The traditional choice after winning an overwhelming victory in a by-election you triggered yourself would be to do some celebratory interviews or, at the very least, to turn up to the count. Nigel Farage, though, took a different path. There was no sign of a promised victory speech; the official line was that he had instead been “partying through the night”.
We all know what was going on here – Farage is simply happier hiding among supporters and GB News (if there is still any difference between the two) than he is risking scrutiny by outsiders who can’t be trusted not to ask, say, why exactly Essex Police knew nothing of the security threat he’d claimed they’d warned him about. Nonetheless, the suggestion he’d been up all night getting pissed with his mates brought to mind the old Farage: the man who likes a pint and a fag as much as he disliked Brussels and the nanny state. This was a key part of his myth, the thing which helped make him the patron saint of golf club bores. If you were the sort of person who liked proper binmen, watched Life On Mars thinking Gene Hunt was actually a bloody decent copper and reckoned things were better before political correctness went mad, then Farage wasn’t just right: he was fun. He just says it like it is, doesn’t he? Why’s she pulling that face? Can’t she take a joke?
Farage has stopped being fun. He now looks like he’s the one who can’t take a joke. He triggered the by-election through a lengthy speech more than a little reminiscent of Father Ted accepting the Golden Cleric (“And now, we move on to liars”). Throughout the campaign, he’s seemed genuinely angry at the ingratitude of a British electorate who don’t appreciate he could be earning so much more money elsewhere and towards the other parties who’ve declined to give him the opportunity to beat them fair and square. For a man who used to give the impression that he enjoyed being in politics, and who could have sidestepped this entire by-election simply by not bothering to call it, he seemed remarkably inconvenienced by the whole thing.
The big question – one of the big questions; others, about the dear leader’s finances, are also likely to return with a vengeance – is how much damage all this will do. The “hail fellow, well met” routine was grating, in part, to liberals, left-wingers, and other fans of human decency because it was such an effective way of repackaging some really quite nasty politics. There’s a chunk of the electorate who’ll tick a name on a ballot paper less because of ideology than because they seem like the sort of funny bloke who’d be nice to have a beer with. The side of himself Farage has been showing recently does not seem like a man who’d be fun to have a beer with. He seems like the sort of ranting lunatic you’d boycott a pub to avoid.
And so, just as there are some voters who liked the Boris Johnson they saw on Have I Got New For You, but disliked the guy whose Downing Street partied while the world locked down, it seems likely there are at least some potential Reform voters who’ll sour on a more openly resentful Farage. Right?
Alas, the saloon bar bore routine was only ever one part of the baffling appeal of Nigel Farage. The politics of the radical right is also the politics of disappointment and failure: the promise, to those who think their own declining relevance is a sign of a world gone wrong, that the clock can be turned back and their lost status be restored.
To these voters – often, though not always, men of a certain age – what looked to many of us like an embittered rant about establishment ingratitude might look like something else entirely. When Farage struggled to contain his fury that the “uniparty” wasn’t playing fair, he might also have spoken to those who also feel unrepresented and patronised by the establishment. When he claimed he was the most attacked politician of modern times, in apparent ignorance of the two literal murders, he may have spoken to those who feel their grievances aren’t taken seriously either.
Whether there are enough such votes to win power remains to be seen: the very public humiliation of Matthew Goodwin last February suggests some limit to the electoral appeal of open resentment. But it is notable that Farage gained both votes and share in his unnecessary by-election. And as well as Count Binface did, there are clearly many voters who felt that, by standing behind a novelty candidate, the establishment might as well have been mocking them. Nigel Farage has had a bad summer – but we can’t discount the possibility that the angriest man in British politics could yet have the last laugh.
[Further reading: Race riots have become an annual British event]
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Subscribe here to comment‘If you were the sort of person who liked proper binmen, watched Life On Mars thinking Gene Hunt was actually a bloody decent copper and reckoned things were better before political correctness went mad.’ I believe all of these things yet can’t stand Farage and would be categorised as hard left by the Guardian etc. Perhaps a nice indication of how metropolitan liberalism – which is fundamentally concerned with appearances – differs from socialism, which is concerned with class and material relations, the stuff that really matters.
“When he claimed he was the most attacked politician of modern times, in apparent ignorance of the two literal murders” – I keep reading this point being made, in the New Statesman and elsewhere, and the people making it seem to think they are very clever.
Suppose Politician A is attacked 100 times and not seriously hurt, and politician B is attached once and killed. Who was “most attacked”? On any reasonable reading of the words, it is politician A, even though the effect on politician B was worse.
Farage is clearly referring to the volume of attacks. Is there a politician who has been attacked more frequently?
If by “attacked” you mean criticised then perhaps so, although if that’s the metric then I suspect Dianne Abbott comes into the equation. In any case criticism and actual attack are different things and shouldn’t be confused, as Farage often does.