They would soon be gathering at a cavernous venue on the fringe of Britain’s troubled second city. Inside, their party had built a turquoise fantasia to welcome them. There were tractors and buses to climb aboard. George Finch, the laddish young leader of Warwickshire County Council, was striding about with a camera crew buttonholing attendees. Jeremy Kyle was seated on a circular dais, broadcasting a show live to the jumbotrons above our heads. You could buy some roast hog or fly a helicopter simulator or sign a book of condolences for Ann Widdecombe. On sale were pens and mugs and tea towels that showed Nigel Farage doing the dishes and proclaiming: “Washing up is… boring, boring, boring.”

Conference was supposed to be a chance for “normal people” to gather — and for party leaders to unveil their serious plan for power, ready to be implemented on day one of a Reform government. Certainly, a change in conversation feels especially urgent for the party now. An embarrassing by-election, and a series of rows over funding, had driven Nigel Farage away from the spotlight and stalled his momentum. Restore were leeching votes from the Right, while just a few days before the faithful were due to gather, a poll had put Reform third, behind the Conservatives. It was the party’s lowest rating in 18 months.

But if Farage’s inner circle hoped Conference would now be a chance to reset after a torrid summer, there was the “James thing”. With key lieutenants James Orr and Dan Jukes caught on camera discussing a legally dubious funding operation in garish detail, and Farage filmed ordering oysters in the Essex sunshine, and insisting “it’s all above board”, it seemed Reform’s bid to fix itself was floundering already. The blob was fighting back.

Reform has since been reported to the Metropolitan Police by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, both keen to twist the knife. As for Farage himself, he told Laura Kuenssberg he was simply not paying attention. “I am not a compliance officer,” he complained. “I was in the middle of canvassing in the Clacton by-election. I turn up. I frankly wasn’t even listening.”

The ongoing project to professionalize Reform looked, then, to be a work in progress. There were other signs. On Friday, the first panel of the day featured a spread of Christians talking about freedom of speech. When the discussion was opened to the floor, the first comment was on the “gay issue”. While there had always been gay people, a woman mused from the front row, it felt as if there were now be more of them than ever. Had the panel considered the physical implications of hormone-disrupting chemicals? The panel did not wish to consider such things. With the microphone returned, they hastily moved back to freedom of speech.

More significant was the party’s struggle to develop its relationship with big business. Reform has always had a strong element of petit-bourgeois support — “normal people” running normal companies seemed well represented among the delegates. For the blue chips, though, associating with an insurgent political movement is not without danger. Why risk tying yourself to a Guardian exposé on racist language? Just think of the ESG rating. But despite this, and Reform’s rolling donation crisis, British industry has begun to shift. Slap bang in the center of the conference hall was a lounge sponsored by Heathrow. Major firms, including NatWest and Serco, attended the business dinner.

The morning after, though, the rumors were that it had not gone to plan; Farage is said to have mocked NatWest for debanking him and Serco for profiting from the asylum crisis. There were other frustrations too. Nick Marley, whose supply-chain management consultancy paid £6,000 for a booth, told me he was disappointed “senior folk” from the party hadn’t dropped by his stand for a chat.

Among the membership, there were far fewer doubts. Talk to almost any rank-and-file member and they will tell you the same thing: the establishment is trying to stitch up Nigel; they will use any trick in the book; if we have made any errors they have been made 10 times over by the uniparty before us.

Two young councilors from Salford were bullish. Their local party group chat had barely mentioned the exposé; it seemed destined to slide away, to be forgotten alongside other SW1 gossip. When one of the men asked for my view, I suggested that the drip, drip nature of financial misconduct claims would eventually become a problem. But the lads were not worried: we were at a reception, drinking for free, and Boney M. would be on soon. If Andy Burnham were to call a snap election, they both agreed, Reform would likely leapfrog the Tories to become the official opposition.

When I spoke to a Reform insider about Channel 4’s revelations, however, they were far less sanguine. The atmosphere the evening before, they said, had been “febrile” as the news broke. “This reflects a pattern of unprofessional behavior that was starting to be addressed but now needs to be supercharged”.

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The appointment of Zia Yusuf, who served as Reform’s chair from 2024 to 2025 before abruptly quitting, had been meant to bring the organization into line. But when I asked about his performance, my source was contemptuous. Yusuf had not helped, and indeed had perhaps made things worse.

After the evening’s entertainment had wound down inside the hall, attendees decamped to a nearby shopping center, where a dim casino served drinks until 5am and slot machines flashed neon-bright. Here, a certain anxiety seemed to be germinating through the party cadre. A Reform press officer, glassy-eyed, insisted that he simply did not care anymore. He did not care about anything.

Another functionary was eager to tell me that he had known and been deceived by William Lockwood, the undercover reporter from the Centre for Climate Reporting responsible for the Channel 4 sting. The Reformer pulled out his phone and began scrolling through dozens upon dozens of WhatsApp messages between the pair. “If I had a birthday party and invited 100 people he would be one of them”. He seemed wounded by the experience, on the edge of a nervous collapse.

The next morning, a small band of protesters gathered outside the conference. Separated from attendees by the police, they held a banner that read “Brum Youth Give Racists the Boot” and chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear: refugees are welcome here!” Many were wearing surgical facemasks.

Inside, Danny Kruger was delivering a talk about how to reform the state. Danny Kruger always seemed to be delivering talks on how to reform the state. Each day of Conference, he popped up at events throughout the hall, proscribing civil-service reforms and constitutional restoration and cost-cutting measures. On this occasion, he was in conversation with Mark Littlewood, the Liz Truss ally and director of Popular Conservatism, as he set out Reform’s preparations for power.

The party had intended for the conference to focus on such plans. Everywhere, the hoardings declared Farage’s team was ready for “The First 100 Days”. On stage, spokespeople were making policy commitments. But, in the wake of Channel 4’s report, nobody other than the party hardcore seemed to care.

In Kruger’s case, that was a shame, because his ideas are both serious and radical. Reform, he declared, would have to launch an “institutional intifada”. “I want Reform to be a radical insurgent party. A revolutionary spirit in the English tradition of revolutions, which is restorative, which is why restore is such a good word, annoyingly. Actually, we are about restoration not revolution but there is a radical spirit to that restoration that’s going to require some breaking of the furniture.”

Kruger and Littlewood agreed that the power of quangos would have to be severely curtailed. How many even were there? According to Truss, Littlewood said, there were 444. But he wished it might have been 666, given the demonic implications. Kruger, who is in charge of Reform’s preparations for government, working under Orr until the latter’s resignation, began throwing out policy on the hoof. He would like to abolish His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, he said, and was sure Yusuf would agree if he raised it. But, he conceded, “that’s a big job”.

For Kruger, and an increasing number of others on the Right, Britain’s modern ills can be traced back to 1997 and the election of New Labour. According to this theory, Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms started a process of political neutering, removing power from elected officials — and, by extension, the public — and placing it into the hands of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Electing a conservative government would therefore achieve little unless such vested interests were taken on. Following this line of argument, populism can be viewed merely as a means of re-establishing popular control of the state.

While the ostensible theme of the conference was demonstrating that Reform was ready to take office, that actually seemed to undersell its importance. For if the party is truly prepared to follow through on Kruger’s proposals, it will mean a vast and complex remaking of the British state. The constitution would be revised, the House of Lords faced down, the machinery of government re-tooled to conduct mass deportations. Such plans will face huge and sustained opposition. That the party’s own conference had been overshadowed by a Channel 4 exposé said little good for its chances of succeeding.

After Kruger’s talk ended, I spoke to David Starkey, who had been sitting in the front row and whose arguments regarding Blair’s malign constitutional influence have become influential in these circles. There were still several big question marks, he told me. “How far is Farage himself committed? How far is Farage capable of communicating these ideas? And finally, how far have they really done the preparatory work?” The effort required would dwarf the voluminous preparations made by Trump’s team in advance of his second term, Starkey said, while he could see no signs that key legislation was being prepared ahead of time.

In its clashing moments of frivolity and seriousness, the conference seemed to mirror something of Farage’s own internal divide. Is he a hard-drinking outsider, giving voice to a slice of the nation — but whose indiscipline and laziness will ultimately doom him? Or is he ready to move into No. 10 and transform the country in the twilight of his career? The question of whether Reform can now break past its core vote share largely depends on how the public answers those questions.

Then there’s the damage inside the party machine. Jukes, who started campaigning for UKIP at 18, is said to be like a son to him; Orr has deep ties to JD Vance and European conservative networks, and brought a much-needed intellectual ballast to the party. Farage’s relatives, the leader himself told Robert Peston, had been begging him to quit politics. “When your own family starts to turn on you because of what you do, [there are] some very thoughtful moments,” he said. “Very, very thoughtful moments.”

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One insider described the events of the past 48 hours to me as “sub-optimal”. Jukes and Orr had wanted “to show something shiny to the boss” — they had not considered the diligence required. Such problems, however, would help Reform in one respect. “External pressure keeps everything tight,” they said. “The cracks don’t show.”

Farage, the insider claimed, had come out of the summer in a much better place than before. “He’s much more chipper. He likes campaigning… yes, he’s a politician — he likes the sound of his own voice but he always listens.” In this telling, the Clacton by-election was not so much a busted flush as a period of rejuvenation, the Faragist equivalent of a yoga retreat in the Balearic Islands.

Another source insisted the conference had been great and the “hit job” from the press had been dealt with effectively: nobody wanted to hear from murky groups looking for gotcha moments. Jukes was a “generational talent”, they said, and one of the most loyal people in Farage’s circle. “To lose them to a fucking net-zero sting would be awful.”

