Nigel Farage is tired of being everyone else’s gadfly and now he has found true ambition. A member of parliament at the eighth time of trying, he wants to be Reform UK’s prime minister, and he believes he can do it.
There is no doubt that Farage is brilliantly successful at spooking his rivals. He has led a one-man party with a mission of making a mess of other parties. Brexit, his career cause, has brought on an identity crisis in the Conservative party that it will take more than the aimlessness of Kemi Badenoch to overcome. At the time of writing, Labour awaits the byelection in Runcorn and Helsby and the local elections with great alarm, in trepidation of what Reform might do in areas that Labour won back from the Conservatives only nine months ago.
Farage is behaving like a man who thinks he can win. At the launch of Reform’s local election campaign at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham, Farage rode onto the stage on a JCB, to signify his party’s bulldozer effect. Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, boomed out at the crowd: “Do you want to make Britain great again?”
Farage used his own speech to demand a British version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, although precisely which public services he would like to see cut was left unspecified. The mood was clearly designed as an echo of the rallies of the faithful conducted by Farage’s ally Donald Trump.
Two questions therefore arise. The first is whether Farage’s ambition is indeed viable, and the second is whether he would, after the example of Trump and autocrats the world over, seek to recast the political system by which he came to power.
The best defence, perhaps the only real defence, of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system—which provides exaggerated winners and losers for a given share of the vote—is that it has helped protect the nation from extremism. No populist intent on damage has been able to climb over the threshold needed for a parliamentary victory.
The horribly plausible fiction of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—in which the fascist-inclined aviation hero Charles Lindbergh wins the Republican nomination, takes the presidency and sets about dismantling American freedoms—could not happen in the UK, where the leader is not directly elected. Power vested in parliament, from which a government is then created by invitation of the monarch, has proved to be a strong bulwark against populism, perhaps more so than the elaborate plans set out by the founding fathers of the American republic in the Federalist Papers to combat what they called “Caesarism”.
Yet the barrier to the populists is lowering. For so long a bipolar event, British politics has split four ways. In 1951, when Winston Churchill’s Conservatives beat Clement Attlee’s exhausted Labour, the two won 97 per cent of the vote between them. In the 2024 general election, the combined Labour and Conservative vote had fallen to 57.4 per cent. This might just be the beginning.
At the time of writing, opinion polling from Election Maps shows Labour in second place on 24 per cent and the Tories down to a remarkable 22 per cent. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens between them take 23 per cent. But higher than ever before, in first place, is Reform, polling at 25 per cent. Affiliation will ebb and flow between the parties, but politics split four ways has never been seen before in the UK.
The closest historical parallel takes us back a century. The issue of the hour was imperial protection versus free trade and there was a new body, the fledgling Labour party, which claimed to speak for a nation that had been hitherto neglected. In November 1923, the Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had been in post for only six months when he gambled on a general election. His assumption was that his doctrine of imperial tariffs would prove more popular than the free trade positions of Labour and the Liberals.
Baldwin was both right and wrong. The Conservative party did win the most seats in parliament. At this point the Liberal leader, Herbert Asquith, made a mistake that is a lesson for our times. Believing that a minority Labour government would soon collapse and demonstrate the party’s unfitness for office, Asquith consented to underwrite a Labour government. In fact, though Labour only governed for 11 months, the mantle of office did not look incongruous. Asquith had helped the Labour party look viable.
Electoral success for Farage might still seem like a distant prospect for a party that won only five seats in 2024. But Reform does lie second in 98 seats, 89 of which were won by Labour. At the end of April, a translation of polls into seats by Electoral Calculus, a political consultancy, suggests that the Asquith error offers an important lesson. Labour would be the largest party on 199 seats but even with the support of the Liberal Democrats (54) would be a long way short of commanding a majority. The combined seat count of Reform (167) and the Tories (156) would be 323, which means the political right would beat the political left comfortably.
The question might be very simple: will Badenoch, or Robert Jenrick, or whoever leads the Tories into the next election, be prepared either to uphold Farage or to go into government with him? No doubt another election would follow quickly—there is no overall majority for anyone at the moment—but it would do so after Farage had used the mantle of office to his advantage. It might once have been an outlandish possibility, but the question must be faced. The question is not whether Farage could end up in government. It is instead: what would happen if he did?
