The Royal Navy has protected our shores from many a terrifying foe down the centuries. Napoleon. The Kaiser. The Nazis. Now, if Reform UK get their way, the lads and lasses in navy blue will be tasked with seeing off what the Mail would have us believe is an even greater threat to Britain: some of the most desperate people on earth, being ferried across the Channel by criminal gangs, using what can only be described as dinghies. Puts the Battle of Jutland into perspective, doesn’t it?
Actually, to the best of my knowledge, not a single British-crewed yacht has yet come under attack from one of the small boats (a term that could in itself be thought to convey some information about the exact level of threat we’re talking about here). One might also suggest that, with the Russian shadow fleet on the prowl, now was perhaps not the best time to add to the RN’s to-do list.
But Nigel Farage is determined to change the subject after a summer so far split equally between scandals concerning his finances and a pitched battle with a man dressed as bin, so there he is, desperately trying to get back to playing the hits.
If distraction really was the point of the exercise, yesterday brought him good and bad news alike. The topic of the day was not, in a break with recent history, where exactly all that money came from, despite the news of yet another parliamentary investigation. (This one’s about Richard Tice.) All the questions instead concerned the tricky matter of whether Reform would be taking up Rupert Lowe’s generous offer of an electoral pact with his own even more reactionary Restore party.
To this the most likely answer is no: the two men detest each other, and the way the week so far has gone it certainly doesn’t feel like a heartwarming reconciliation is on the cards. The moment Farage told a press conference he had “opened the door to that conversation” by offering to call, Lowe immediately popped up on X to accuse him of lying. We’ve all in our time wriggled out of awkward conversations by pretending to get confused about who was actually meant to do the dialling, I’m sure; but if Farage really did think he was opening the door, it felt a lot like Lowe was slamming it again, in the hope of catching his opposite number’s fingers in the process.
It’s far from clear that Lowe’s generous offer of friendship was ever really intended to be taken seriously. It came with several conditions he knows Farage can’t meet: a commitment to mass deportations; the exclusion of former Tories from any future cabinet, which amounts to inviting Robert Jenrick to get even less subtle in his plotting; a promise to ban essentially anything that feels even a little bit Islamic, in a manner that would amount to making Islamophobia a matter of national policy. Were Farage to accept the pact, then Lowe would have dragged him reluctantly towards his own position and set himself up as a power player on the hard right. Were he to reject it, he’d be sending a hefty signal that the most radicalised right-wing voters should jump ship and follow Lowe. For the leader of Restore – a party with one MP but which just beat the Tories in the Greater Manchester mayoral election – this is win-win.
For Farage, though, it’s the opposite. Take the deal, and he’s not only empowered a rival but risks alienating the centre-right voters he likely needs to win to form a government. Reject it, and he risks alienating his own base. This is, you may recall, almost exactly what he spent the last decade doing for the Tories: dragging them rightwards, at the slight cost of making it increasingly impossible to govern. The poetic justice is delightful.
At least, it would be, did we not all have to live in this country. As hard as it is to imagine Farage and Lowe playing nicely, imagining Farage taking another three paces to his right is all too easy. Worse, if Lowe’s ploy works, it raises the prospect of someone one day doing to him what he did to the Tories, and the British right somehow becoming even more radicalised still. This is a truly terrifying prospect because, sooner or later, the right are going to win.
Little wonder, then, that Farage tried to return to his comfort zone and start talking about small boats; I’m half surprised he tried to distract us by talking about the investigation into Richard Tice. Really, at this point, he must be almost hoping to lose to that bin.
[Further reading: The revenge of Old Labour]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentHave any of those morons been in a care home or hospital lately? Mass deportations would lead to an instant collapse.
Specious argument. There’s no shortage of British people who can do these jobs. We have 1.76 million unemployed.
And foreign doctors were deliberately preferred over British doctors to such an extent that legislation was passed this year – the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026 – to give British doctors a better chance of being recruited. We had a situation where people were qualifying as doctors in the UK and couldn’t find work.
Does it assist to pretend that he thinks the ‘threat to Britain’ comes from potential dinghy attacks on the Navy? The Bin will come up with better arguments, I hope.