As we spoke, Farage strode past in a turquoise suit, surrounded by a phalanx of security guards in black. “Andrew Breitbart… just used to say ‘walk towards the fire,’” the source said as we watched Farage head into the arena. “Whenever there’s a scandal or a hit job or whatever, I just think you have to walk towards that fire. You can’t be afraid, you can’t run away from it. And yet, there’ll probably be more. That’s the nature of life. You win some, you lose some.”

To end the conference, the leader appeared on stage for a final time. He seemed to be in an ebullient mood. “If it’s not fun then it’s not worth doing anyway, is it?” he asked. This had been the biggest and most fun conference they had undertaken. Did he really mean it? “My people’s army,” he continued, “I’m proud to lead you. Once again, I love you all.”

For the faithful in the hall, it was a moment of inspiration. “Farage is back to his best,” Peter Faultless, a wizened party member from near Walsall told me, as we walked away from the stage and back towards the real world. “He clearly wants to lead us.” For Faultless, as with so many other Reform members, there is no alternative. Yusuf is great and Jenrick smart, but Farage is the boss. “Reform is not going to win the election without him,” he added. “Without him — we’re not the same.”

Even so, to universal tabloid rejoicing, the Sussexes are moving back to Britain. Though maybe only for a bit. And Chuck wasn’t told till the last minute. And Harry is still on non-speakers with Wills. And maybe it’s just for Meghan’s work. Except why are they even doing this when they said they’d never? What about the millions Harry owes the Mail? And so on.

The dichotomy that stands out, amid all the rubbernecking and rumor-mongering, is “public” and “private”. Megxit was all about Harry and Megs being private individuals, so well-known for appearing in public to tell us how desperately they needed their privacy they even got a South Park segment about their Privacy World Tour. 

But despite being so private, Harry is still angling for the British public to pay for his security. But this doesn’t really make sense. Why would he be entitled to a state-funded heavy with an earpiece, if he’s just a private individual? Aren’t famous rich people expected to pay for their own bodyguards? 

Harry’s difficulty is trying to reconcile two mutually exclusive kinds of fame: the kind that comes with high-profile public service, and the kind that comes with individual celebrity. In this sense, the nearest parallel — both in terms of divisiveness, and in terms of ambiguity — isn’t Britain’s panoply of still-living ex-PMs, but a man currently angling to join their number. The only Brit, in fact, clickbait-friendly enough to out-clickbait Prince Harry, and who functions even more powerfully as a human Rorschach test: Nigel Farage. 

Farage, too, has been in the news lately in connection with arguments over his security and the nature of his public profile. To Farage’s admirers, he’s a hero and public servant: Britain’s last chance of escaping the Uniparty and restoring something more like the status quo ante Blair. To his many haters, meanwhile, he’s the odious imp responsible for the calamity of Brexit, whose comeback was oiled by almost winning I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here! and whose conduct in public life has always indecorously blurred the lines between lucrative media and celebrity appearances, and purportedly selfless public service. 

Amid this ambiguous maelstrom, Farage argues that the divisiveness of his public role has placed him at such grave risk of public attack that the Home Office should offer him greater state-funded protection than has hitherto been available. He has further asserted that the £5m donation at the center of the current parliamentary standards investigation was intended to help him with security costs the government refuses to cover. The whole debate became still grimmer following the murder of Reform migration spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe at her home. 

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So is Farage a celebrity or a political figure? Greedy grifter or vulnerable public servant whose safety is in the national interest? Harry, meanwhile, hasn’t (to my knowledge at least) received any undeclared donations from crypto bros of any kind. But — albeit perhaps for different reasons — he too acts as a kind of human Rorschach test, variously perceived (including perhaps by himself) as “public” as in high-profile public service, and “public” as in lucratively famous. 

In Harry’s case this isn’t down to a role in parliamentary politics. It is instead the result of the unique nature of the “working royals” as public figures methodically insulated from the faintest whiff of commercial grabbiness. 

Being “royal”, as far as royalty has operated in Britain since the last absolute monarch was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, is largely symbolic. The human individuals born royal are employed as symbolic placeholders for absolutism within a parliamentary democracy. It’s a weird job, one that comes with certain privileges, but also makes demands as well, especially when it comes to monetizing your public profile. 

In a way that has some parallels with the restrictions on politicians, there is a profound taboo on monetizing living royals. Royalty works, inasmuch as it does work, by making the royals generic and representative. Celebrity is the exact opposite; it assembles an individual personal brand and privatizes any profits. Kate and Wills understand this dynamic and play along with a mix of dutiful reserve and understated wokeness that is (if you’ve spent any time around Britain’s upper castes) impeccably small-c conservative. 

Harry, though, was always the wild one. It was Harry who went to a fancy-dress party dressed as a Nazi; who saw combat and then blabbed about slotting jihadis; who Went Too Far by getting therapy and reinventing himself as the Royal Lolcow with that awful memoir. He might not be the sharpest tool in the box, but he clearly never had a sufficiently bland personality to be wholly comfortable with a role as silent figurehead. 

And it was also Harry who inherited his mother’s morbid fascination with the other kind of public life: the individual celebrity personal brand. Despite (so he recounts in That Memoir) an abiding fear of loved ones being hounded to death by the press, he somehow still married an actress and couldn’t stop reappearing in the public eye to demand privacy. And Meghan, meanwhile, clearly never understood the difference between royalty and celebrity. 

This is perhaps understandable: America is a republican, entrepreneurial culture, and from that perspective it’s easy to see how royalty might be conflated with personal brand. Or perhaps it was just her. In any case, the result was wall-to-wall cringe, made even worse whenever Harry joined in. 

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Among the deeply bonkers, predominantly American “Sussex Squad” royal fandom, which seized on Megxit as a re-run of 1776, the settled narrative is that Markle was expelled from the Firm for being “too Black”. But the reality is the opposite: it was clear when they married that the British establishment and much of the public were over the moon at the prospect of a Diverse Royal. It was the deeply un-royal grabbiness and oversharing, not Meghan’s epidermis, that turned the British public against them. For lovers of royalty-as-represention, the idea of monetizing that aura prompts the kind of revulsion reserved for people who fundraise “for good causes” then (cough — Captain Tom — cough) trouser the proceeds.

Meghan had no such qualms. When the Sussexes announced their decision to step back as working royals, they simultaneously applied to trademark “Sussex Royal” and turn their HRH status into a lifestyle brand. Correctly sensing the imminent disaster of “HRH”-branded scatter cushions in Target, the Palace briskly put a stop to these maneuvers, spiking the brand application and drawing sharp lines to delineate the Sussexes’ activities from anything that might resemble “working royal” duties. The couple were only allowed to retain their “HRH” titles provided these were never employed in any public or commercial capacity. 

Various tell-all cringefests have followed, to media fascination and cold Palace fury. And after all that, who can blame the Firm for wanting to ensure that their exit was unambiguous and their status simply that of private individuals, as they said they wanted? Accordingly Ravec, the committee that manages security for British public figures, has also treated them thus, ruling not only that Harry’s security should not be publicly funded, but that he would not be allowed to access government protection even if he reimbursed the taxpayer. Wealthy private individuals, even those closely related to the King, don’t get to rent armed protection from the British government. 

But Harry seems not to want what he says he wants — nor perhaps to understand that you can’t be both a working royal and a regular celeb. Or, less charitably, perhaps he’s just realized he is rubbish at being a celebrity but can’t quite bring himself to go full Prodigal Son. All the Sussexes’ American ventures bombed, and there are still no HRH scatter cushions. Meanwhile Harry’s Invictus Games project is in Britain, and now Guy Ritchie has reportedly offered Megs a job. It turns out the only things they were ever good at were the two jobs they tried to leave behind, and then, disastrously, to merge: being a regular TV actress, and a working royal. 

Now they seem to want it both ways again. He’s clearly angling for a kind of Premium Economy sort-of-royal status. Between this and his charitable gyrations it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that he longs to be a public representative again, like his nan. But his wife is just as clearly yearning to return to that other, mutually exclusive kind of fame. And if there’s one thing Harry could glean from the ongoing Farage farrago, it’s that the way to make yourself maximally vulnerable to press harassment is by trying to combine celebrity with public service. 

So, assuming Harry was telling the truth about not enjoying such harassment, the Sussexes face a straight choice between symbolic representation and the celebrity kind. In other words, between Harry’s vocation and Meghan’s. Assuming he wants to stay married, in Harry’s shoes I’d be beginning to wonder what secret third thing would allow me to be famous, and politically powerful, and symbolically representative. 

Under what circumstances could he enjoy both kinds of public aura? The answer is: it could, in theory, be done. But to achieve this, Harry would need to reach much further back than his grandma’s reign, to the monarchy as it was before his branch of the family got anywhere near it. That is, to royalty as it was understood in the British Isles before 1688. And with the exception of the other, even more bonkers, fringe of royal fandom, no one is quite ready for that — least of all Harry, or Meghan, or indeed Nigel Farage.  

Most people don’t make such remarks simply because they’re stupid. If the government threatened to drive a motorway through their back garden, they would wise up on the planning laws quickly enough. They come up with such clichés because they don’t know much about politics, for the reason that the kind of politics we practice doesn’t seem to know much about them. The country, like much of the rest of the world, is gripped by a profound crisis of legitimacy. Great swathes of the population no longer have the faintest trust in its political institutions. It’s as though the passengers on a train greeted an announcement that they were approaching their destination with hoots of derision and snickers of skepticism. Politicians are about as popular as pimps. As far as institutions go, a lot of people still admire the Royal Family; but this is partly because the royals don’t really impinge on their daily lives, as politics is supposed to do. The fact that royalty does nothing of importance is one of the major reasons it stays in power. Most citizens see no more point in abolishing it than in ridding humanity of Morris dancing or the Yeomen of the Guard. There’s no harm in adding a few useless decorations to your domicile.