For the moment, Farage’s political credo is a mixture of populist and nationalist slogans and short-term chicanery. His courting of the steel unions and sudden conversion—or at least the absence of any ideological hostility—to steel nationalisation show that his politics are fluid.
There is no systematic process within Reform for coming to policy positions. These positions are simply decreed by the leader, and so any previously published statement could be an unreliable guide to what a Farage government is inclined to do. That said, “Our Contract With You”, the Reform manifesto for the 2024 general election, paraded a familiar mix of lavish spending pledges, cultural bemusement and irritation with institutions.
Farage is not averse to an uncosted promise. His manifesto pledged a further £2bn for the criminal justice budget, 10,000 more prison places and 40,000 new police officers. He will tackle a shortage of doctors and nurses by offering frontline NHS and social care workers employment with a basic tax rate of zero for three years. There will be tax relief of 20 per cent on all private healthcare and insurance and a voucher for private treatment for any patient unable to arrange a GP appointment within three days, a consultant within three weeks or an operation within nine weeks.
But it is the way that Farage turns economic hardship into cultural resentment that makes him a powerful and dangerous player. His signature issue has always been immigration. Even when he was ostensibly obsessed with the European Union—to the extent of naming his party Brexit—his main preoccupation was immigration.
A Reform government would create a Department of Immigration with a focus on deportations and offshore processing. Foreign workers would be subject to a National Insurance rate of 20 per cent (the standard rate is 13.8 per cent). Reform would require five years of residency and employment before anyone was entitled to claim benefits, and no undocumented asylum seekers would be permitted to remain.
All populist leaders take political energy from cultural issues in which they place themselves on the side of the common sense of the people, against the uncomprehending elites. This is a standard Farage tactic too, and the Reform manifesto was notable not so much for the strangeness of its judgements, but for the salience that cultural issues are given, and the tone of resentment with which they are covered.
So, a Reform government would initiate a ban on “transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools” and a ban on social transitioning, such as pronoun swapping. The 2010 Equalities Act—a shrine to diversity, equality and inclusion rules, according to Reform—would be scrapped. Reform also managed to find within the Online Safety Act the divisive influence of critical race theory which, in the account given of it by Reform, is the academic accusation that racial bias is endemic in western institutions because they have been primarily designed and administered by white people. There would be a Free Speech Bill to “stop left-wing bias and politically correct ideology”.
This would spell trouble for the BBC licence fee, which the Reform team regards as a form of taxation without representation in pursuit of a biased liberal view of the world.
All of this overheated saloon bar prejudice is permissible under the rules and conventions of the British state as they stand, but it is a characteristic of parties of the populist right that they project an air of constant beleaguerment. They become a danger to the liberal democratic political settlement when the populist begins to believe his own rhetoric.
The populist leader is apt to conclude that the rigged system is itself the problem, of which all these cultural issues are merely the symptom. Once this conclusion has been reached, the institutions of the state are in the firing line.
On the face of it, Reform purports to be a constitutionally proper party. It is, after all, predicated on a defence of parliamentary sovereignty. As its constitution states: “The only laws that should apply within the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom are those wholly made by the Parliament of the United Kingdom”. Yet that does not mean Farage thinks the British state works to that end.
He endorses a theme of recent Liz Truss speeches, that a conspiratorial cabal of liberals in the BBC and the civil service control the country, irrespective of who is in office. Hence Reform would seek to bring forward a new Bill of Rights and a comprehensive Free Speech Bill. The UK would also leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which Farage sees as a restraint on sovereignty, particularly in relation to immigration and the deportation of foreign criminals.
There is enough in this rhetoric to hint at the direction Farage might take, particularly given the company he keeps. The annual National Conservative Conference (NatCon)—which was made notorious this year when the mayor of Brussels briefly and foolishly tried to prevent it meeting—is a gathering of the democratic backsliders. Farage gave a keynote address and so did Viktor Orbán, Hungarian prime minister since 2010 and the patron saint of European populists.
In an infamous speech on “illiberal democracy” in 2014, Orbán set the template: “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organised, reinforced and in fact constructed. And so, in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”
Orbán rewrote the Hungarian constitution without consent from the opposition. He narrowed the scope of jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court and ensured that his Fidesz party would have a majority of appointees. He put Fidesz loyalists in control of a new press authority, the banks and state companies. Media outlets were either transformed into government mouthpieces or shut down.
