Bullying allegations, police investigations and parliamentary expulsions – the recent feud between Rupert Lowe and his former colleagues in Reform UK is almost routine for any political party led by Nigel Farage. His public life has involved a series of bruising factional disputes and personality clashes with prominent members of his various parties. But he has always emerged victorious: ex-colleagues such as Godfrey Bloom, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Suzanne Evans and the Tory defectors Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell live on largely as vivid footnotes to the history of British populism, while Farage remains its great anti-hero.
His apparent invulnerability to challenge matters more than any temporary scrap. Farage’s enduring and divisive presence has arguably been the most important feature of 21st-century British politics. Under the Reform banner, it has now made him (according to some polls) the popular leader of the most popular political party in the country. In the run-up to this year’s local elections, the only question has been the scale of the Reform surge. As Reform cements its regional presence through local government, establishing the networks and strongholds of a truly nationwide political party, talk of it winning hundreds of MPs and having a role in the next government no longer seems fantastical.
Although another general election is not due until 2029, both Britain’s major parties find themselves in a brutal struggle with these populist insurgents. Labour, whose hesitant performance in government derives in part from a dizzy uncertainty about its mandate – its huge parliamentary majority resting precariously on a mere third of the popular vote – already has the bedraggled appearance of a depleted administration. Alarmingly, Reform’s populist message appears to resonate with Labour’s core working-class base, without which it might shrivel into an uncompetitive party of the urban intelligentsia. Tory anxieties are similarly existential, indeed more so. The Conservatives – reduced at July’s election to a rump of 121 MPs – face the daunting possibility of extinction. According to several tracker polls in recent months by Techne UK, between 23 and 33 per cent of those who said they voted Conservative in July have thought about backing Farage’s party. At this rate of attrition, it becomes a question of when – not if – Reform displaces the Conservatives as the main party of the right.
The stunning rise of Farage and the various parties he has dominated over the past quarter-century – first the UK Independence Party (Ukip), then from 2018 the Brexit Party, rebranded in 2021 as Reform UK – parallels political trends across the Western world. Nativist anti-immigrant parties have displaced traditional parties of the centre right in France, the Netherlands and Italy. Populism – mostly on the right, but sometimes on the left, and often positioned as the voice of authentic working-class concerns – has disorientated politicians across the political spectrum. The mainstream left, such as the Social Democrats in Germany, no longer seems naturally attuned to the concerns of ordinary people. In the US Farage’s friend Donald Trump and his Maga followers have hijacked the Republican Party. Everywhere one looks, the momentum in politics seems to lie with illiberal populist movements and nativist start-ups.
Explanations for this widespread phenomenon tend to be correspondingly broad-based. Globalisation has been devastating for many regions that flourished in earlier phases of Western industrialisation, but are now scenes of disused factories and exhausted coalfields. Mass migration has led to further dislocation, especially for the populations of these left-behind places. This is exacerbated by “welfare chauvinism”: the benevolence that legitimises welfare states appears to extend only to one’s own kind. Commentators have also noticed across the West a cultural backlash against what is perceived as the hyper-liberalism of university-educated elites. Liberal identity politics – an emphasis on the rights of minorities, on multiculturalism and on a green agenda – as well as the opposition to it are both products of a turn against materialism, whereby an emphasis on values and identities is replacing a class politics based on economic management, wealth distribution and the burden of taxation.
Frictions between the generations and growing divergences between male and female voting patterns compound these trends. Older voters are dismayed at the whirl of social change, while an aggressive new form of masculinity among younger males – the attitudes associated with the online manosphere – questions what it regards as the lopsidedly feminised cultures of educational institutions and workplaces. Yet, whereas in previous eras traditional media outlets were able to filter out obnoxious opinion, social media algorithms now place a premium on provocation, which has the effect of bringing rowdy populism from the margins into the mainstream.
Farage taps into all these trends, and, if not quite an international star, his occasional performances at Maga events have endeared him to Trump and earned the displeasure of Hillary Clinton. But Farage is also a reversion to an earlier type of disruptor in domestic politics: the unconventional popular tribune.
Tribunes were originally elected officials in the ancient Roman republic assigned the duty of standing up for the interests of ordinary plebeians against those of the wealthy patrician class. Throughout modern British political history, various figures have functioned like tribunes in the challenges they have posed to the received wisdom of established political elites. Sometimes these tribunes have operated outside parliament, in pressure groups and other extra-parliamentary organisations; sometimes they have played a role in parliament itself, as independents or as frontmen for small parties on the fringes of political life; and sometimes they have operated within the major parties, producing significant convulsions in our politics.
Farage has generated major changes in the political weather from outside the mainstream parties. If he can hold Reform together, he has an opportunity to reconfigure a two-party system that – notwithstanding various Liberal revivals and the localised insurgency of the SNP – has held for over a century.
