Are Brexiteers Set To Rally ’Round Nigel Farage, Once More?
Polling shows that the party built by the Brexit advocate, Reform UK, is a mere 10 points behind the floundering Tories, as Farage contemplates a leadership role among British conservatives.
He’s back. Not quite, but even rumors of Nigel Farage’s return to frontline United Kingdom politics are the stuff of nightmares for the Conservative government. And the stuff of dreams, for conservative-minded Britons.
“The Brexit champion is being lined up to lead Reform UK’s election charge,” the Daily Express reports, “and is said to be on a mission to finish off Rishi Sunak.” Though the prime minister has been more than capable of finishing off his own political career.
Mr. Sunak was supposed to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Yet Boris Johnson and Liz Truss at least won the confidence of the Tory membership — if but for a time — and none have done good by Brexit.
A smaller state, lower taxes, more personal liberty, and a secure border were among the myriad promises of Brexit. The Conservative government has reneged on all of them. For its perfidy, it languishes in popular opinion.
Present WeThink polling shows that the party built by Mr. Farage, Reform UK, is a mere 10 points behind the Tories at 20 percent. Reform’s current leader, Richard Tice, predicts a further 5-point rise in their fortunes, at the prospect of Mr. Farage returning to the fray.
Reform already got a boost with the defection of Conservative former deputy leader Lee Anderson, who fell foul of his party on the issue of immigration. Mr. Anderson “crossed the floor” to become Reform’s first sitting MP in the Commons — with speculation that additional Tory defections will follow.
Alternative polls are no more promising for the Conservatives. A recent YouGov survey shows the Tories to be stagnant at 20 percent, and Labour and Reform at 44 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
Election Maps UK projects a Labour majority government at 443 seats, with the Conservatives losing nearly two-thirds of its current total, at 111 elected MPs.
Meanwhile, over at Conservative Central Office . . . Tories had prided themselves as the standard-bearers of patriotic traditional values. Instead, they deviated from the path of principle and pursued the ephemeral plaudits of the Establishment, at the expense of core supporters. The Conservative hierarchy did so with contempt, secure in their belief they were the only game in town.
Blinded by hubris, Conservatives forgot that it was Mr. Farage’s belief in United Kingdom independence from the European Union that instigated Prime Minister Cameron’s referendum in 2016. And Mr. Farage’s yeoman efforts that shepherded the vote to success as others took the laurels.
Again, it was Mr. Farage and the predecessor to Reform UK — the Brexit Party — that forced a dithering Prime Minister May from office after leading Tories to devastating results in May 2019 European elections. She was replaced by Mr. Johnson, whose derring-do won the Conservatives a majority and got Brexit, battered and bruised, through Parliament.
That was the Conservative government’s high-water mark. The Tory tide has been receding ever since. Now, they are divided between those prepared to rally round the current head, Mr. Sunak, or those clamoring for anyone embodying popular appeal, whether that be the Commons leader, Penny Mordaunt, or the defense secretary, Grant Shapps. Seems any candidate likely to shift polling favorably can apply.
Even Mr. Farage himself. “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by ‘26. Very surprised,” he told PoliticsHome last October. Tory MPs may “think I’m joking,” but “I’m serious.”
Not everyone has missed this late-hour ludicrousness. “The idea that changing the Prime Minister now would make the Conservatives more popular, with an election in view, is madness,” Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg says. “It would be destructive.”
Especially when change at the top changes nothing. None of the putative replacements has a plan for “conservative” change in the governing program. Sound policy positions may exist, but on the backbenches, where they languish.
What the party’s populist hero, Benjamin Disraeli, said of Sir Robert Peel and his team, applies with equal condemnatory force to Mr. Sunak and Co. They have “tampered with the generous confidence of a great people and of a great party,” Dizzy decried. “A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.”
As for Nigel Farage, he may well rise to lead a coalition of conservatives by 2026. But the Conservative Party, its Brexit bona fides forever discredited, its day has set for the foreseeable future.
