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Nigel Farage is gambling with the future of the British Right – but it may just pay off
The Conservatives’ decision to sit out the Clacton by-election has handed the Reform leader the narrative he needs
The people versus the establishment. Students of British political history, of which Nigel Farage is certainly one, will perhaps hear in this an echo of Asquith and Lloyd George’s “Peers versus the People” election campaigns of 1910, the two elections needed to destroy the unelected Lords’ power to block budgets agreed by the Commons.
But Asquith was prime minister and Lloyd George was chancellor. They wielded real power in the system. Their popular support enhanced that power, but it was winning electoral majorities and pulling the levers of power that enabled them to bring about change. And they had a clear proposition – old age pensions and the people’s budget.
Contrast Nigel Farage’s decision to launch a political war against the establishment. Winning the by-election will put him formally in exactly the same position as he is now. And his proposition is a more nebulous one: that the standards process isn’t working and is being used to destroy him and Reform.
Having seen what happened to Boris Johnson, admittedly in a slightly different process, I admit to some reservations about the parliamentary standards arrangements. One can’t of course be sure, but no one publicly involved is an obvious empathiser with Reform or “populism”. The process itself can be the punishment, particularly given the curious rule that MPs are not able to discuss public investigations against them until they have concluded.
Moreover, however neutral the official bit of the process is, in the end the rulings have to go through a parliamentary vote in a Commons where Labour has a massive majority. I can understand Farage’s reservations.
Farage clearly believes he will be vindicated in those matters. But at this stage no one really knows. So the proximate cause of the by-election is not necessarily the easiest platform to fight on, and to make it work Reform must deflect attention from the money and bring to the foreground the politics.
It was no doubt the prospect of facing such a by-election campaign that has tempted the main parties to say they will not run candidates. There is little risk in this to Labour, though it sits oddly with Burnham’s view that he can beat Reform where others can’t. But for the Tories I do not think it is a good decision not to compete, especially when they have decided to run candidates in other elections where they have no chance. No doubt they think it clever and that it will spike Farage’s guns. I’m not so sure.
The problem is that it looks like a clever retreat to process. Of course they can say this is an unnecessary and expensive by-election, that Farage is frightened of standards and scrutiny, and that there is something dodgy about the whole Reform set-up. The trouble is that this refusal to run on the arguments rather proves the Reform point.
After all it always looks bad for politicians to seem to decline the argument. Doing so plays into Reform hands and invites the riposte: “This is why you can’t trust the main parties. They are obsessed with following the way things have always been done. We’re talking about the future of the country. That’s what’s really at stake.”
Reform has been given the opportunity to highlight this difference between them and the rest. Farage has the chance to be centre of attention for a positive political reason, and to point to all those who undoubtedly want to stop him and his party. This just plays to Reform strengths and – if they run things right – enables them to push out their policies unchallenged in a local political theatre transferred to the political stage of the whole country.
This means that, despite the weirdness of the by-election, Reform must try to run a barnstorming campaign that is taken national, in which the original cause is forgotten and the proposition is “Look at all these politicians who bungled the last couple of decades and reduced Britain to its present sorry state. Now half of them are too frightened to fight and yet they are still trying to stop the party that wants to kick them out – not by beating their arguments, but by tying them in regulatory knots. Stop them and re-elect Nigel. Tell them what you think.”
It must, in effect, be another national by-election like Makerfield, with voters asked to remember that they are giving a signal about the future of the country.
I know the professional political class in Westminster will find this hard to understand. They just do not get how a good part of the country – and let us not forget, a majority of voters on the Right – sees Reform. Westminster can’t really compute a party that is playing by different rules and appealing to voters in novel ways. They think in the end that seemingly serious people following their tried and tested rules will win through. I’m not convinced any more. More and more Britons don’t care about process. They just want results.
The opportunity for Farage now, even if the by-election is effectively sabotaged by the other parties, is to position himself clearly as the leader of the change vote, and make it unambiguously clear that the other parties are simply frightened to have an argument about policy and only want to play political games.
Get this right and it could give Reform a top-up of the political rocket fuel that has been visibly lacking in recent months. Of course, get it wrong and they are back at square one. So they have to make the arguments national, and make this a Midlothian campaign for the 21st century. If anyone can do it, Nigel Farage can.
[Source: Lord Frost - Comment - Daily Telegraph]
