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Courtesy of the Times.
A few years ago, I sailed the ocean blue with Nigel Farage. The vessel was a cruise liner bound for Guernsey, the occasion a floating convention for Eurosceptics (long story). He arrived wearing a colonial-style pith helmet; sported Union Jack-patterned leather shoes; had a pint of Bombardier superglued to one hand. So far, so cartoon ’Kipper. But when I chatted to Farage a more surprising man emerged: reflective, non-patronising, direct, wearied by a life of constant battling. Reader, I rather liked him. I may think Brexit a monumentally bad idea, but I cannot see Brexit’s chief architect as the racist, sinister, manipulative monster that many paint him to be — and if Farage’s opponents want to beat him, they need to ditch this tired line of attack.
It seems that nothing can slay the irrepressible Farage. Not a plane crash, electoral failure, party scandal, media ridicule, death threats or multiple resignations. The ultimate political Lazarus is back, his Brexit Party surging in the polls in the run-up to next month’s European parliament elections. YouGov has the new party in first place at 27 per cent, with Labour on 22 per cent and the Conservatives on 15 per cent. A survey out yesterday suggested that 40 per cent of Conservative councillors were planning to vote for the Brexit Party. His political opponents are rightly very, very afraid. Once upon a time Farage was shackled to the mad and bad of Ukip: the one who taught a dog the Nazi salute, the one who talked of “Bongo Bongo Land”, the one who campaigned against a conspiracy of EU toasters that left bread all “peely-wally”. Hauling this net of idiots behind him acted as a drag anchor on Farage’s political talents for years. Now freed of the Ukip name and the ghastly purple branding, now in a fresh outfit with more credible candidates, he is a serious threat to the mainstream parties not only next month but at the increasingly likely second referendum or general election that may follow.
Farage’s gift is that he manages to speak to us not as automatons but as sentient beings. While the vast majority of politicians recite from a script that has been fed through a “what would play well with ordinary folk” filter, he does the extraordinary thing of saying what he actually thinks. No “try-to-please-everyone” triangulations, no working out what Mondeo Man would like to hear in order to win a few more votes. Whether you agree with Farage or not — and on Europe I strongly disagree — you have to concede that this makes him electoral dynamite. What should Farage’s Conservative opponents do, then? They must first cease those pointless attacks on him for being part of the establishment he claims to hate. However clever it may seem to point out, most people don’t care that Farage went to private school, or worked in the City, or that he was a tried-and-failed Conservative candidate. They don’t care that he is friendly with Donald Trump, or that he has used private planes, or that he set up a tax avoidance vehicle for his children’s inheritance. They don’t care, in short, that he attacks the “career professional political class” while being one of them. Farage can get away with any seeming hypocrisy because he is comfortable in his own skin and convinced of his own beliefs. They don’t care, either, about the fact that he has hung out with Marine Le Pen or clapped Viktor Orban on the back, or that he’s a fan of Steve Bannon. Whether we view them as beyond the pale or not, Twitter assassins need to realise that the average voter does not think about these figures, or find it sinister that Farage knows them.
The attacks on Farage for being a raving racist fall flat, too. Yes, the infamous “Breaking Point” poster he unveiled during the referendum campaign was unpleasant, but trawl through his statements on immigration and you will not find much that the majority of voters would disagree with. He feels that an extra five million migrants over the coming decade would be too much; that low-skilled migration from Europe has undermined wages here; that social cohesion matters just as much as GDP figures when it comes to measuring the impact of immigration. When critics mutter that Farage is a fascist because of these views it only demonstrates the howling gulf in opinion between some of the well-heeled and less well-off parts of our nation. Moreover, now that his Brexit Party is taking votes from Ukip, which these days is aligned with the extremist tub-thumper Tommy Robinson, Farage can claim to be the mainstream politician who has done the most to neuter the nastier elements of the far right.
In short, it will never work for Conservatives to attack the man or his cause directly. Every time Farage is labelled a racist for raising concerns about immigration that are held by the majority of voters, his reputation as a teller of truths is burnished. Sneering at his pie-and-a-pint mateyness and nostalgia for a certain kind of England is always going to be counterproductive, for it is seen by many as an attack on their own beliefs and their own lives. For the Conservatives, the one way to counteract the Farage phenomenon is to be very clear about what it will strengthen: Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. The message that must go out from now, in the first few weeks of the Brexit Party’s existence, is that voting for Farage’s movement will only profit the socialists. After Theresa May’s disastrous three years in power, and with Conservative policies running on empty, Leave voters in Middle England can no longer be relied upon to vote Tory.
The only thing that may animate them, or at least prevent them from supporting the Brexit Party, is that by deserting the Conservatives they are giving momentum to the Momentumites, emboldening Corbyn, and increasing the possibility of a Marxist in Downing Street before the year is out. David Cameron once joked that if voters got into bed with Nigel Farage, they would wake up with Ed Miliband. This time they’d be waking up with a true Red in the bed: a man who would raise taxes, nationalise swathes of British industry and cosy up to Russia. Asking people to vote tactically may be uninspiring, and might betray the paucity of policy and personality afflicting the Conservative Party, but Tories seeking to defeat Farage must remember that attacking the man himself will get them nowhere.
@ClareFoges