James Snell

The Brexit party crack-up

At the start of the year, the Brexit party didn’t exist. When it roared to success a few months later in the European parliamentary elections, much was made of how unlike a normal party it was. Nigel Farage was fond of telling audiences that his MEPs included Tories and former members of the Revolutionary Communist party. What else could unite them, he would ask, but the need to leave the European Union? Yet that common cause is now proving to be the party’s undoing in the wake of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal. While Theresa May’s agreement was panned almost instantly, reaction to Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal has been mostly positive. Tory Brexiteers queued up on the airwaves and in studios to condemn what amounted to ‘vassalage’ under May. This time, Tories – even hard-to-please members of the ERG – have been almost universally supportive. Broadly speaking, Brexit party voters agree: a Survation poll shows that more than two-thirds of the party’s supporters approve of the deal. But not Nigel Farage. The Brexit party leader’s reaction to Johnson’s deal has been remarkable and self-contradictory. By turns, he has invoked the Benn Act and the supremacy of European law in attempts to justify his continued opposition to the government’s line. This is casting about for a cause and appears as desperate as it is. Without a place in Parliament, his party is a prisoner of events. Farage knows all too clearly that the Brexit party risks irrelevance unless it can outflank the Tories in some way. As a result, he is forced into increasingly tortured and hard-to-maintain positions. Many of its MEPs and leading lights distrust Johnson, but they are also willing to give the PM the benefit of the doubt, if it means delivering Brexit. Lance Forman, Lucy Harris and others appear cautiously in favour of Parliament approving

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