Westminster ended last year in a strange place. Conversation was dominated by the question of whether Nigel Farage could become prime minister. No 10 grew weary of being asked how it would respond if Elon Musk donated $100m to Reform. Despite the Conservatives’ worst-ever election defeat, there was an ideological swagger to the right.
As well as Labour’s early woes, this reflected Donald Trump’s triumph in the US. Like Lenin’s Bolsheviks before him, the thinking ran, he would seek to export his revolution. Farage, who toasted Trump’s victory at Mar-a-Lago, would be one of the biggest beneficiaries.
Amid the frenzy – some in SW1 spoke as if the next election was a done deal – I tried to keep perspective. “[Farage’s] political association with Donald Trump is more of a hindrance than a help,” I wrote on 9 December. “While a majority of Reform voters (59 per cent) hold a favourable opinion of the president-elect, just 25 per cent of Britons do. Farage is the voice of a people rather than the people.”
The truth of this has become clearer in recent weeks. Rather than smoothing Farage’s path to No 10, the US president is throwing obstacles in his way. Research published earlier this month by More in Common shows that the Reform leader’s association with Trump is the biggest obstacle to voting for the party (cited by 37 per cent).
Even among Farage’s base, disapproval of the president is surging (largely due to Trump’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky). Over half of Reform supporters (53 per cent) view Trump unfavourably, an increase of 25 points in two weeks. Partly as a consequence, Farage’s own approval ratings have fallen. Only 26 per cent of the public now have a positive view of him, while 65 per cent have a negative view.
Pragmatic diplomacy – as displayed by Keir Starmer – is one thing. Voters accept the logic of working with the US to protect economic and security interests. A plurality (46 per cent), for instance, want Trump’s state visit to the UK to go ahead (only 32 per cent do not). But ideological kinship with the president could be politically lethal.
Across the world, Trump is reshaping electoral politics – but not in the way that some anticipated. The Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre – heralded by the right for his populist approach – has seen his party’s 20-point lead disappear in some polls. The new Liberal prime minister-designate Mark Carney is representative of a species some thought extinct – the technocratic insurgent (Emmanuel Macron, a former Rothschild banker, is perhaps the last such case).
As he fights a desperate rearguard action, Poilievre has adopted a new slogan: “Canada First”. The problem with a Nationalist International, it turns out, is that nationalism is hard to internationalise. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen are similarly scrambling to distance themselves from the US president without repudiating him entirely.
The discovery that Trump is electoral halitosis isn’t the only thing diminishing his golden facade. Shortly before the president’s inauguration, George Osborne spoke of the mood among Democrats he encountered in Silicon Valley: “There is a real feeling, and it’s quite a contrast to what’s happening in Europe and in the UK, that the animal spirits of capitalism have been fired up, that deregulation is coming, that further growth is coming, that this is, as he himself describes it, a new golden age for America.”
How, you might ask, is that working out? Since Trump entered office, US economic growth forecasts have been slashed (Goldman Sachs projects growth of just 1.7 per cent this year, down from 2.4 per cent) and stock markets have plummeted. The tech billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have collectively lost $209bn since his second term began. A majority of the US public (52 per cent) now disapprove of his performance to date – always an uncomfortable position for a populist to be in.
None of this means that the right’s advance is necessarily over. Poilievre may yet defeat Carney in the Canadian election – the appetite for change after a decade of Liberal Party government could still prove decisive. Reform could win the first by-election of this parliament – triggered by former Labour MP Mike Amesbury’s conviction for assault – in Runcorn and Helsby (one Labour strategist suggests the contest will be “incredibly difficult”).
But what all of this does mean – Farage’s American headache, the disorientation of fellow populists, the US economy’s woes – is that the curious spell Trump briefly cast on Westminster has been broken.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Why Britain isn’t working]
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