Now Nigel Farage needs some Five Star thinking

Times

a day ago

There will never be enough space in a single column — or one newspaper — to recount the long list of dreamers, ideologues and eccentrics crushed beneath the ploughshare of Nigel Farage's ambition. So let's focus on 11 of them and come to Zia Yusuf later. In the spring of 2019, as Ukip descended to uncharted depths of chaos and extremism, its former leader hit the phones and charmed his colleagues in the European parliament. 'Join the Brexit Party,' he told them. 'You'll be guaranteed a seat.'
Thirteen of them did. A few weeks later, when Farage unveiled the slate of candidates that won the European elections at a canter and finished Theresa May, only two were present. The Brexit Party promised to 'change politics for good'. The unlucky 11 did not expect that mission to start with their careers.
Casual cruelty is the very stuff of party politics. Here, it also had an unarguable logic. 'We had to be different,' Richard Tice, Farage's deputy, later told the biographer Michael Crick, 'and be seen to be different.' Six years on, Reform UK is a clear first in every opinion poll, is even a viable force in Scotland and is regarded by Sir Keir Starmer, quite rightly, as his chief opponent at the next election. Yet its leadership is grappling with that same strategic question.
Until this week, all the evidence suggested Reform is different: different from the Brexit Party, different from Ukip and different from every other passing challenge to a party system many British voters now detest.
Reform's electoral base is different, for a start. Running for the Labour leadership in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn predicted that non-voters would do something unprecedented and come to the ballot box for socialism. He was right about the appetite for something different but the polls tell us it is Farage who now motivates the chronically disengaged.
But the biggest difference of all is how Reform has done it. There is no Limehouse Declaration, very little detailed policy and — like Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom — only one member who really matters. 'He's got this far,' says one Farage intimate, 'on vibes alone.'
Those vibes are the new zeitgeist of this divided country — or at least half of it. It is much more than a dislike of Starmer or contempt for the Conservative Party. This is a rejection of politics itself: the aloofness, the arid argot of platitude and cliche, the rotating cast of graduates who look and sound the same. Farage's voters think, with some justification, the mainstream has proven itself incapable of exercising even the most basic functions of liberal democracy, be that protecting bank balances or borders. Labour MPs know this only too well from doorstep rounds that now resemble Orwell's Two Minutes Hate. Even if the Tories turn to the viral influencer Robert Jenrick, their path to relevance remains too narrow for comfort.
How different can Farage afford to be? Reform has got this far by rejecting the old strictures of British party culture. Its payroll is a tenth of Labour's, which has around 400 staff.
Yusuf, the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur, ruled Reform's HQ at Millbank Tower with an iron fist over 18-hour days. Sackings came almost as readily as electoral triumphs, disgruntled juniors complained of micromanagement, no spokesman uttered a word without his licence and every decision he took was inevitably met with a chorus of online racism. Now, after weeks of backbiting, bitter briefing and an unseemly public row with Sarah Pochin, the new Reform MP who chose to use her first question to the prime minister to demand a burqa ban, he has quit.
The upshot is that Reform now looks uncomfortably similar to the old Farage parties, though for once the quitter has not fallen out with Nigel but everyone else. The departed chairman had more influence than any member. Indeed, until last year, in conscious homage to Wilders, there were none. Now there are 235,000 but they enjoy no meaningful power. Over the summer, I'm told, they will finally elect three representatives to Farage's party board but the leader and his appointees will enjoy a permanent majority.
Then there is policy, which Westminster assumes is a necessary precondition for political success. That which exists amounts to an offer we would recognise from the Continent: the hard line on migration and generosity on welfare is the meat and bread of Europe's radical right. But beyond that are vast expanses of empty space. Fellow travellers who submit well-intentioned policy papers to Reform HQ find themselves confronting a wall of silence. Convention dictates that this will all fall apart before the next election, unsteady under the weight of its own costs and contradictions — and, even before Yusuf's hasty exit, that is precisely what Downing Street was betting on.
But Farage does not do convention. We would not know his name if he did. After his success in last month's local elections, the leading man is now considering demands to hire a supporting cast, a credible shadow chancellor — an economist or another tycoon — to help cost his expensive policies and attack Rachel Reeves on the economy. These have taken on new urgency after Yusuf's abrupt departure. Who are they going to put on television, for one? The conventional route would be to declare that refugees are welcome and invite disgruntled Tories to flesh out his team. Suella Braverman's husband is already a Reform member. Surely a former home secretary would be a statement of intent? Jacob Rees-Mogg insists he is a Tory to his fingertips. But could he be tempted? These, I am told, are precisely the wrong questions. Defectors seeking asylum should look elsewhere. As Tice said in 2019, Reform strategists want to look different — and know they must be seen to be different, too.
No party is spoken of with such reverence within Farage's inner circle as Italy's Five Star Movement, alongside whose MEPs he once sat in Brussels. Led by the comedian Beppe Grillo and powered by the internet, they broke the Italian party system and circumvented a media largely controlled by Silvio Berlusconi. One of their innovations was to present their ministers, most of whom were not political insiders, to the electorate well ahead of time.
There may be 1,532 days until the next general election, as one weary Farage adviser told me this week, and what's left of Reform's leadership is reluctant to play Westminster's game. But on this week's evidence, a credible shadow cabinet from outside politics may well be what is needed to show they can still do things differently. Proving Farage can build a serious team, like that Italian comedian, may be the only thing that stops them becoming a joke.