The same process is under way in Turkey, Serbia and Georgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) introduced a series of constitutional amendments in 2017 that weakened parliamentary oversight and centralised vast powers in the hands of the president. Freedom of expression has been seriously curtailed. In Serbia, the president, Aleksandar Vučić, has suppressed civil society organisations, weakened the judiciary and interfered in elections. In Georgia, the Georgian Dream party scored an implausibly good result in the October 2024 election, during which there were widespread reports of misuses of administrative resources, voter intimidation and coercion.
The common motif is that these are all palace revolutions. There are no tanks in the streets, no arrests at night by hooded thugs in the pay of the leader’s courtiers. The modern authoritarian presses on the fragilities of a democratic state until it cracks. Most alarming of all, there are serious flaws in the older democracies too. The collapse of Indian democracy has been predicted ever since the country’s independence in 1947, but it now faces the threat of its own prime minister. Narendra Modi exerts an undemocratic influence over appointments to the security services, tax authorities and the media. Political and human rights activists, particularly from minority communities, have faced judicial harassment and arrests under anti-terrorism and sedition laws.
Then, of course, there is what Farage himself regards as an exemplar. People close to the Reform leader say he has been studying closely the blizzard of executive orders that Trump has signed early in his second term as US president. Farage admires Trump’s conservative chutzpah, and shares with the president the quintessential populist conviction that he and he alone is the true voice of the people.
This, in the end, is why a populist leader can undermine democratic procedures without an outbreak of bad conscience. It is because—and this applies to the Farage world view—the populist regards himself as the universal repository of a democratic value, to which any time-bound procedure or modus operandi can only ever be an approximation.
And yet, surely this could not happen here, could it? The standard retort to all these worrying instances is that they take place in distant lands, far from the quiet exceptionalism of a UK that has always admired itself, and been admired, for the gentle stability of its politics. There is good historical weight to our complacency but, in truth, the barriers to populist degradation are lower than we think. The populist autocrat works by corroding from within.
In September 2022, the EU declared that Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy and is now an electoral autocracy. This is reminiscent of the 1976 Dimbleby Lecture given by the late Lord Hailsham, in which he lamented the prospect of an “elective dictatorship” prevailing in the UK. Hailsham’s argument has usually been seen as a salutary political warning, but a long way from a description of the facts.
But if the US can slide towards authoritarian politics, why assume it cannot happen to the UK? Indeed, it is possible that British exceptionalism could be the best ally of a determined populist. US politics in Trump’s second term is shaping up to be a running contest between the president and the constitution.
In Britain, those defences are tacit and unwritten. It may be that the ambiguity and the flexibility of the unwritten British constitution—the very virtues always trumpeted by its advocates—are the weaknesses that can be exploited by a populist. “Our virtues are most
frequently but vices disguised,” said La Rochefoucauld.
Any tendency towards complacency should have been dispelled by the creeping corrosion of the constitution that has been practised by Conservative governments since 2016. A disdainful attitude to democratic ways and means is not an invention of Farage’s. Senior Tories have undermined the independent institutions of the judiciary, the BBC and the civil service time and again. When the government was forced, by the 2017 Gina Miller legal case, to seek parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 as a prelude to leaving the EU, Liz Truss, then the lord chancellor and justice secretary, refused to speak in favour of judicial process.
Perhaps the most egregious constitutional vandal was Boris Johnson. In response to his attempt to prorogue parliament and so forestall discussion of Brexit, the Supreme Court was forced to remind the prime minister of the constitutional status quo. In its judgment of September 2019, the court wrote: “The House of Commons exists because the people have elected its members. The government is not directly elected by the people (unlike the position in some other democracies).”
Johnson was forced to resign as an MP in June 2023 in advance of the conclusion of the House of Commons privileges committee that he had held the House in contempt when replying to inquiries about lockdown gatherings in Downing Street. Johnson’s arrogant and embittered response is the classic populist archetype: “Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court… I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt under way…” As if that were not bad enough, Johnson went on to say that the privileges committee should not be using its powers “to mount what is plainly a political hit job on someone they oppose”.
Johnson turned the Conservatives into constitutional cavaliers, and once round-headed figures such as Truss and Rishi Sunak were tempted to follow his lead. The Rwanda Bill, in which Sunak’s government claimed Rwanda was a safe country to receive asylum seekers, displayed a shocking disregard for truth. The Public Order Act 2023, which places undue restrictions on the right to protest, is the sort of bad legislation on which a committed populist can easily build.