As a chauvinistic champion of traditional English liberties, Farage is a throwback, reminiscent of earlier xenophobic tribunes such as John Wilkes or Horatio Bottomley. Wilkes, who became MP for Aylesbury in 1757, exemplified an emphatically English strain of political radicalism, one tinged with populist bigotry. In the earlEarl of Bute (court favourite of the new king, George III) became for a short period the first Scottish prime minister of the British state, Wilkes launched a pointedly titled weekly magazine, the North Briton, which ran a virulent campaign of Scotophobia. At the time, dislike of the Scots was understandable. “Britain” was only a recent creation of the Union of 1707, and in England there was as yet scant popular identification with the idea of Britishness. More specifically, the British state had teetered during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, when a detachment of troops at Finchley was all that stood between an army of Scots Jacobite invaders at Derby and the capital.
Wilkes was expelled from parliament in 1764 for seditious libel. His profile as a radical champion of English liberties was at its height during the years 1768-69 when he was returned to Westminster by the voters of Middlesex at a general election and three subsequent by-elections. On each occasion the authorities rejected the popular result and excluded Wilkes from the Commons. Only in 1774 was a re-elected Wilkes at last allowed to resume his career in parliament.
The rakish Wilkes, like Farage, had a chequered hinterland. Farage has built his persona around booze, cigarettes and laid-back loucheness; nor has he suffered much political damage on account of details that have come to light about his private life or his casualness about financial protocols when a member of the European Parliament. Wilkes, similarly, earned notoriety for his involvement in the blasphemous proceedings of the Hellfire Club at Medmenham, for his womanising, and for the bawdy, semi-pornographic poem he co-authored, “An Essay on Woman”. But this aura of scandal did nothing to dent Wilkes’ popularity with the London crowd. Farage seems to have the same charmed capacity to defy the norms of political propriety – and get away with it. Farage’s confident reply when a reporter asked him, on his first election to the European Parliament, whether he would be corrupted by “the endless lunches, lavish dinners and champagne receptions” was: “No – I’ve always lived like that.”
Horatio Bottomley’s career was – if anything – even more colourful than that of Wilkes or Farage. Not only was he a chauvinistic demagogue, Bottomley was also a conspicuously successful businessman and magazine proprietor, who, having overspent on mistresses, racehorses and champagne, was for a time excluded from parliament as a bankrupt, and later imprisoned as a swindler. In 1906, the same year Bottomley entered parliament as a somewhat nominal Liberal MP, he also set up John Bull magazine, of which he was also editor. As the title suggests, John Bull catered to the tastes of patriotic, unpretentious Englishmen. It fed its working-class readership a diet of horse racing, football, jingoism and pride in the muscular freedoms of English life.
In the early stages of the First World War, John Bull sold a million copies an issue – the largest circulation of any contemporary British magazine. But by then Bottomley had been forced to leave parliament on account of his bankruptcy. During the war, Bottomley was ferociously anti-German and also agitated on behalf of “the man in the street” against liquor controls. He returned to the Commons as an independent MP in the general election of 1918. His career finally unravelled in 1922, when he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for fraud. Ironically, given his financial swindles, a core element of Bottomley’s populism was his call for a new form of government: an assembly of businessmen.
Bottomley’s populist successors on the exotic fringes of modern politics include Reverend Ian Paisley, the fiercely anti-Catholic Ulsterman and founder of the Democratic Unionist Party, and George Galloway, a maverick Labour left-winger who has subsequently won election to parliament for Respect and then for the Workers Party of Great Britain. But other tribunes have not merely added a dash of vivid eccentricity to British political life – they have functioned as midwives of new political eras.
In recent history, four populist tribunes – Enoch Powell, Tony Benn, Alex Salmond and now Farage – have arguably had a more dramatic and transformational impact on political life than most of our recent prime ministers. Powell was a direct influence on Farage, who reminisces fondly about the time he chauffeured Powell to Berkshire to address a meeting of the Anti-Federalist League (the forerunner of Ukip) during the Newbury by-election campaign in 1993. In 1968 Powell, a Conservative MP, was sacked from the shadow cabinet of Edward Heath for his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he described the immigration of blacks and Asians from the Commonwealth as like “watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. In protest at Heath’s decision, a thousand dockers marched on parliament demanding Powell’s reinstatement.
Benn began his political career as a technocratic moderniser, but during the 1970s became a left-wing populist: campaigning for a democratising overhaul of the Labour Party’s procedures, workers’ control of industry, and Britain’s departure from the European Economic Community. The havoc Benn caused provoked the formation of a breakaway Social Democratic Party in 1981, which, by splitting the anti-Conservative vote, assisted Margaret Thatcher’s victories in the elections of 1983 and 1987.
Salmond became leader of the Scottish National Party in 1990 when it had only five MPs, but with an instinct for headline-catching bravado and a tribune’s capacity to present himself persuasively as the voice of the Scottish people, made the SNP the dominant party of government in a devolved Scotland and came close to breaking up the UK.