Widespread disaffection can lead to political revolution, were it not that people are sometimes too disaffected to be revolutionary. Astonishingly, however, a third of Britons told a recent survey that capitalism had failed and that a communist revolution was necessary. Or so The Times reports. It’s hard to believe that it’s true. A quarter of those polled declared themselves open to supporting enemies of the state like Russia and Iran, which is to say that the bespectacled bank clerk opposite you on the Tube train might well be a fifth columnist. The prospect of a collapse of legitimacy is why Edmund Burke appealed in the wake of the French Revolution for government by popular consent. This is one reason why he was a Whig and not a Tory. Power must respect the values and customs of the populace. Governing classes in Burke’s view survive only by engaging the affections of their inferiors, and a loveless sovereignty is politically bankrupt. India must be ruled with due respect to its indigenous culture, not with the ham-fisted brutality of the stereotypical imperialist.

Nations in Burke’s view aren’t primarily governed by laws, but by a set of affinities and tacit understandings between rulers and ruled. What holds them together is more cultural than political. If colonies like America can associate being subordinate to the Crown with their own civil rights, the more perfect will be their obedience. The only firm seat of authority, Burke declares, “lies in the minds, affections and interests of the people”. If this fails, and the common people take to the streets, then of course you unleash on them the full force of your repressive powers. There’s always a coercive fist within the consensual glove. But to unleash your powers is to risk an even more drastic loss of legitimacy. It’s better on the whole to woo your citizens than to shoot them down. Governments who do the latter have won and lost at the same time.

Cynicism about the political class isn’t quite such bad news for the Establishment as it might appear. People don’t live by politics alone, even when they trust and admire their politicians. The dull inertia of everyday life may be enough to keep them from tearing up the cobblestones. Most of them spend most of their time simply trying to keep their heads above water. What absorbs their attention isn’t the break-up of the social contract but the price of bacon. This is one way in which economics takes precedence over politics. What Marx calls the economic base is what Americans call the bottom line. A certain amount of economic pain has a distracting effect which may benefit the guardians of the system, whereas too much of it poses a threat to them. Even so, regular visitors to Davos may console themselves with the thought that revolutions only occur when people can glimpse an alternative to what they have now which strikes them as both feasible and desirable. If the problem isn’t simply a specific political regime but politics as such, this isn’t likely to happen. In the view of a disillusioned populace, even Lenin would simply be more of the same.

“They’re all the same” and similar sentiments may not be true, but the impulse behind them is surely authentic. People are right to be cynical about politics; it’s just that a lot of them are cynical for the wrong reasons. If the political sphere can’t bring genuine change, it’s largely because it’s severely constrained by the banks, major corporations, domestic bureaucracies and international capitalist institutions. In this sense, globalization breeds an erosion of political trust at the national level. The same is true of geopolitics, which forces political states into crippling amounts of expenditure while underfunding the institutions that ordinary people rely on. Besides, capitalism is the fastest-changing system in human history, which can make political promises hard to keep. Politics shrinks to a cramped arena in which room for maneuver is drastically curtailed. Nations become agents of forces they can’t control. The Britain that once ruled the world is now ruled by it.

There’s a false solution to the widespread prejudice against politics, which is to make a politics out of it. This is known as populism, which is currently sweeping the globe. You can denounce international set-ups while being bound hand and foot to the global corporations, and cheer for the Common Man while supporting the world-wide financial markets which are pushing him toward the breadline. You can even make a fortune on those markets yourself, while blaming immigrants for the social damage which such financial forces wreak. You can castigate elites in the name of the common people while stashing away millions of pounds or billions of dollars yourself and owning a large number of posh houses. You can also speak out for some ordinary people by demanding an end to immigration, while not speaking out for others who demand better health care and a decent standard of living. A figure who represents the whole of this hypocrisy is currently king of the world, able to change the rules of international football with a flick of his fingers. Pretty soon he’ll be setting the menu at McDonald’s. We’re in danger of a return to absolutism, when politics was a matter of the monarch’s will.

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Some MPs claim to have been drawn to politics by sheer altruism. They prop up the Commons bar out of an insatiable desire to serve their country. Most people, however, are driven to political action by material reasons, not fancy ideas. Where the populists have the advantage is that these reasons exist in plenty — failing health service, crumbling schools, unemployment, buckling social provision  — and with consummate sleight-of-hand can all be attributed to a single source: immigration. Anti-immigrant politics means changing the population rather than changing the system. Moreover, populism combines its material grievances with deep-seated cultural ones, and this is a formidably powerful fusion. Who would have thought that culture, of all things, should play such a key role in the political realm? It is, however, culture in its most potent sense, which is to say issues of identity, rather than Balzac and Beethoven. Populism feeds on a profound human fear of the Other, along with an anxious attachment to the familiar. In blaming this monstrous Other for most of the nation’s woes, it refuses to recognize that capitalism has always generated private wealth and public squalor as sides of the same coin. It’s a form of life which populism wants to deepen and defend, whatever its apparent concern for the standard of living in Southend.

If “They’re all the same” is the mantra of the disillusioned citizen, what are the most common words spoken by politicians? “To be clear.” “I’ve been very clear from the outset.” “Kemi has always been clear about our policy on…” This is curious, because it suggests that people consider obscurantism to be the major vice of politicians, which surely isn’t true. They may be distrusted, thought to break their promises, spout a lot of garbage or be paid too much for doing too little, but not to obscure their meaning. They may lie from time to time, but they usually do so lucidly. Some of their deceptions are wonderfully transparent. Besides, clarity can be overrated. Part of the fun of everyday life lies in its ambiguity, as with the notice “Refuse To Be Put in This Basket”, the meaning of which varies according to which syllable of “Refuse” you stress. I pointed out many years ago that the instruction “Dogs Must Be Carried”, sometimes found on escalators in Underground stations, might be thought to exclude those who approach the escalator without a canine in tow. There’s an apocryphal story about the rockstar Bono opening a concert with an appeal for starving children. Clapping his hands, he says: “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.” “Well stop fucking doing it, then,” someone in the audience shouts in mock-indignation.

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One of the finest ambiguities in the English language is built into Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend a fabulously rich young American woman, Milly Theale, whom they discover to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that Milly and Densher may marry and Densher may inherit Milly’s wealth when she dies. In an extraordinary twist in the narrative, Milly is told on her death bed of the plot against her, but bequeaths her fortune to Densher even so. The result of this act of forgiveness causes him such deep remorse, as well as such love for Milly’s memory, that he refuses to accept the bequest, and he and Kate part forever.

A question, however, lingers. Milly’s generous act breaks up Kate and Densher’s relationship as surely as might a bout of sexual infidelity. But did Milly foresee this consequence? Is that why she left Densher her money? Is her forgiveness a devious act of aggression? And is Densher’s penalty for deceiving her to be besotted with a corpse for the rest of his life? As often in James, the issue is undecidable. We shall never know whether Milly was saint or schemer. Life, as Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, is like a rough ground, not a sheet of pure ice. Clarity is only occasionally to be attained. It’s there for the most part in the discourse of politicians. But sometimes they’re lying even so.

Lansbury came from a radical family, and he’d been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1880s. Then in the Liberal Party, he’d gone on to join the Social Democratic Federation, the country’s first socialist party, before being elected in December 1910 as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London. Once in Parliament, he was infuriated by the Liberal government’s refusal to extend the franchise to women and by its approval of force-feeding Suffragette prisoners on hunger strike. “You are beneath contempt,” he shouted, walking up to the government front bench. “You will go down in history as the men who tortured innocent women.” He was suspended from the chamber for that outburst.

He was equally angered by his own party’s failure to confront the government on the issue. Having exhausted all other tactics, he resigned his seat and called a by-election, asking his constituents “to endorse my policy of making women’s suffrage the beginning and end of my parliamentary fight”. It was a risky move. Bow and Bromley was a marginal constituency, and he’d only been elected in 1910 because the Liberals had declined to field a candidate and had backed him, giving him a clear run against his Conservative opponent. But it was worth the risk for one so committed to the cause. 

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By Simon Heffer

The by-election that followed was noisy and atypical. The Labour Party was incensed by Lansbury’s actions and declined to give him official support, while the Liberals again refused to participate. Women’s groups from around the country campaigned for Lansbury, with public meetings addressed by the constitutionalist Millicent Fawcett, the socialist Ethel Snowden and the extremist Emmeline Pankhurst. Meanwhile, anti-suffrage opponents rallied under the slogan of “No Petticoat Government”, and the Conservatives tried hard to insist that this wasn’t a single-issue election.

The most effective poster read: “Lansbury is sick of Parliament. Bow and Bromley is sick of Lansbury. Vote for Blair and make everybody happy.” And on polling day, that’s what happened. On a 10% swing, the Conservative Reginald Blair took the seat and Lansbury was out of Parliament for a decade.

In the long run, standing on his principles didn’t do him any harm. When he returned to Westminster in 1922, again for Bow and Bromley, the number of votes cast had more than tripled, the electorate swelled by the enfranchisement of the working class and of most — if not yet all — women. It turned out that he’d been, in that curious modern phrase, on the right side of history. And when the Labour government split in 1931, and the party suffered a massive election defeat, he was the only ex-Cabinet minister left in Parliament, becoming leader by default at the age of 73. He held the party together in its darkest hour, his record speaking for him as a veteran campaigner for women, peace and the working class.

