The post you are reporting:
Hugo Rifkind writing in the Times.
Nigel Farage is back! Don’t take it from me, take it from him. Pretty soon, he may be coming to your town on some manner of battle bus. “I’m back!” he declared on Saturday. “From where?” you might be thinking, in which case shame on you for not paying attention. Did you not realise that the former Ukip frontman had left politics after the Brexit referendum? Were you fooled, perhaps, by the way he has continued to earn £89,000 a year as a member of the European Parliament? You idiots, that’s barely a job at all. Indeed, given his attendance record (748th out of 751 MEPs) he might not even know he’s still got it. Instead, he has spent the last two years turning himself into a formidable broadcaster, soaring to the dizzy heights of a phone-in gig on a local London radio show.
There are various reasons for this, and they probably include the implosion of Ukip and Farage’s desire to make some money. More important, though, has been Brexit’s advancing complexity. Shouting “no, no, let me finish, it’s the will of the people!” is all very well when the debate is broad but notably unsatisfactory once you’re deep into non-tariff barriers and reciprocal border agreements. In that old episode of The Simpsons when Homer runs for Mayor of Springfield, he does so under the slogan “Can’t Somebody Else Do It?” and this is very much the sort of Brexit in which Farage has always believed. And so, after decades of campaigning for Britain to leave the EU, when the question became, “OK, but how?” he basically left the national stage with an almighty shrug of, “dunno, not my area”.
Now he feels that we are back in his area. “I’ve had enough of their lies, deceit and treachery,” he wrote in a newspaper column. “The time has come to teach them a lesson — one that they will never forget.” Does he, perhaps, mean a lesson about the technical details of a paperless customs arrangement at the Irish border? Alas, no. Farage is angry about Theresa May’s Chequers plan, which promises a degree of regulatory alignment with the EU after Brexit. People, he says, “are being lied to while their wishes are blatantly ignored”. But does Farage have a better plan? About how the wishes of the people could be better fulfilled? No, of course not. Not his area. Somebody else can do it. His real lesson, and his only lesson, is that this will be a constant. For the armchair generals of Brexit, any deal struck in the ministerial trenches will be “betrayal”, just as any warning of the consequences of not striking one, however rigorously sourced, will be “Project Fear”.
A few days earlier, the British Medical Association had warned of dire consequences for the NHS if Britain left without a deal, involving both staffing of surgeries and hospitals, and the logistical challenges of leaving bodies such as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Farage says they are wrong. Not how they are wrong, or why they are wrong, just that they are. “This baseless claim,” he writes, “proves Project Fear is thriving.” Yet a recent poll suggested that 60 per cent of doctors from elsewhere in the EU are thinking of leaving Britain. You might recall that the Conservative MP Anna Soubry once had to apologise for saying the then Ukip leader looked “like someone put their finger up his bottom”. We can only marvel at his blithe confidence that, should the need arise, there will always be somebody available who will. Other such troublesome facts will soon be upon us, not in single spies but in battalions. Unspoken, the real subtext to Farage’s decision to return to the fray is the likelihood of the government this week beginning to publish contingency plans for what should happen in the event of a no-deal Brexit. If they make the prospect look scary, and they will, then expect them to be sneered away in a similar fashion.
Take Brexit seriously and Farage has no role. This makes it all the more striking who his new bedfellows are. “Starting today,” he wrote, “I have pledged to give Leave Means Leave my full support”. Possibly you have failed to keep track of precisely which Brexit faction is which, because life is short, but this is not typical Farage terrain. Leave Means Leave was co-founded by the entrepreneur Richard Tice, who first set up the smirkingly nihilistic Leave.EU with the unlovable Arron Banks, but it’s supposed to be a more reputable endeavour. Numerous Tory MPs are listed as supporters of Leave Means Leave, and while they include the odd banal sloganeer (hello Andrea Jenkyns) the roll is dominated by those — such as John Redwood and Jacob Rees-Mogg — who fancy themselves as hard Brexit’s intellectual wing. Dominic Raab, now the Brexit secretary, was a founder member, too. Will these people still be supporting Leave Means Leave once it has Nigel Farage on a battle bus? Once he is teaching the leader of their party a lesson she will not forget? It is their failure, not hers, that Farage is back in this debate. They have had two years to move the argument for a hard Brexit on from his tub-thumping simplicities about betrayal and elites and the will of the people. Two years to make their case about WTO this and Global Britain that, and to evolve something more than, “You lost, we won, get over it”. How come Farage still speaks their language? How come they haven’t left him far, far behind? Shame on them, if this is all they’ve got.