Farage is self-aware about his place in British political tradition, but the way he positions himself in relation to his antecedents is at times surprising. This is because Farage – though at one time a member of the Conservative Party – presents himself as a classical liberal. In his memoirs he stresses the influence on his ideological formation of John Stuart Mill’s argument that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. Farage has described these as “sacred words” and maintains that his political creed is one centred on the individual’s right to “self-determination”. Speaking to the New Statesman in 2014, Farage also identified with the legacy of Richard Cobden and John Bright, the 19th-century free-trading liberals who in 1838 launched the Anti-Corn Law League to campaign against tariffs on imported wheat.
Ukip began its life as the Anti-Federalist League, its founder, Alan Sked, paying deliberate homage to the legacy of the Anti-Corn Law League. But he changed the name of the party to Ukip when he realised that late-20th century voters did not catch the allusion or the liberal, free-trading resonances of the name. Sked, too, was a classical liberal who later fell out with Farage when Sked’s creation was dragged towards the xenophobic right. Yet, his dislike of Sked notwithstanding, Farage remains keen to parade the classical liberal pedigree of his politics. Indeed, the very name of Farage’s current party, Reform UK, evokes memories of the 19th-century movement for political reform, and the extension of the franchise in the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884. (Farage had mulled using the “Reform Party” name as far back as the early days of Ukip.) Among Margaret Thatcher’s less successful gambits was her call for national renewal by way of a return to “Victorian values”. By contrast, Farage, whose interventions in public controversy are often offensively crass, invokes Reform in a manner that is for once subtle and underplayed.
At an earlier stage of his career, when commentators thought that Ukip was trawling for votes among the same sort of loutish xenophobes as the overtly racist British National Party, Farage took pains to identify differences of substance as much as conduct: “They’re authoritarian, we’re libertarian. I believe in free trade and globalism.” We are yet to see how Farage’s supposed core beliefs survive his flirtation with Trump, whose authoritarianism, America First attitude and hostility to free trade appear to be diametrically opposed to the values of his main British cheerleader. Will Farage – who parades his bloody-minded independence from political fads and fashions, but is not averse to shape-shifting opportunism – succumb to the charms of the tariff-loving American president? Might Farage end up resembling another disruptor in British politics, Joseph Chamberlain, the Edwardian champion of imperial tariffs, who managed in the course of his party-swapping career both to split the Liberals and to drive free-traders such as Winston Churchill out of the Conservative Party?
It is the customary fate of political tribunes to miss out on the highest posts in government, and surely not a coincidence that our most telling aphorism about political disappointment was coined by a populist. Enoch Powell remarked: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” The dash and colour that the likes of Wilkes, Bottomley and Galloway have brought to politics are as likely to lead to personal implosion as to successful careers at the heart of government. However, in their very disruptiveness and capacity to communicate alternatives to the status quo, tribunes foresee the possibility of future vindication, sometimes long after their own demise. The wave of English nationalism that produced the Brexit referendum result of 2016 seemed like a colossal posthumous ratification of Powell’s political project; yet Powell himself had died in 1998 and his parliamentary career ended on the outer margins of British politics with his defeat as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down in the general election of 1987.
Rarely, of course, does the populist tribune become prime minister, though it sometimes happens in a crisis when the normal conventions of politics are in abeyance. The energetically radical Welsh Liberal, David Lloyd George, ousted his more languid fellow Liberal, Herbert Asquith, from the premiership midway through the First World War, when wartime pressures were compounded by the circumstances of coalition government. Boris Johnson, too, made it to Downing Street, but only amid the shambles of the Brexit negotiations, which strained party loyalties and the patience of the wider electorate.
More commonly, the tribune flourishes as the straight-talking alternative to the less colourful pragmatists who tend to monopolise high office. While these pragmatists earn the contempt of saloon-bar blowhards for their openness to compromise, conciliation of interests and punctilious observance of domestic and international laws, they nonetheless constitute a cadre of reliable personnel capable of operating the ship of state.
Elon Musk’s cack-handed shakedown of the US state shows what happens when inexperienced braggarts are entrusted with demanding roles within a government machine. The populist tribune flourishes precisely because he or she is unburdened by responsibility. The corollary is that in the UK party elites and voters recognise this awkward fact, and recoil from the risk of allowing outspoken mavericks to form governments.
But unlike other populist tribunes, Farage can envisage two potential routes to Downing Street: either as the leader of a party that wrecks the Conservatives and supplants them as the main body of opposition to Labour, or through an amalgamation of Reform and the Conservatives. At various points in his career Farage has engaged in backstairs negotiations with the Tories; sometimes to discuss the possibility of an electoral pact, at others with a view to finding a safe seat for himself. He is unscrupulous and far from fastidious in the way he chooses then discards the vehicles of his own self-advancement. Nothing should be ruled out: in Farage’s world there is no forbidden fruit.
[See also: Can Reform grow up?]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall