A Trotsky in pinstripes
Nigel Farage has had a good run. Nobody of his generation has had a greater impact on British politics.
But his latest bid to blow up the Establishment, by posing as a people’s tribune hounded by press barons and parliamentary busybodies, smacks of sheer desperation.
Monday’s televised harangue from his wolf’s lair in Millbank Tower displayed all the signs of an increasingly paranoid chancer who knows he has been rumbled.
It turns out that taking millions of pounds from an expat crypto-tycoon and hanging out with a convicted fraudster is not the way to endear yourself to the nation.
Voters are heartily sick of MPs who live from rather than for public service. Many thought Mr Farage was different. How wrong they were.
His latest bombshell — resigning his seat in order to wrest our attention back from Labour’s equally self-indulgent melodrama — turns out to be a dud.
None of the other parties is playing his game by putting up candidates to stand against him.
It’s not because they are all in cahoots against him. Is Rupert Lowe really part of a cabal that also includes Zack Polanski? Are Kemi Badenoch and Andy Burnham secretly conspiring with the National Crime Agency and MI6 to do down Reform UK?
Mr Farage is insulting the intelligence of the British public. He knows the voters of Clacton-on-Sea will re-elect him, so he is risking nothing. When he is returned to Parliament, however, the accusations of sleaze won’t have gone away.
It is patently absurd and, frankly, patronising to ordinary people for him to keep repeating that “nobody cares” about the charges now being investigated by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.
The facts that he has already admitted are alarming enough. Reform supporters like to claim that all MPs are dodgy, so they may assume that the kind of donors and associates that Mr Farage considers acceptable are normal in British politics.
They are not. In fact, Mr Farage should have stayed a million miles away from “Posh George” Cottrell, who has spent time in a US federal penitentiary for wire fraud, rather than reportedly accepting hospitality, help with security and donations from Cottrell and his “aristocratic” mother. Fiona Cottrell is now reported to be under investigation by the Metropolitan Police over donations of half a million pounds to Reform before the 2024 election.
Whether or not he and his deputy Richard Tice have broken either the criminal law or parliamentary rules, Mr Farage has demonstrated a lack of judgement that ought to disqualify him from high office.
While Mr Farage was embarking on yet another ego-trip, Kemi Badenoch was doing the job of opposition leader, holding a press conference about defence policy. Unlike Mr Burnham, she was levelling with the public about how we might pay for the transformation of our land, sea and air forces rendered urgently necessary by Putin’s menaces.
This is the issue that the nation needs to focus on. We have an outgoing Prime Minister who has just appeared naked at the Nato conference chamber in Ankara, wearing little more than Lord Alli’s designer spectacles, while the incoming PM is still fiddling in Manchester. We still don’t know what his plan is to restore our defences — or even whether he has one.
Nigel Farage has just shown beyond doubt that he is not a serious alternative. There is only one political leader who has consistently conducted herself in a statesmanlike way over the past two years: Mrs Badenoch.
A general election is probably not going to happen any time soon. But after the strange interlude of five or six party politics that we have witnessed since Labour swept into power in 2024, it is now clear that normal service will, sooner or later, have to be resumed.
The choice we face is between our traditional two-party system, represented by broad churches under Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch, or the fragmentation and chaos of identity politics, bringing riots and disorder in its wake.
It turns out that “broken Britain” was a misnomer. It wasn’t the country that was broken, merely the Westminster model that was so widely imitated in the democratic world. Now that the nation can see plainly what is on offer, I hope and expect a return to sanity and common sense.
Not for the first time or the last, the much-maligned British press has done a great job of exposing a hollow man. As Mrs Badenoch has repeatedly pointed out, the leader of Reform UK, a party that proposes to run the country, simply doesn’t turn up to work in the House of Commons.
Nigel Farage has unmasked himself as the Leon Trotsky of the 2020s, selling permanent revolution under the guise of reaction — and to a country that has avoided both extremes for centuries.
The nation voted for neither permanent revolution nor or extreme reaction two years ago. Nobody wants a Trotsky in pinstripes, any more than a mini-Trump in a cloth cap.
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