The Future's Right; The Future's Farage

Farage's hostile takeover of the Tories won't happen but it doesn't need to - they already think like Farage.

He’s got his eyes on you.

This has clearly been a disastrous election for the Conservative Party and for its leader, Rishi Sunak, now forever known as the “D-Day Dodger”. They’d lost even before they published their manifesto today, which must be some kind of record. No one takes seriously Tory promises on cutting taxes from a government that has raised the tax burden to the highest level since the 1950s. Nor indeed is there much confidence in Sunak’s ability ‘stop the boats’ or cut legal migration when he has presided over record numbers of both.

Anyway, it’s often not manifestos but those telling, unforced errors by politicians that colour public attitudes. Think of Gordon Brown’s calling a Gillian Duffy ‘a bigoted woman’ in 2010 or Sunak racing back from Normandy to do an ITV interview that wasn’t even being broadcast that night. This mistake though may not just be terminal for Rishi Sunak, it may be the moment historians realised that the political right has changed and the old Conservative Party is no more.

I’ve yet to hear a convincing explanation of how Number Ten allowed the Prime Minister to make his early departure from the 80th commemorations of the 1944 allied invasion of Europe. The Tories have a legion of special advisers, pollsters and PR people, yet no one stopped to ask whether it might look a little strange for the Prime Minister of the UK to desert the scene of the greatest amphibious landing in history, where thousands of British, Canadian and American troops perished? This, in the middle of an election in which the PM had called for the return of national service?

I’m not the first to suggest that must be a crack team of election saboteurs embedded in Downing Street - the same fifth columnists who deprived Rishi Sunak of an umbrella as he announced the general election outside Number Ten in a deluge of rain. (Things can only get wetter, ho ho). The British Conservative Party used to be called, rightly, the most successful election-winning machine in the democratic world. Not any more. Something has gone terribly wrong: the party doesn’t know what it stands for any more.

Mind you, that hasn’t prevented the Tories from winning elections in the past. Not for nothing has the British Conservative Party been called “the stupid party”. This is because of its very aversion to intellectual navel gazing. Absence of ideology has been successful for the Conservatives when there is too much of it around, as in the 1930s when Stanley Baldwin made a fetish of suburban, English, Christian values. Equally, the party has been willing to adopt ideology occasionally when there’s too little of it around, as in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher ordered her cabinet ministers to read tomes by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The point is that since Disraeli, the UK Conservatives have had a knack of picking up the mood of the nation and reflecting it back at them. They have lost this knack - or at any rate they no longer seem able to identify and stick with leaders who do.

My own view is that the modern Tories really lost the plot when they lost Boris Johnson over party gate. Like him or loathe him - and many do - the former Tory PM had an almost uncanny ability to connect with voters across the class and educational divide. I am not making a moral judgement here, but a political one. Johnson won a near landslide majority in 2019, leading a deeply divided parliamentary party still in shock from Theresa May’s disastrous snap election and in deadlock over Brexit. Johnson had even been censured by the UK Supreme Court for proroguing parliament unlawfully. Everyone knew of his faults back then, but people voted for him, nevertheless, because he had a simple message “Get Brexit Done” and because he had a personality. Johnson was a gifted satirist and iconoclast in an era saturated with cant and bien pensant moralising.

Personality is also what the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, has in abundance, though his message is more obscure. His USP so far seems to be a willingness to thumb his nose at the media elites with their Net Zero lecturing, hostility to cars and holidays and their hatred of patriotism. This resonates with working class Brits who don’t like immigration much and who can’t afford Teslas and heat pumps. They’re tired of being lectured about climate change every time the sun shines, or when it rains, or when it snows. It’s a bit like being back at school, and these are generally voters who did not perform well in an academic environment.

Farage is Britain’s version of the populist revolt we have seen the European elections, where the far right has made unprecedented gains in countries like France, Austria, Italy and Germany. There are differences between the various right wing parties, but it is fair to describe this as a Western Europe-wide nationalist revolt against environmental austerity, immigration and identity politics. It has been a long time coming and, intriguingly, it is supported by many young European voters not just the usual “gammon”. . It’s strange to think of Nigel Farage as being in tune with Europe, but if this populism goes on he may have to rethink his opposition to the EU.

Again, I’m not making a moral judgement here but simply pointing to what I think are the Reform leader’s assets and why he is likely to attract many of the less educated voters who warmed to Boris Johnson. However, I don’t think Farage’s “hostile takeover” of the Conservative Party is likely to succeed. Our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it extremely difficult for small parties to make an impact in parliament.

Those many advocates of proportional representation, in the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, have been keeping rather quiet recently. This may not be unconnected with the recent success of the far right in countries where proportional representation has given them a significant chunk of MPs presence in many European legislatures. The right began its recent wave of electoral success, as I discussed in earlier posts, by entering government in countries like Denmark, Finland and Sweden where they gained a foothold through PR. This is unlikely to happen here.

Farage could, however, alter the character and trajectory of the Conservative Party. In a sense he already has, since the Tories are increasingly in line with his views on immigration, identity politics and Net Zero - as the former Tory home secretary, Suella Braverman has pointed out. There is no longer a “cordon sanitaire” between the right and what used to be called the “far right” or the “hard right”. Indeed, these categories have been undergoing rapid change.

It may seem a statement of the bleeding’ obvious that the natural place for the party of the right is to be on the right. The right has changed out of all recognition in the past decade and especially following the successes of formerly hard right parties like Georgia Meloni’s “Brothers of Italy” ( which many commentators still call neo-fascist). These parties are not anti-democratic or racist. They may have racists in their ranks but they are not ideological National Socialists or white supremacists. Alternative fur Deutschland and France’s National Rally are no longer anti-semitic organisations seeking to defeat democracy, crush opposition and colonise racially inferior nations. Or if they are, they are in very, very deep disguise.

Nigel Farage is similar in that he is assumed by default to be a racist and a xenophobe. Most recently he was accused of blowing “a racist dog whistle” by suggesting that Sunak’s D-Day departure was because he doesn’t understand “British culture”. The dog whistle presumably being that the Prime Minister’s Hindu race was the reason he deserted the Normandy beaches. Yet, there’s no reason to think that this cock up had anything to do with Mr Sunak’s skin colour, if you think about it for more than ten seconds. Indeed, Farage was eager to point out that 40% of the armed forces that fought against fascism in 1944 came from the commonwealth, or what was then called the “British Empire”.

The “hard right” isn’t so hard any more and old fashioned left-wing street-fighting is no longer the way to deal with what should really be called the New Right. Like throwing milk-shakes and wet cement, hurling accusations of racism against populists like Farage is counter productive. Unfortunately the left is so saturated with performative tribalism it doesn’t realise that it is playing Nigel Farage’s game. The more he is tarred with the brush of fascism, the more he is reviled on social media and abused on the streets the more attractive his version of beery populism becomes.

As the Conservative Party disintegrates following July 4th, Farage is going to be a serious player - not as a leader or a minister but as an inspiration to distraught Tory politicians searching for reasons for their defeat and wondering how to reconnect with voters. Inspiration may not be a word most people would associate with the former UKIP leader, but these are strange times.