Nigel Farage, it hardly needs saying, is no George Lansbury. There is no issue of principle, or even of policy, at stake in today’s by-election in Clacton. And the difference doesn’t speak well of today’s politics. Beneath Farage’s thin-skinned petulance and posturing, there lies the media’s — and perhaps the public’s — fascination with electoral contests, rather than actual policy. Keir Starmer’s premiership was a time of flatlining productivity, of rising unemployment, of an incipient borrowing crisis (bond yields are higher than when Liz Truss “spooked the markets”). But the average voter could be forgiven for not noticing the parlous state of the economy as the drama of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory and unopposed coup played out in the press. This isn’t politics, it’s soap opera, and with the departure of Peter Mandelson, Farage is now the longest-standing character still in the show, in large part because he recognized the direction of travel early on.

It wasn’t always thus. Even if we consider the closest recent parallel to Clacton, that of David Davis in 2008, there was a serious point being made. Davis was the Conservative shadow home secretary and believed that a critical moment had been reached when the Commons voted in favor of the Labour government’s proposal to allow detention without charge for up to 42 days. This came in the midst of an attempt to introduce identity cards, attacks on the jury system, and increased surveillance by councils and quangos. As Davis pointed out, “600 public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post”. So he resigned both his shadow cabinet job and his seat to fight a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in Yorkshire on the issue of civil liberties.

Then, as now, the other major parties didn’t contest the election. Labour, understandably, had no wish to defend its record, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said his party supported Davis’s position and wouldn’t therefore stand against him. The whole thing became a farce. There was a record field of candidates — 26 in all — including the likes of David Icke, Mad Cow-Girl and Ronnie Carroll (the man who’d sung “Ring-a-Ding Girl” in the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest). There were so many of them that they weren’t allowed on the platform to hear the result, for fear of breaking the stage. 

Davis won, of course, with an increased share of the vote, but it was a pyrrhic victory, both politically and personally. Gordon Brown’s government paid no attention at all. And Davis’s career suffered. Just three years earlier, he’d fought David Cameron for the Conservative leadership. Now, he looked a much reduced, peripheral figure. “If I was given my job back, I think I’d take it,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll be offered it.” He wasn’t, and he didn’t serve in the Coalition government of 2010-15.

In retrospect, Davis’s by-election captured the moment when British politics became totally trivial. The question of civil liberties was genuinely important, and has become ever more so. But the chance to challenge the growing power of the state was ducked by the media, which had decided that soap operas were more fun. The Daily Mirror saw Davis’s actions as “a cynically disguised leadership challenge to David Cameron”, while the Daily Telegraph said it was “a challenge to Mr Cameron’s authority”. It wasn’t. It was an attempt to position the Conservatives as the party that would defend the individual. When it was turned into a circus, the opportunity passed and the direction of travel remained unchanged. The era of the police raiding people’s homes in pursuit of social-media rudeness was just about to dawn.

And now comes Farage in Clacton. He may not have distinguished himself in Parliament, he may have struggled with delegation and with running a political party, but he has proved over the last three decades to be a consummate campaigner, and calling a by-election looks like a retreat to his comfort zone. But it’s a path fraught with danger. To start with, he runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock, even more than did David Davis. Breaking the 2008 record, there are 34 candidates, ranging from the SDP through three separate representatives of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, all the way down to Rejoin EU. It’s hard to retain any sense of dignity in these circumstances. Worse still, the focus on Farage’s finances risks giving the impression of him being a spiv, rather than the lovable rogue that has previously been his great selling-point. 

These three self-triggered by-elections tell an unedifying story of political decline. Lansbury’s was an honorable position and it was seen as such. Davis was also a principled man, but he was treated as a joke. And now Farage reduces legitimate concerns about the probity of his funding to a caricatured gimmick of the electoral process.

Oddly, though, that comment from the Suffragette may yet be applicable. The Bow and Bromley by-election in 1912 does not “stand out in history as a great political landmark”. But if Farage is sufficiently damaged, then Clacton in 2026 may do.

Kent always was deepest Farageland. It sums up Farage’s political vision and persona: close enough to London to understand it, far enough to be in touch with the provincial commonfolk. In this, Farage differs much from his rival on the Right, Rupert Lowe. Though both cut their teeth in the City, Farage still presents himself as a wheeler-dealer, the tribune of the petit-bourgeoisie. Lowe, on the other hand, has reinvented himself as a farmer. His concerns are basically rural, including his preoccupation with self-defense. Inveighing against “metropolitan attacks on rural Britain” in his gilet and wellies, always flanked by a flock of sheep, he claims the old mantle of the Countryside Alliance.

The contest between Reform and Restore has reached a stalemate. There are murmurings of a rapprochement. It seems probable that, if there is a general election soon, there will be some kind of pact. That would involve Restore standing down in places like Kent. It might also involve Reform leaving Lowe’s Great Yarmouth, and rural constituencies, to Restore. Farage, the “cheeky chappie”, can appeal to Kent and Essex’s Cockney diaspora. Lowe, meanwhile, can rattle off the farmers’ list of grievances.

It would be a natural division of territory. Farage is shaped by the South East, especially the Greater London periphery, at least as profoundly as Andy Burnham is by the North West. Kent was part of the South East England constituency that Farage spent 21 years representing in Strasbourg and Brussels. He spent just as long sniffing around for seats at Westminster, always favoring Kentish ones — even if they fell outside Kent proper. In 2001 he stood in Bexhill and Battle — a de facto Kentish constituency, since much of its electorate comprised pensioners from Bromley. In 2006 he contested a by-election in Bromley and Chislehurst. Twice he stood in South Thanet. Clacton, in Essex, was the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, so it’s only natural that Farage, after so many bruises, should have pitched his tent there in 2024. It has many similarities with Farage’s Kentish power-base, not least in its Reform-friendliness; but perhaps he would have been happier somewhere farther south.

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Farage's Clacton reckoning

By Simon Heffer

It’s ironic, of course, that Kent is in some ways the most European part of Britain. On a clear day, you can see Calais from Dover. This has been known sometimes to stimulate a certain fellow-feeling with the people over in the distance. That might have been its effect on the Kentish prime minister who took us into Europe, Ted Heath. But, as so often, the closer one gets to a boundary, the more one fashions one’s identity against the other side. Where Heath saw in the Channel a European stream to be bridged, Farage finds proof of England’s insularity. In 2016, more people in Kent agreed with Farage than with Heath.

Kent’s long Channel coastline also leaves it exposed. It is both England’s watchtower and its soft underbelly. Wordsworth wrote “To the Men of Kent” amid the Napoleonic invasion scare:

Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent,
Ye children of a Soil that does advance
Her haughty brow against the coast of France,
Now is the time to prove your hardiment.

In 1588 Philip II directed the Armada to land on Kent. It is no accident that Farage was one of the first to sound the alarm over the small boats crisis: he could witness it firsthand from the Kentish coast. “Another huge armada”, he tweeted in 2021, “has hit the Kent beaches”. Just this week, Reform has announced that it would deploy the Royal Navy to stop the small boats.

Like Farage, the South East has a radical streak. As far back as 2014, a young political scientist by the name of Matthew Goodwin was comparing Farage with the region’s most famous upstart, Wat Tyler. It is actually unknown whether Tyler came from Kent or Essex; both counties claim him as theirs. In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter: for here, in their rowdiness, Kent and Essex combine. The counties which gave UKIP its pair of MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless; the county of Farage’s seat, and the one that is his home — these were, throughout English history, the most potent sites of insurrection. Other counties could gnash their teeth and cause trouble on occasion: the peasants of Norfolk also rose up in 1381. But, unlike Wat Tyler, they were too far from London to make any difference. It is difficult, as the Norfolk MP Lowe may discover, to make parochial rural concerns impress themselves on the metropole: the closer one gets to the centers of wealth and power in Britain, the less people care about farmers and guns. Only places like Kent and Essex can encircle the capital and exert deadly pressure on it.

The trailer for a forthcoming film about the Peasants’ Revolt presents it as one fought against the King. In reality, the ideology motivating Wat Tyler and his collaborators was a loyalist one. They wanted to rescue the king from his wicked counselors: Wat Tyler claimed to act on behalf of “King Richarde and the trew communes”. When the rebels demanded the heads of the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, this was because they had been traitors to the crown. The Peasants’ Revolt also, of course, involved xenophobic violence against London’s Flemings and Lombards. In short, Kent and Essex look to London for their salvation. But they can also take it upon themselves to set things in London right.

The cause of revolt in 1381 was simple: the people of Kent and Essex were sick of paying so much tax. That spirit has never really gone away. Six centuries later, Kent and Essex were the heartlands of Thatcherism. Unlike much of the country, their proudly individualist, enterprising, and petit-bourgeois denizens welcomed Thatcher’s laissez-faire agenda. Farage, if not quite Essex Man, was at least a Kentish wide boy. Unlike Lowe’s farmers, they feel deeply that their fortunes are bundled together with London’s.

Farage was happy on the open-outcry trading floor of the London Metal Exchange after the “Big Bang”, fueled by adrenaline and a never-ending supply of drink. He always envisioned UKIP as a libertarian party cast in Thatcher’s image. The line separating it from the BNP was that “they’re authoritarian, we’re libertarian”. Farage is, indeed, a liberal at heart. His political awakening came when, aged 14, he picked up a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the Dulwich College library. He was inspired to join the Conservative Party as a teenager by a visit to the school by Thatcher’s libertarian guru, Sir Keith Joseph. Interviewed in the New Statesman in 2014, he was asked whether he was part of the “‘small c’ conservative family”. “God no!” was his answer.

