Why does Nigel Farage get to play British politics on easy mode?

The Guardian

21 hours ago

In today's rundown, discontented Britain, politics is supposed to be hard. Deep national problems need to be solved, but voters are impatient and often contemptuous of politicians. Past mistakes are rarely forgiven. Promises are treated with scepticism. The costs of policies are scrutinised and often resented. Attempts to set out priorities, such as the government's spending review this week, face endless questioning.
Disagreements inside political parties, meanwhile, are seen as signs of weakness and division. MPs with outside interests are seen as greedy and uncommitted. As for the minority who survive these pressures long enough to have a significant career – the electorate usually grows bored with them. Few retain its interest beyond a dozen or so years.
Nigel Farage first became an elected politician in 1999. Since then, disillusionment with his profession has intensified to probably unprecedented levels. Yet few, if any, of the unforgiving rules of British politics seem to apply to him, or to his latest vehicle, Reform UK. They appear to be playing politics on easy mode.
His Commons appearances are infrequent, his extracurricular activities prolific, his party's internal culture chaotic and its plans to 'fix' Britain largely theoretical and uncosted. His one concrete policy achievement is Brexit, now widely considered disastrous or disappointing.
In a country often said to have had enough of metropolitan privilege, he is a wealthy, privately educated southern Englishman who used to work in the City of London. In a country supposedly sick of political rancour, he consistently falls out with colleagues. In a country that supposedly wants politicians to be more modest and better at apologies, his public manner is self-satisfied and unrepentant.
Yet since winning only five seats at last year's election, Reform UK has increasingly dominated the political conversation. Farage's constant speeches and press conferences, complete with self-congratulatory smiles and jokes, receive huge coverage for a tiny Westminster party. Few Labour or Tory policies feel designed without actual or potential Reform voters in mind. And as the traditional main parties have fallen back in the polls, Reform has overtaken them. Winning power has become a possibility.
No new British party has ever done this. Even Labour, with the trade union movement behind it, took a quarter of a century from its foundation to reach government. Why is Reform seemingly finding politics so easy?
The usual way of explaining its rise is through the troubled state of the country, the main parties' inadequacies and Farage's talent for exploiting political and social crises. These have all played a big part, but so have less examined factors.
The design of our political system is one of them. Supposedly hostile to new parties, it can, in fact, be too hospitable to them if their popularity is not yet reflected in parliament, and they can, therefore, avoid taking on tricky Commons roles. Because Reform is not the official opposition, Farage doesn't have to ask regular prime minister's questions, and doesn't have to build a coherent critique of the government – and thus also expose himself to its potentially damaging counterattacks. While Kemi Badenoch struggles to rubbish Keir Starmer's government, and Starmer rubbishes past Tory governments in reply, Farage can sit back, seemingly above the Westminster squabbles many voters dislike.
An MP for just a year, he barely has a Commons or constituency record that opponents can attack. He and Reform can act as the opposition in an amorphous and potent rather than narrowly parliamentary sense: as a repository for the hopes and fantasies of a wide range of voters that the country can be rescued – 'reformed' – by a radically different government.
Something a little like this has happened before, with the creation and brief ascendancy of the Social Democratic party (SDP) in the early 1980s. Allied with the Liberals, the SDP won byelections and surged ahead of Labour and the Tories in the polls. Some predicted the SDP would replace Labour, as some predict Reform will replace the Tories now. Yet unlike Reform, the SDP had been founded by familiar Commons figures, all former Labour ministers, and this connection to the mainstream meant that its fresh, insurgent feel could not be sustained. Its popularity faded.
Less associated with Westminster, Reform may prove harder for the established parties to suppress or co-opt. Farage also enjoys an advantage not available to the SDP: strong rightwing media support. In order to get the politics it wants, or to obstruct the politics it doesn't want, this historically dominant part of the media almost always backs a rightwing party. With the Tories' deep unpopularity, poor current leadership and terrible recent record in government, Reform seems a better prospect. While it presents itself as a revolt against the established order, in reality its anti-immigration and anti-diversity policies seek to protect or restore traditional social structures. It's an easy cause for conservative journalists to support.
What might make Reform's life harder? Possibly, having to run the councils it won in May's local elections, during a period of tight public spending. Yet given Reform's ability to evade responsibility, it's also possible that problems at its councils will be blamed on the government instead.
Farage may finally start to age, politically speaking, as he becomes more of a Westminster fixture, and also engages with – or ignores – the problems of his deprived constituency, Clacton in Essex. His 21 years as a member of the European parliament to an extent preserved his novelty – like his movement's metamorphosis from the UK Independence party to the Brexit party to Reform UK – since few Britons followed its proceedings. Now, as a purely domestic politician, he gets more constant publicity. Although he seems to relish it, it could bring overexposure. In the most recent polls, Reform's popularity had stopped rising.
But waiting for him and his party to lose their novelty is a risky and passive strategy for Reform's opponents, with the next election at most four years away. Anxious Labour activists and election strategists increasingly talk about promoting a 'stop Reform' message. Yet with Labour having weakened its anti-Reform credentials by sometimes echoing its language and policies, that message might only resonate with enough voters if Labour forms some kind of electoral alliance with more consistently anti-Reform forces: the Greens and Liberal Democrats, perhaps even Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National party and leftwing independents. That would be uncharted territory for the tribal Labour party. But with Reform enjoying an ascendancy that our political and electoral systems never anticipated, we are in uncharted territory already.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist