It’s a bit late now for the British media to start asking hard questions about the Reform UK leader
Amid the multiple resignations and comebacks of Nigel Farage, it’s worth remembering something. Eight years ago, he got a tumultuous welcome to a packed house by Trinity College’s Historical Society, and the next morning to RTÉ’s Marian Finucane show, before stepping up to rapturous applause at Freedom to Prosper, the Irexit conference organised by his own Ukip-led grouping then in the European Parliament – all of it excitedly reported by national journalists. Not bad for a right-winger who moaned incessantly about being silenced by a mainstream-media conspiracy.
In a Breitbart News interview that week with the headline, “If Ireland wants to be an independent state, it can’t stay part of the EU,” the great philosopher gave his analysis of the unfathomably sappy will of the Irish people: “You can’t measure the word ‘freedom’, you can’t measure the word ‘independence’, you can’t measure the word ‘democracy’, but there is an extreme irony of centuries of struggle against the British to get rid of them and now suddenly they’re being run by Brussels!”
Farage had no shame, then or now. Back then, he was an 18-year member of the European Parliament – ranking 748 out of 751 for attendance while drawing more than €100,000 in salary plus a €300-a-day living allowance, and being investigated for misuse of public funds.
He had “absolutely no hesitation” in backing a US gun-flashing, homophobic religious zealot or defending Donald Trump’s retweets of racist Britain First hate posts or lauding France’s Marine Le Pen or the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, a young far-right German party at the time.
A year later, Hermann Kelly, director of communications for the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group in the European Parliament – a group chaired by Farage, who was formerly Ukip, then the Brexit Party and lately Reform – attempted to import Farage’s ideas wholesale into the Republic in the guise of a “patriotic party”.
It was almost as if the Irish people had never had to ponder the non-charlatan meaning of the word “patriot” or laid eyes on Farage’s infamously dehumanising pro-Brexit billboards featuring Syrian refugees near the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015. The screaming red caption “Breaking Point” with its “the EU has failed us all” message seemed like a horrifically distorted, racist breaking point.
At the weekend, a politically minded friend in the north of England tried to explain the vibe before last week’s elections. He was in the habit of carrying out straw polls of random people about their voting intentions, following two years of Labour after 14 years of Tory dominance. The answer was always about what Labour were not doing – though never about what Reform could or would do. But there was still a lot of talk about the “small boats”, he noted.
In London over the weekend, an angry Brexiteer friend was lashing out at Starmer et al – and not even the Office of Budget Responsibility can persuade him that the cost of Brexit to the economy in 2024/25 alone was at least €100 billion, with an ongoing cost of 4 per cent. He cannot bear to concede the generational error. Last week, for the first time in his life, he did not vote.
The result of all this was the stunning swing to Farage’s Reform Party from the very same areas that voted for a catastrophic Brexit.
Farage is the only senior figure from either side of the Brexit campaign who is still in frontline politics, and no one laughs in astonishment when he continues to trash British institutions while getting rich on advertising gold bullion, speeches for MAGA and presenting a right-wing GB News show. According to the Guardian, his income since he was elected as an MP has now reached £2 million on top of his parliamentary salary. Maybe that’s the Trumpian appeal.
“I can do what I want,” he told the Financial Times in March, which explains why his tiny parliamentary party was able to buy up “Get Starmer Out” entire front pages across England on polling day. Reform’s real story is the veritable tsunami of dark money that has flown into Farage’s and the party’s coffers from a Thai-based crypto billionaire, Christopher Harborne. The connection? The presumption that when Farage becomes prime minister, his promise of a “Big Bang” reform could add tens of billions to crypto companies’ market value. And just like the US, he wants a British “Doge” and an Ice-style British deportation agency.
It’s the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme come to life, the internet parody of remorseful voters who end up being eaten themselves by their own party’s savage policies (“I never thought the leopards would eat my face,” said the person who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party). On Sunday, the Observer ran a striking front-page close-up of Harborne with the title “The man who Bought Britain” – brave, but three days after the election.
Would it have made any difference if the media had gone for the jugular earlier? The answer, whenever it comes, might not be to our liking.