Farage is, instead, a 19th-century liberal. Certainly, his libertarian instincts are at odds with Lowe’s new-found agrarian, protectionist ones. When Farage joined UKIP, it was called the Anti-Federalist League; its name evoked the Anti-Corn Law League, the 19th-century liberal campaign against Britain’s entrenched farmer class. The Anti-Corn Law League defeated the farmers, and the farmers, as a political force, never really recovered. Lowe’s efforts to champion them are unlikely to meet with much success. Lowe, the modern-day tribune of the class that the Anti-Corn Law League took on and defeated, was never involved in UKIP. Under Farage, UKIP continued to model itself on the 19th-century campaign for free trade. In a speech to the UKIP conference in 2013, Farage set out the 19th-century liberal case for Brexit: if Britain were to leave the EU, it would “get back the ability to strike free trade deals”. He even suggested “abolishing tariffs on African produce” to “do more to raise living standards there than any amount of aid”. Peace and prosperity through free trade: this was pure Manchester Liberalism, worthy of Richard Cobden.

These days, “Manchesterism” has acquired a rather different meaning. It is, we are told, the opposite of neoliberalism, the opposite of Thatcherism. The ascendancy of Andy Burnham may now put paid to Reform’s hopes of making inroads in the North. Burnham’s victory in Makerfield was held up as “proof of concept” that, with a Northerner in No. 10, and one willing to disavow Thatcherism altogether, Labour could keep the “Red Wall” standing.

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Why Andy Burnham won’t Rejoin

By Samuel Rubinstein

Now, Patrick Maguire claims in The Times, Farage is inspired as much by “the Eurosceptic Labour minister Peter Shore’s vision of state control of strategic industry” as he is by his liberal and libertarian idols, Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, and John Stuart Mill. But one has to wonder: was his heart ever really in it? It was awfully expedient for Farage to move in a big-state direction at just the moment he wanted to curry favor in the post-industrial North, when talk of “realignment” was filling everyone’s ears. The rise of Burnham might therefore come to him as some relief. Now, he can revert to his true, Southern, Thatcherite self. In Clacton he can also, for good measure, defeat his only serious rival in the byelection: the Shoreite SDP.

Recently, as though anticipating the Burnham shift, Reform has dropped some of its more Shoreite posturing on nationalization. Having long fantasized about a union of “socially Right” with “economically Left”, Reform appears to have surreptitiously drifted back into Farage’s small-state comfort-zone. The Reform-adjacent think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, is singing from this hymn sheet. Its first paper was published with the imprimatur of the Thatcherite Spartan John Redwood. “What to do if the UK faces a sovereign debt crisis?”, it asks. Its prescription is a classically liberal one: slash benefits, push for growth with supply-side reforms, cut red tape, trim the state. And, above all: “Do not raise taxes unless absolutely necessary”. There is not much room here for Lowe’s more agrarian vision. The next election is far more likely to be Burnham’s Manchesterism versus the 19th-century kind.

Reform may now be staking out a new path to victory, a “Southern strategy”. It probably would require some compliance from Lowe: he reaches a different kind of Southern voter (albeit a much less significant group) than Farage does. Either way, the strategy would look like this. Forget about Gorton and Denton; forget about Makerfield. Leave the North now to its “king”. Brush aside the ex-Labourite Lee Anderson, the “Red Wall” made flesh: Farage was never a likely tribune of the “left-behind” Northerners, anyway. Offer the South a kind of populist liberalism, with its recognizably Kentish precepts: sovereignty of the people, suspicion of the state, hostility to taxation, vigilance on the border. Throw some bones to Lowe’s band of angry farmers, while steering clear of full-scale protection. Do it well enough to force the Tories, the other Southern party, into a merger. And then, at the next general election, Farage can run the campaign he has always secretly wanted to, the kind of campaign that served Thatcher well enough on three occasions. The North never was Reform’s heartland. Farage’s heart always belonged to Kent.

Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024 should have taught everyone that what has come to be known as “lawfare” — using legal processes to weaken political opponents — doesn’t work politically. But it seems few heeded the warning. Only last week, a similar attempt to bar Marine Le Pen from running in next year’s presidential elections failed after a French appeals court reduced the length of the ban. This is not the end of her legal battles, but it is certain now that she will be a candidate and her popularity remains undimmed.

There are other examples: in Romania, the supreme court banned the far-Right leader Călin Georgescu from taking part in the 2024 presidential elections. In Germany, the CDU wants to deprive Björn Höcke, one of the most high-profile politicians of the far-Right Alternative for Germany, of his fundamental right to vote and stand for elections. In the Netherlands, they went after Geert Wilders. It’s happening everywhere, again and again.

They have learned nothing. Trump bounced back from his legal battles and won the election. Le Pen will be a candidate. It is too early to make any predictions about the next French presidential election. But we can at this point safely conclude that the technocratic coup against Le Pen has failed. It will now be up to the voters to decide. This was not supposed to happen.

The case of Nigel Farage in the UK falls into the same category, though the details differ. Unlike Trump or Le Pen, the Reform UK leader faces neither criminal charges nor a police investigation. Instead, he was being investigated by the House of Commons Committee on Standards after breaching rules by failing to declare a gift. It would almost certainly have recommended a suspension which could have triggered a recall petition. If 10% of voters had signed it, a by-election would automatically have followed.

But by resigning his seat, Farage has short-circuited the procedure that could have led to his removal. If he wins, he may still face an investigation when he returns, though the House of Commons would, at that point, probably not be so stupid as to suspend him, if only to avoid the absurd spectacle of two by-elections in the same constituency within a few weeks of each other.

The media plays an important role in the political campaign against Farage. And its pursuit of Farage is deeply reminiscent of the one against Trump in the two years preceding the 2024 election. Ultimately, though, Trump walked away from his legal troubles and an assassin’s bullet. Farage walked away from a plane crash, and I suspect he will survive the slings and arrows of the British press as well as the onslaught of Count Binface’s jokes. British politics is full of entertaining stunts. But the idea that the Tory, Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters of Clacton will unite and support the bin man is absurd. What does it tell voters about how seriously politics is being taken by the establishment?

What, too, does it tell us about the media’s motivations? I suspect they’re mainly selfish ones. The legacy media owes its existence to closed-shop access arrangements such as the political lobby in the UK, or the White House press corps. In Germany, exclusive access to politicians is organized by a journalists’ club, which organizes all government press conferences. If Friedrich Merz wants to talk to the media, he has to knock on their door. And in the US, legacy media has been one of the biggest losers from the Trump administration. They lost their exclusive access to administration officials as the Trump administration opened up to bloggers and influencers.

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Count Binface: a serious fool

By Pratinav Anil

Populist leaders do not respect the press cartel. They are creatures of social media. If Farage were to become prime minister, he could decide to discard the political lobby altogether in Westminster. He could instruct his arts minister to allow foreign media organizations take control of UK newspapers and private broadcasters. Without much effort, he could finish them off in a single term. Even if British voters were to get rid of Farage after one term, his successors would almost surely not resurrect the old system. Even if a candidate of the Left in the US were to succeed Trump in early 2029, I would not expect that person to waste political capital on resurrecting long defunct journalist lobbies. Time moves on, and priorities change. No wonder the fourth estate is panicking.

And as consumers of news, we should speak out if the media pack is out for blood, or, as the Germans say, are chasing a pig through the village. This is what is happening to Farage. Sometimes it works: the media successfully got rid of Boris Johnson by persuading gullible Tory MPs to commit electoral suicide and ditch the leader who won them a landslide victory. They dispensed with Keir Starmer in similar circumstances.

I doubt, though, that the campaign against Farage will succeed, because Farage, unlike Johnson and Starmer before him, is in control of his party. His voters don’t care about politically constructed criminal cases or donations. They care about the things that affect them.

And they are right that many politicians simply don’t seem to care about the things that affect them. Yesterday’s men simply cling to mistakes of the past, refusing to learn from them. Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump should have been a cautionary tale. Instead of pursuing him through the courts, the Democrats should have focused on their own campaign, and considered whether Joe Biden was fit to run while there was still an opportunity to find an alternative candidate. But no, the Democrats figured they had it in the bag — just as they did back in 2016. Overconfidence and wishful thinking play a big role in the demise of the center. I see the same mindset again in the UK campaign to rejoin the EU. The Rejoiners are clinging on to the same old failed strategies that sunk the Remain campaign — a false assessment of the economic significance of the single market.

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Farage's Clacton reckoning

By Simon Heffer

In Germany, the centrist parties that now want to ban the AfD should similarly reflect on why such attempts failed in the past. In 2017, the constitutional court struck what appeared to be a rock-solid case against the Right-wing extremist NPD. Unlike the centrists, though, the AfD learned from the episode and has taken precautions to protect itself against a ban. The chances of a ban are practically zero. And yet, the Left clings on to the same old failing ideas again and again.

Lack of reflection and critical self-examination has a become a defining characteristic of the political center worldwide. And all the while, the center-right, which has traditionally been stronger than the center-left in Europe, is losing support. By creating perma-coalitions with the center-left, they are driving more and more voters to the extremes. They do what they always did. Exactly as Talleyrand said.

The way to solve the political problem is to attempt to address the underlying problems such as deindustrialization and low productivity. Yet centrist policy agendas are full of displacement activities. So instead of focusing on fixing what lies beneath their broken economy, the British establishment is rooting for a man with a bin for a face. Should that strategy fail, if you want to dignify it with such a term, they might even resort to the ultimate, and most desperate, trick to keep Farage out of power — proportional representation. The experience of European countries has been that cynical changes in electoral systems backfire against those who initiate them. The simple reason is that voters, as a group, are not stupid.

