, like all of us? Like a surprise? There are no surprises now, Nigel, you’re an elected MP. You can’t be going round plotting big reveals like some malevolent magician. You published your manifesto, you were in voted on it, no? You can’t stick it to the decadent establishment in parliament and its sclerotic drain on democracy, their lack of probity and transparency, by doing something that’ll ‘stun’ us, your own voters included.
But this is what Nigel Farage does.
War?
The day after winning the 2016 Brexit referendum, he says ‘Tada! £350 million for the NHS? Lol!’ Or in 2020, with the UK finally leaving the EU, he crowed, ‘The war is over, we have won’. War? When was Brexit, which according to him at least geared around the referendum, the ultimate expression of democratic mandate, sound argument, rational judgement, when was it actually a war? The millions of people on the Remain side weren’t in fact holding legitimate positions of disagreement with him, but were, he later revealed, enemies in a war, a civil war he never deigned declare.
Stunning
Was he referring to some further reshuffling of power at the heart of the Reform Party?
He certainly ‘stunned’ Richard Tice when Farage replaced him as Reform Party boss weeks before the general election, ‘stunning’ everyone when reversing on his previous commitment not to stand as an MP, then ‘stunned’ the pro-refugee-drowning deputy leader Ben Habib by replacing him with Tice. (More stunning was making Tory defective Lee Anderson party whip for a party of five MPs, including himself, and his bosses. How bad must the other two be? One’s pretty bad – genuinely stunningly bad).
Pretty stunning I suppose that he was elected at all, not just on the eighth attempt, but he did so from a constituency so disaffected by all life economic and political they not only voted in the agitator-in-chief of the Brexit disaster, but someone who only months ago said, ‘Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?’. How bad can it be that people could be so disillusioned and angry that they’d vote for that?
Apparently some though were duly stunned that, instead of doing his job as a constituency MP he instead jetted to the States to support Donald Trump, to consol and share his own relatable experiences of so nearly being cut down by assassins’ milkshakes. How many of his constituents might yet be further stunned that he’s seemingly shelved his enthusiasm to spend much time either there or sticking it to parliament from within the chamber by returning to GBNews three times a week. We could ask Farage, but to be fair, at this rate, he wouldn’t know.
Taking over the Tories?
So what are we to be stunned by? That he may take over the Tories, now a rudderless rump of a party in search of a leader, while Farage and co. are leaders looking for a gang. Odd – so many Reform supporters, by his own claim, are former Tory voters so disaffected by them that they turned to Reform – so why betray that by coopting those tired has-been wash-out Tories into the Reform Party? What’s new about that? Didn’t Reform’s voters vote NF precisely to get away from these people? Also, would those who’ve somehow stuck with the Tories find themselves able to vote for a Tory-Reform mutant party, such that they’d cohesively challenge Labour at the next general election? A huge tranche of moderate Tories we think already turned to the Lib Dems, and how many others abstained? Surely there’s scope for a ‘centrist’ One Nation bloc to form and maintain the fissure such they collectively all stay out of office for a long time? It’s not as if the Tories’ lurch towards the populist ‘think tanks’ Tufton and Leave and NF’s other mates around the corner from the Commons worked out well in the end.
A major issue is, while Farage might seek to take over the not insubstantial remains of the venerable machine that is the Tories – who’ve rejected him all these years – but could he really run it? Doesn’t he figure much better as a behind-the-scenes, from-the-sidelines agitator manipulating a few critical percentages of votes to rattle the electable Tories into his bidding, whereas at the point he takes over a major party he’d prove useless and unelectable. Maybe with a competent chief-of-staff, someone like Dominic Cummings or Steve Bannon, amid a slew of other international unsavouries he’ll be inviting into the Commons’ tearooms he’d fare better. But they’re repulsive figures and Farage’s party of five it already proving incoherent, let alone put him at the helm of one with hundreds of MPs that’d duly be overwhelmed by a tsunami of raging lunatics and racists drawn to Farage’s flame – assuming Reform’s people are even real.
I might be stunned to see Farage last long in the chamber, seeing as he can’t behave there like he did in the European parliament, and surrounded by far bolshier, brighter, younger and likely female MPs to cut him down. But he needs his soundbites for YouTube. That’s the thing, as Emily Maitlis recently pointed out, it’s as if journalists still think it’s the 1950s and they ask the questions, they are the gatekeepers to for the world to see the truth – whereas now people like Musk, Tate, Farage, film the interviews themselves and send out their own pretty clips to the faithful before other versions come out.
This is Nigel Farage. What’s stunning is the gap between what people vote for and what they get.
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