Nigel Farage ought to terrify the Tories. He has terrified them many times over the past decades. But until now, he hasn’t had the force of the US president, the richest man in the world, and the global online right behind him.
As the struggle to become the dominant voice on the British right intensifies, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative party look like yesterday’s news by comparison.
Who is to say Farage cannot supplant the Tories as Trump supplanted the old Republican elite or Marine Le Pen supplanted the Gaullists?
The latest example of how rapidly the political weather is changing was Elon Musk’s rant that the ‘people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state’. Along with a portion of his 205 million followers on X, Musk backed pub landlord Michael Westwood’s petition which stated that, because Keir Starmer has ‘gone back on his promises,’ Parliament must be dissolved.
Even by Musk’s standards, the campaign is absurd. We are not governed by American billionaires, any more than we are governed by tyrannical policemen. We are a parliamentary democracy where petitions are a sideshow. I seem to remember there was one in 2019 to ‘revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU’. It received 6,103,056 signatures – I may even have signed it myself.
Reader, we did not remain in the EU.
Unless Starmer decides to go early, the next election will be in September 2029. Nevertheless, Westwood had two million signatures at the time of writing – an impressive total. Labour politicians cannot just ignore this. The narrative that Starmer breaks his promises has taken hold everywhere from the Corbynistas to the Faragists.
Labour must surely know, too, that like the Eye of Sauron, the global right focuses on one target at a time. A few years ago, it was Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand. Now it is Keir Starmer’s UK.
But contrary though it may seem, the Tories ought to be more concerned.
Farage is their rival. Reform is taking their votes. It’s not just that Conservative politicians have never been able to mount an effective attack on him: Farage and Reform look now as if they represent the future of right-wing politics.
With Trump’s victory, the leader of Reform is more likely to be invited to the White House than the leader of the Conservative party.
Musk and his network do not amplify Kemi Badenoch. They amplify Farage, and Tommy Robinson, and the causes they espouse.
Sometimes you need to take a deep breath and take stock of how times are changing. When Farage went on GB News to discuss the police questioning of Allison Pearson, to quote one example, Elon Musk was watching. ‘This is insane,’ he cried. ‘Make Orwell Fiction Again!’
How easily we have become used to the world’s richest man and confidant of the US president watching a small UK TV show, hosted by the leader of a party of five MPs, and furiously amplifying its message to a global audience.
The Tory party is so used to having its back covered by the Tory press that it seems lost in a new world where Musk and Trump cheer on its rival on the right and give Farage a far greater global presence than its leaders.
Peter Mandelson, who reacts to changes in the political wind faster than a well-oiled weathercock, can see it. In his role as a Starmer outrider, he said that Labour should ‘redouble its efforts’ to find common ground with Musk.
I doubt accommodation with a nationalist America, that wants tariffs and a cut to its European defence commitment, is possible. And any deal with Musk, let alone with Farage, would infuriate centre-left opinion.
But Mandelson is right to see Farage as a representative of the dominant force on the global right. Who is to say Farage cannot supplant the Tories as Trump supplanted the old Republican elite or Marine Le Pen supplanted the Gaullists? Across the west, traditional centre-right parties are either being replaced or taken over by the radical right.
The power of the Republican establishment began to fall in 2013 when its leaders said they would accept legalising the status of millions of undocumented migrants in the US. Trump saw his opportunity and used the backlash to destroy the old regime.
David Cameron promised to reduce immigration from the hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. Brexit was meant to secure our borders. None of the promises came good and, whether you look on it with approval or dread, the opportunities for a radical realignment here are clear to see.
Never believe complacent English voices who assure you that ‘it can’t happen here’. It can always happen here. There is no guarantee that the Conservatives will continue to dominate right-wing politics.
Nick Tyrone, a Lib Dem activist turned political researcher, made the point for me when he said that, after Trump’s victory, everyone in British politics was comfortable with their roles except the Tories.
The narrative that Starmer breaks his promises has taken hold everywhere, from the Corbynistas to the Faragists
Farage and Reform are Trump’s friends and imitators. The Liberal Democrats and Greens are anti-Trump parties. Labour is in its heart anti-Trump too, of course. But it can also say that it is the party of government that will cut a deal with the devil if it’s in the national interest.
Where is the Conservative party? What is its point? It perhaps takes Liberal Democrats to see how fragile the Tory position has become, as they have been the beneficiaries of its decline. At the last election, they took seats that had always been Tory. In Henley, Chichester, the Cotswolds, Esher and even Tunbridge Wells for goodness’ sake, moderate people on good incomes abandoned a party that was once their natural home.
This Tory loss of so much of the respectable southern middle classes is the most significant political change in years. The fact that the media has largely ignored it does not make it any less significant.
If the Tories go ever more Trumpian, no one will be more delighted than Ed Davey. If they move to the centre, Nigel Farage will celebrate.
You can’t appeal to Esher and Essex at the same time. The last people who should want Starmer to call an early election should be the Conservative politicians who will be torn to pieces in the process.
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