Just as Talleyrand’s famous phrase described the failure of the House of Bourbon, it explains the demise of the age of multilateral globalization, the age that the EU represented so fittingly. Rather than confronting economic and political failures that have driven voters elsewhere, politicians simply return to their familiar tactics. Multilateralism is dying not because it was bound to fail, but because its proponents never learned, and never forgot.

And we all know what happened to the Bourbons.

I have known Farage for over 30 years, and happily campaigned with him in 2016 for Brexit. I remain convinced he was the main architect of the great popular vote to leave the EU — the kudos claimed by Boris Johnson and his former henchman, Dominic Cummings, is simply not credible. Brexit happened because of the mobilization of the British working and lower- middle classes, and it was Farage who mobilized them. Many of those enlisted then moved into Reform and helped its massive popular vote at the last election. For Reform to hold on to those voters it needs Farage as its guiding spirit. If anything happens to him, it is over for the party.

Those were the stakes he was playing for in making his decision to resign: but it may well answer nothing, except the question of how much his standing in a far corner of Essex compares with that of Count Binface. It will not disperse the problem of Farage’s undeclared £5-million gift from a crypto-currency billionaire, or of the largesse the Sunday Times claims he received from George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster. Assuming he wins his by-election — and given the competition, it is hard to believe he will not — the investigation into his financial arrangements by Daniel Greenberg, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, will resume the day he returns to Westminster. If Farage is found to have behaved improperly and is suspended for 10 days or more, his constituents could launch a recall petition and trigger a second by election. Should that happen, the main parties (which seem to expect it almost as a certainty) have indicated they would contest it.

Where, though, are the people of Clacton in all this? At the 2024 general election 58% of them turned out to vote, just 1.7% lower than the turnout nationally. It will be interesting to note how many will turn out to vote in the Farage vs Binface contest. One difficulty for him is that he has not been a frequent visitor to his constituency, though has acquired a reputation for frequently visiting the United States, as he did last weekend. Will voters regard this by-election as having been called lightly or frivolously? After all, if Farage was true to his word, and had done no wrong, there would not have been any need for a by-election at all. Some Clactonians, even some who voted for him in 2024, may feel they are being trifled with, or that he is trying to avoid, for a short time, serious scrutiny. If they are asked to turn out again a few weeks later to go through the process again, the situation would be so unprecedented that it is hard to predict what would happen.

Farage is not stupid, and presumably took all this into account before calling his by-election. Perhaps he thought all the main parties would take him on and, having defeated them, would not bother to orchestrate a recall petition should Greenberg find against him, and should he receive a suspension of more than 10 days. Now, because the other parties will not fight in this by-election, he may find himself fighting a second in a climate of voter exhaustion, and unable to rely on his own supporters turning out again — especially if his opponents exploit the findings against him necessary to provoke a second contest as evoking sleaze.

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What Burnham shares with Farage

By Aris Roussinos

As elsewhere in 2024, the growing uninterest in politics in Clacton seemed to reflect a larger than usual disenchantment with the established parties, especially with the Conservatives, who had been the incumbents. Although Reform only won five seats in that election, they had the third largest popular vote, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, who won 72. The fact remains that under the first-past-the-post system, Reform were lucky to win any seats at all. Since 2024, Reform has waited for pivotal moments to transform its undeniable ability to garner votes into an ability to garner seats. Perhaps it thought that moment had come when did well at the 2025 local elections; but its support remained concentrated in certain geographical areas.

Perhaps it thought that moment would come in the Gorton and Denton by-election, at a time of spectacular unpopularity for the Labour party; but the combination of a poor candidate and a strategy to harness ethnic minority voters gave the Greens the seat. Perhaps it thought it would come at this year’s local elections, but some stunning local triumphs were not followed by victory at the Makerfield by-election, in a seat where Reform had won all but one of the council wards in the local elections. Again, there was an indifferent candidate; but whatever the reason, Reform did not break through and win a by-election that would have pitched a defeated Labour party into turmoil. To lose one such contest was a misfortune; to lose two started to look more than careless. For some time some connected with Reform, which has money and a gift for commanding publicity, have admitted there is struggle to find top-class candidates, even for local government. As the Conservative party’s opinion ratings slowly improve, the appeal of Reform to ambitious politicians diminishes: and the need for the pivotal moment becomes ever greater.

Even if Farage wins a second by-election — which, one must stress, would be a far harder task than winning the first — there is no guarantee that would provide the pivotal moment. Perhaps the party’s most profound problem is that they have lost their unique selling points. They may want to be tougher on illegal migrants, and bid farewell to the ECHR, but so too does the Conservative party. For a long time people on the Right preferred to support Reform because to them the Conservatives were the party of 14 wasted years, their dismal reputation compounded by the horrors of Johnson and Truss. But that party is now under new management; Mrs Badenoch is more popular now than her party, but the party’s popularity is slowly rising too.

A by-election, or possibly two by-elections, in Clacton could give Reform an opportunity to rebuild its momentum. Or, a second election following sleaze allegations could allow the old parties to prove there is life in them yet. For some months it has been said that Reform peaked too soon. Farage wishes to defy that belief. It may take until well into the autumn to see whether he is right, or whether the much-canvassed people of Clacton have had enough.

And so, yet another failed leader has been sacrificed as an offering to the British public, as Labour carries out an internal coup to stave off an electoral revolution. But even as the Lancastrian usurper secures his hold on Westminster, disbursing sinecures to his faithful retainers, there is no particular reason to believe he will be any more successful in office than Starmer. After all, many of those today celebrating his successful coup were just as feverishly exultant, two years ago, over the coming Starmerite golden age. If they were better judges of the country’s mood, we would not be here today.

Like an incoming headmaster turning around a failing school, Burnham told us Westminster is “broken” in his landmark devolution speech, using language apparently no longer the preserve of Right-wing populists. But will future historians characterize him as a continuity figure, carrying out necessary reforms to save a failing system from itself, or as an agent of total change? His manifesto-by-proxy, The Productive State, which aims to flesh out his much-invoked but nebulous Manchesterism as a program for governance, claims him for the latter role. As it states, the public “ask now for only what is obvious: major, even fundamental changes in British society” to cast off “the meanness and frustration of long years of stagnation and decline”, unabashedly adopting a “declinist” framework still mocked as a Right-wing fantasy by backwards-looking elements of the Labour Left. Indeed, the paper notes, “Labour have hitherto not delivered on that demand. If that feeling does not change, the electoral consequences will be severe and lasting.” That much is true. Yet what is perhaps more interesting than the structural economic reforms the paper suggests, is that its writers frame their socialist ends in postliberal terms, quoting Polanyi and appealing to national sovereignty and state resilience to make arguments postliberals were condemned for a decade ago.

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How to save postliberalism

By David Goodhart

As the foreign policy writer Lily Lynch recently observed, “Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus.” The same may be said of the domestic political and economic order so drastically reshaped to fit the vanished dreamworld of globalized liberal capitalism. And so, The Productive State observes, “in an era of weaponized interdependence — where access to energy, critical minerals, and essential supply chains has become a tool of geopolitical pressure”, the question of ownership of vital infrastructure “is a strategic one, which cuts to the heart of live debates about sovereignty in an increasingly geopolitically unstable world”. National sovereignty, state capacity and resilience in a world of global competition rather than co-operation, in which Westminster failure “wears down the basic democratic expectation that public institutions can identify the needs of the public they govern and act to meet them”, eroding the state’s legitimacy: these are Lexiteer arguments of a decade ago, now championed, perhaps too late, by those who would in 2016 have scorned them.

For in economic terms, there is very little, in The Productive State’s condemnation of neoliberalism as the agent of national decline, that could not be said, or has not already been, by Reform’s planner-in-chief and prominent postliberal intellectual, Danny Kruger. That there is such an overlap between The Productive State and postliberal arguments is hardly surprising, given British postliberalism’s intellectual descent from socialism. Even still, it is of note that Burnham’s only open challenger, so far, is the Blue Labour-endorsed candidate Al Carns, standing on a platform of industrial renewal through sensible energy policy in the service of national security. Even if Farage has shied away, recently, from his tentative support of nationalization for key infrastructure, postliberalism already appears to dominate the economic argument, ahead of the next election.

But the arguments for national sovereignty, domestic reindustrialization, energy security and a strengthened state have been won by the deteriorating security environment rather than the esoteric pronouncements of post-liberal commentators: both the former Thatcherite Farage and the Labour soft-left now converge on them for the credibility to advance their own projects. Reform’s Zia Yusuf publicly threatens the prime beneficiary of actually existing British neoliberalism, the outsourcing giant SERCO, for its insufficient zeal in carrying out future mass deportations. The postliberal Labour MP Jonathan Hinder declares, “Put cheap energy before clean energy. Drill for our own oil and gas in the North Sea. Back British industry, by scrapping self-harming Net Zero policies. Seriously start to rebalance our economy away from London. Stop the boats.” The next election will be fought on firmly postliberal territory, quite divorced from the ineffective theorizing of the movement’s intellectuals.

For we live, now, in the unmanaged postliberal order brought about by liberal hubris. A decade ago, Brexit offered Westminster the breathing space to break with liberal nostrums in a controlled and sober way, listening and acceding to the democratically-expressed demands of the electorate. Instead, the Brexit vote was treated as the mindless revolt of unlettered proles, manipulated by social media algorithms and a malign network of populist demagogues. Back in the heady days of Brexit discourse — and I have cause to remember this well — to argue that liberal fantasies of enlightened cosmopolitan governance had seen the capacity and legitimacy of individual states dangerously weakened, threatening the basic political order itself, was reviled as something akin to fascism by those who have only latterly awakened to reality.