In her 49 days as prime minister, Truss presided over the ideological sacking of the permanent secretary at the Treasury and a refusal to allow the Office for Budget Responsibility to assess Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget. She gave a speech to her party conference of impeccable populist charlatanry in which she identified everyone she did not like as part of an anti-growth coalition.
Since being forced from office, Truss has been, in effect, bidding to be a populist leader of the discontented, conspiracy-minded political right. In February 2024 she, quite wrongly, told the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Maryland that her premiership had been sabotaged by the British deep state. At the time of writing, Truss is reportedly in conversation with Farage about whether she could take a role with Reform.
There has been plenty of preparatory work done for the populist who wishes to disregard procedural constraints, which are, in any case, weaker than we might like. This is the predicament explored in Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick’s comprehensive and quietly frightening new book Could It Happen Here?: The Day a Prime Minister Refuses To Resign.
Hennessy and Blick’s imagined day of reckoning is a right-wing populist prime minister refusing to leave office after defeat at the polls. It triggers a revolution in fancy dress: “The Speaker refuses to take the Chair. They order the Clerks not to sit at the Table. The Mace is not carried into the Chamber.”
Hennessy and Blick show that the UK, the famously undocumented state, is guarded at a moment of crisis by nothing more than the “good chaps” theory that the people in power would act with integrity. But, in the event of a Farage victory, why would that assumption hold? Confronted with some bad chaps, the good chaps might fold one by one.
The Johnson years showed there are enough ministers prepared to trade propriety for power. It would surely be naive to expect the cabinet secretary to act contrary to the advice of a political master. The comptroller and auditor general must ensure that money is spent in accordance with the will of parliament, but this official is outranked by the chancellor of the Exchequer, as is the governor of the Bank of England. We might look, in desperation, to the speaker and the clerks of the House, or perhaps the chief of the defence staff. In reality, none of them would have an obvious mandate to act. It is hard to imagine Lindsay Hoyle emulating William Lenthall, who in 1642 stood in defence of the five members of the House that King Charles I was seeking to arrest.
At the apex of constitutional theory stands Charles III, although the last time a British monarch used the reserve power to dismiss a prime minister was in 1834. If an election were widely thought to have been illegitimate, the immediate question would be how the king would react. If the prime minister were refusing to relinquish power, the king could, in theory, use his power to dissolve parliament and trigger another general election. In the fevered atmosphere of the moment, this might look like the ultimate establishment stitch-up.
One obvious way to fix an unwritten constitution is to write it down. But there is no reason to suppose that a determined populist would be bound by a constitutional document. The Democratic party in the US tried to arrest Trump’s first term by using quasi-judicial processes, such as the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. It didn’t work, because a state operates more on tacit understandings than on appeals to constitutional procedure. In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt show that American politics works in large part on “forbearance”—the ethos of integrity in which due process is observed. If Farage and other populists do not play by those rules, much as Trump did not play by those rules, what can be done?
When the tacit laws do not operate, there is no option other than to use formal power—the most effective of which is the law. The UK Supreme Court did, after all, force Johnson to desist in his attempted prorogation of parliament. It may be too that, in the exhausting encounter between the US president and the rules of the republic, the constitution holds. But we would be wise to be ready. Hennessy and Blick call for a commission on the UK constitution, to examine the options in advance of such a moment. That seems a sensible move.
In the meantime, therefore, it would make sense for politicians to do something that does not come naturally, and cooperate with the other parties. Politics is a rivalrous trade, and the Tories loom like the enemy to Labour and vice versa. Yet the day might soon come when their differences seem trivial. Neither party should be tempted to cooperate with the extremist prime minister, but they ought to be ready to cooperate with one another. We might one day need a government of the national constitution.
By refusing to comply with democratic norms, by refusing to accede to court verdicts, by taking the fight to free institutions such as universities, a figure like Farage, drunk on his own power, could test the British constitution to its limits.
Yet there is another danger: the second coming of a politician we know already to be a constitutional vandal. Farage’s influence might yet be seen to its greatest effect through Johnson who, with the Reform leader at his back, might be the real danger in a combination of populist arrogance with the historic weight of an established party. As the former prime minister passes his partial retirement in isolation somewhere near Didcot, we can be ready for the day that some rough beast, its hour come back at last, is slouching towards Westminster to be reborn.