Again too late, the very same commentators who, only a year ago, mocked the inter-ethnic violence predicted to result from mass immigration as the product of rightwing fever dreams, introducing the “nightmare” prospect of “hardened borders,” now panickingly declare that “we cannot simply dismiss the violence as just another outburst of a hardened racist few… because to do so would seem to leave us destined to regular summer bouts of pogromist violence”. This crisis is apparently no longer a hard-Right fantasy: through gritted teeth, the writer comes to the conclusion, presented as novel, that “the sight of unvetted young men landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a glaring signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it”. A year is, evidently, a long time in British political commentary. We cannot, perhaps, ever expect Britain’s liberal Left commentariat to admit that they were wrong, even as they belatedly adopt positions their social standing once rested upon condemning. But Burnham’s ideological malleability — delicately phrased — is such that he can easily adopt much of Reform’s message of a broken, dysfunctional Britain in renewing an establishment consensus he affects to despise.

One obvious danger for Reform is that Burnham, not shy of exaggerated displays of cultural Northernness, will cast them as the party of arrogant, spoiled Southeast England. Early trial versions of this approach, such as moving part of his Prime Ministerial court to Manchester, seem designed more to inspire a kneejerk reaction from his foes than to tangibly improve British governance. But it is difficult to extrapolate too much from his Makerfield win: Burnham is genuinely popular in the Northwest, and simply presented the fastest route to ousting Starmer. Hanging a general halfway through a war is rarely a sign of impending victory; even still, for Reform, the path ahead is uncertain. Running a prominent national-populist intellectual failed in Gorton and Denton; but so did running a no-nonsense local plumber in Makerfield, where a strategic section of the Red Wall has been found electorally wanting. Should Reform now lean into its end-of-pier, ITV1 Red Wall aesthetic, or attempt to woo the middle classes, among whom it has rapidly become the default party of the Right?

It is perhaps in pursuit of a newly radicalized middle-class audience that Farage has begun to write on Substack, focusing on territory simply untouchable to Labour. The Burnhamite manifesto declares that “Reactionary politics… is fundamentally a politics of shrinkage and exclusion: drawing the circle of belonging tighter, withdrawing provision from those deemed undeserving, turning scarcity into a weapon that disciplines and divides,” positing instead a program of mass abundance rolled out by a revitalized British state. Farage’s message is simpler and clearer. As he asserts, the effect of current social housing policy “has been to redistribute the nation’s stock of social housing away from the White British populations who originally inhabited these areas”. Indeed, as he writes, extending Reform’s critique of mass immigration further back in time than has lately been deemed acceptable, “When Labour and Conservative politicians opened Britain’s borders after the war, it would have been simple to maintain a basic principle: the British people paid for these homes, should be housed in them, and newcomers will have to be patient as they earn their way in.” Perhaps addressed at a downwardly mobile, younger middle class, the dangled prospect of redistributing prime urban real estate may yet outweigh fashionable moral poses.

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Here, on the once-perilous ground of immigration, is the obvious dividing line at the next election, between parties with otherwise converging economic worldviews. As Burnham’s first headache, the spat between his future ministers over Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) reforms, shows, immigration is a source of internal conflict within Labour, caught between an awareness of the public will and its own internal morality, while it is Reform’s very reason for being. To win over his party, Burnham may, as he has hinted, be inclined to abandon Starmer and Mahmood’s ILR reforms, intended to quietly disperse what even the BBC now calls the Boriswave. Yet as clear-eyed, Blue Labour-adjacent commentators like the Labour Realists observe, “the Labour Party cannot transfer the costs of a Conservative mistake on immigration policy onto the British people and win the next election”. It is, simply, in Reform’s greatest interest for the Boriswave to become, as soon as possible in the public’s eyes, the Burnhamwave. Reform’s pitch on the Boriswave, already the Party’s prime line of attack against Burnham, is clear, as Zia Yusuf writes: “If Burnham tries to make the Boriswave permanent, we will reverse it: abolishing ILR, rescinding residence rights of those dependent on the state, and reforming the immigration system so that no Government can ever behave so recklessly again.”

The logic for Reform in the coming election — which we may now expect at any date from Burnham’s formal coronation — is therefore to go further, and harder, on immigration than would have been imaginable even two years ago. There is little ground on which Burnham can fight — on housing, on the NHS, on crime — in which his party’s near-religious sympathy for mass immigration has not poisoned the well. Every new social housing development Burnham promises can, and will, be presented as a source of local danger. The future of British politics, long-delayed, is finally upon us.

For Labour, there will never be a better time for an election than now — but for Reform the attractions are less clear. The Party’s declarations of the urgency of new elections do not fully convince, given its recent electoral setbacks and still nebulous program for government. Yet for both the calculation will be the same: the longer the country has to experience the operation of a Labour government, the more attractive a Faragian reformation will seem. With both parties deploring the dysfunctional brokenness of Westminster politics, victory will come to whoever can more convincingly capture the revolutionary mood. Burnham wants a decade to complete his project: but so did Starmer. Like the violent storms attending Starmer’s downfall, Britain’s decade-long, suffocating political climate now seems ready for dramatic resolution, clearing the air for years to come. The heavens are opening up over Westminster: even in his Manchester fiefdom, Burnham is unlikely to escape the flood.

Most importantly, this new “crypto” would be decentralized. Transactions would remain anonymous, carried out directly and without intermediaries, between digital wallets across the world. And while advanced liberal democracies were busy printing money and injecting it into an insolvent banking system via quantitative easing, the total amount of Bitcoins would always be limited to a hard cap of 21 million. Where over-spending governments could stimulate hyperinflationary spirals, the new software would act as a “digital gold”, strictly rationing tokens to “miners” who used their computer processing power to create new Bitcoins.

In the midst of a financial crisis unmatched since the Wall Street Crash, a new techno-utopian movement was born. And it’s perhaps no surprise that Nigel Farage became an evangelist. An instinctive iconoclast, the Reform leader is temperamentally attracted to anything that’ll shake up our fusty old institutions. At a crypto conference last year, he told delegates he was “your champion”, promising to “bring crypto in from the cold”.

Lately, though, Farage has gone from fanboy to investor, putting £215,000 into a crypto startup headed by the former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng (of mini-budget and Trussonomics fame). Kwarteng quickly claimed that the Farage link would help his firm gain “institutional credability” (sic), a useful asset in a crypto world that remains murky, unregulated, and dogged by associations with tax avoidance and money laundering.

Quite apart from his general enthusiasm for crypto, this isn’t Farage’s first foray into unorthodox financial schemes. A former City metals trader, he’s spent years touting the benefits of commodities investments as part of his partnerships with Fortune and Freedom, a financial advice outfit, as well as doing ads for something called Direct Bullion.

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With Farage now getting more involved in the crypto game, advocates doubtless hope their man will help Bitcoin disrupt finance just as he did British politics. Or, if we believe the naysayers, the crypto craze is a symbol of our intellectually decrepit age, a modern-day Tulip bubble inflated either by the dangerous or deluded, eager to sell assets with no underlying value beyond providing dark web services and anonymity for illicit activity. In this reading, the flow of money into Bitcoin and other digital currencies is less a sign of frontier innovation and more an emblem of our era: a damning indictment of the decline of productive, patient, long-term investment in favor of speculative gambles in unproductive assets.

Ultimately, though, Farage’s enthusiasm for cryptocurrency exists at the intersection between grift, personal self-enrichment, and an inchoate political ideology. Nor, of course, is he alone here. Bitcoin and the broader crypto phenomenon has become indelibly associated with the populist Right, from Javier Milei in Argentina to Marine Le Pen in France, who lately performed a screeching U-turn on her party’s opposition to what she once called a tool of the “ruling elite”. For his part, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele instructed his fellow citizens that businesses large and small must accept Bitcoin as legal tender. Farage has promised he’ll let people pay taxes using crypto, and has committed to setting up a sovereign wealth fund of digital currency assets.

If a vague libertarianism is part of the appeal here, there are other draws too. “Drain the swamp” was the rallying cry of Donald Trump, who netted a large fortune through the launch of his own crypto memecoin on the eve of his second presidency. The slogan most obviously referred to Washington’s insider networks, the liberal think tankers, corporate lobbyists and the captured elites in the Republican old guard. But it might just as well have been aimed at MAGA’s other adversary: the finance capital establishment, whose donations allowed Kamala Harris to outspend Trump by three-to-one in 2024.

Wall Street’s cliques sit atop the apex of the world’s dollar-denominated reserve system. They may have been tempted by Trumpian tax cuts, but not at the expense of losing those most valuable of commodities: predictability, stability, and borderless, frictionless open markets. Then there’s the Federal Reserve top brass, who Trump has wasted no time in attacking once back in the White House, not for their money-printing splurges, but for their parsimony, and their refusal to run the economy on hot at the President’s behest.

The crypto world serves as a strange mirror to the traditional Wall Street-Fed nexus. It’s the wayward brother, the rebellious trustafarian that nonetheless remains committed to sharing in the outputs of an over-financialized service economy, reliant on the proceeds of what Marx liked to call “fictitious capital”. The embrace of the technology by an ascendant Right-populist wave reveals an emptiness and superficiality at the heart of their projects. These are Janus-faced movements. On the one hand they feed off popular resentment at the ruling classes  — the deracinated, ultra-rich “citizens of nowhere”  — and instead promise nationalist, patriotic revivals. Yet all the while, they advocate for the further entrenchment of an unrestricted, borderless world, one facilitated by new financial technologies.

The collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods system, over half a century ago, preceded a new phase of globalization, with the expansion of consumer credit and financialization replacing industrial exports as the engines of the global economy. But whatever they might imply, the populists don’t propose to reverse these trends. Rather, they want to deepen them, with the further sublimation of national boundaries and the coherent economies they imply for digitized, globalized transactions. They rail against a globalist elite while promoting a technology that facilitates and smooths global economic integration. They promise to halt national decline while actively boosting digital assets — assets that undermine the capacity of nation-states to fully control their own fiscal and monetary destinies.

For Farage, then, this is less “Take Back Control”, and more “Cede More Control” — to software that has an anti-statist, anti-national ethos embedded into its very code. All the while, crypto involves not the replacement of globalized capitalism, but merely its rejuvenation. And how will this be achieved? By pushing deregulation-on-steroids, turbocharged market liberalism without the mediating forces of the Federal Reserve to shore it up. That’s what’s at the very heart of the crypto phenomenon: the desire for a peer-to-peer currency functioning without the oversight of banks, legislators or indeed law enforcement. And, again, this isn’t so surprising. Faragism has always focused its ire on the free movement of people, of labor, while the transnational nature of capital mobility was taken as a given, or even an unalloyed good. And what all this shows, under proper scrutiny, is that the most mainstream of populisms can operate as a vehicle for intra-elite, rather than anti-elite, competition.

In Reform’s case, meanwhile, its leader’s crypto moment also speaks to a profound identity crisis. Yes, the party wants to stop small-boat crossings. Yet as Nigel began growing his collection of failed Tory ministers, his outfit has lost its outsider edge. We saw another symptom of its ideological confusion in its flip-flopping over Iran: should it remain attached to Trump’s transnational ambitions at all costs, or should it focus on the blunt economic fears of voters back in Britain.

All the while, the party is caught between pledges of reviving industry, rebuilding state capacity, and reorienting the economy towards manufacturing on the one hand — and its roots in the free-market, Austrian School dreams of City-based eccentrics on the other. In a world of burgeoning protectionism, and massive state-capitalist subsidies and aggressive mercantilism practiced by both the Americans and Beijing, the idea of reconciling both approaches is a fantasy. Industrial revival will require an active, agile state that shapes and directs market forces towards strategic, long-term goals.

Perhaps most of all, though, Farage’s crypto mania looks out of step with the times. Where the promise of bitcoin was a future of prosperity driven immaterially, with newfound wealth accrued in the digital ether, conflict in the Gulf reminds us of the centrality of hard goods: energy, steel, secure trading routes, and military-industrial capacity. In a world returning to the politics of production, Farage’s crypto evangelism feels less like a rebellion than strange nostalgia for a fading, borderless age.

In the intervening years, with his bombastic style, and even his body language, Farage contributed to a fundamental reordering of British politics. The Clacton MP is sharp and his enthusiasm for a pint conveys an everyman bonhomie. More profoundly, though, he channels something lying deep within the national psyche: merriment. It’s no surprise, then, that his personality has so easily translated into a huge following on TikTok.

And as his star has risen exponentially, so too has his party’s — on current form, it looks likely to form the next government. All the same, what fueled Farage’s rise may not last forever. Reform’s political brand — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — used to be all conviviality and connection, but as the party has expanded, that merriment is increasingly being replaced by something else: whinging.

If anything, Matt Goodwin’s campaign to win the Gorton and Denton by-election was characterized by a complaining doomerism, failing to say much — if anything — that was positive about the seat, let alone the country. This constant focus on national decline undoubtedly bears fruit when building a popular Substack or YouTube channel. But if you’re trying to win over voters who can’t name the Home Secretary, you need something more hopeful. And even four days after his defeat, Goodwin was still at it. Nicknamed “Badloss” by some of his critics, he was relentless in his complaints that Britain’s electoral system was just as bad as Lebanon and Sierra Leone. Not that many people noticed, though. Let’s face it, if you lose by more than 4,000 votes, and proceed to say you were cheated of a deserved win, people are bound to switch off.

Indeed Goodwin’s failure, and Reform’s immediate response — imagine Donald Trump’s conspiratorial “Stop the Steal” campaign delivered with the hamminess of a Carry On film — is all the stranger given the Gorton result was objectively strong for both man and party. Pushing Labour into third anywhere in the north west is no mean feat. Goodwin simply lost to a strong candidate, Hannah Spencer, in a difficult race. So as the smoke cleared in a testing by-election, Reform sounded like losers.

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Spencer, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different as she shrugged off the negativity thrown her way by both Labour and Reform. A Bolton-born plumber, she focused throughout on bread-and-butter issues: stopping fly-tipping, cleaning up litter, fixing the housing crisis and sprucing up high streets. During the campaign she even completed a plastering qualification. As she stood to deliver her victory speech, focusing less on ideology than daily hardships, Goodwin will have known that these were subjects that would appeal to his target voters: the Greens were no longer the po-faced identitarian liberals who like to tut at your package holiday. At that moment, Reform must have realised that its pitch as the only credible alternative to the uniparty was lost.

But what happened to Reform’s mojo? Whether you blame the veteran Tory influx, Goodwin’s performance anxiety, the outsourcing of strategy to consultants — it is clear that the party has lost its “aura”. This seemed pretty clear when I was canvassing in Gorton, and was repeatedly and politely told by party canvassers that they weren’t permitted to speak to journalists. Nor was Goodwin particularly keen on individual interviews. Yet this is a mass party and, managed correctly, its membership should be its greatest asset. Suddenly, the party machine feels preachy, with a very New Labour feel. Warm ale is out; a pint of control freakery, please.

This relinquishing of authenticity by Reform has started to be reflected in polling. At the weekend, as the Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members in England and Wales for the first time, FindOutNow placed them in second place; on Monday, Lord Ashcroft’s survey put them at third, just three points behind Reform, with almost 90 seats.

Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the center, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high.

Traditionally, many of the party’s would-be supporters figured a vote for the party would be a vote for environmentally friendly policies. When Caroline Lucas was the party’s sole representative at Westminster, the Greens were able to push climate-related issues into the political realm in a remarkable way, from fracking to net zero. It only took one MP.

As the party has increased its MPs to four, the modern Greens have made the political weather on everything from renationalization to Gaza. Today, its MPs function as committed campaigners on strongly held policies at a national level — as well as effective constituency representatives at a local one. This understandably appeals to many of those voters disappointed by the traditional parties.

It helps, too, that Green supporters care about such a range of issues — from electoral reform to rewilding beavers to rent caps to closer ties with Europe. Some simply want to exert pressure on the Labour Party to move further Left. This broad, semi-coherent theory of change sees the party as an expression of social movements as much as an electoral vehicle.

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One downside is that the party risks becoming too successful. The uncomfortable truth is that too many first-place finishes mean the Greens will need to offer more than a grab-bag of progressive causes. For now, though, such problems remain in the future. My suspicion is that few Green voters expect Polanski to be the next prime minister. Many may not even want such an outcome, preferring the party to be a junior coalition member in a progressive government. Indeed, when I interviewed Polanski last week, soon after the Gorton and Denton result, he merely expressed an ambition to lead a party of several dozen difficult MPs in Parliament.

This, incidentally, is also why anti-Green scare tactics, from both Labour and the Right, will ultimately fail. It’s easy to make radicalism feel like an existential threat when it risks actually leading a government — as with Corbyn. That isn’t the case with Polanski. Certainly, comparing a by-election win in Manchester with Iran’s Islamic Revolution strikes most Britons as unhinged. In any case, it’s hard to present an organisation as much of a danger when all its MPs can fit in the back of a London cab.

Ironically, this anti-establishment vibe is also what is most winning about Polanski’s Greens. The party and its leader manage to couple radical purpose with fun — which, in a strange way, is reminiscent of Farage at his best. While I had to grab a few hours of sleep after Thursday’s result, Polanski stayed up all night. The following evening, he appeared on The Last Leg, full of verve and enthusiasm. This relentless energy is invaluable in politics.

Tramping around the sodden streets of Levenshulme a few weeks ago, with all those houses proudly displaying Green party placards in their front gardens, it was strikingly obvious that Reform’s success had opened the door to new possibilities for the Left. After all, if we are suddenly predicting that Nigel Farage can go from YouTube to No. 10, something previously viewed as impossible, then what’s so outlandish about the Greens overtaking Labour?

In terms of what is politically possible, Nigel Farage has — again — done more than blow the bloody doors off. Only this time it won’t all be to his own advantage.

One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt.” The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”

The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticize quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain.” And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.” 

In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. For Powell, Britain’s willingness to take in tens of thousands of immigrants rendered it “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. And compare Lowe’s talk of necessary pain to that 1968 call for an “extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take”. For better or worse, Powell presaged contemporary debates over migration and nationhood. The challenge, as Keir Starmer found out with his more milquetoast “island of strangers” line, is to acknowledge voters’ frustrations without sounding like him. 

Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. The Reform leader recalled being “dazzled”, as a schoolboy in the Eighties, listening to the former Tory MP speak. Last year, he insisted that Powell was fundamentally right about the scale of “community change” in the country. 

Yet, in his beliefs as well as his rhetoric, Lowe is a more obviously Powellite figure than Farage. He’s more interested in reducing the size of the state, is resistant to Reform’s nationalizing impulses, and is less vulnerable than his rival to charges of “socialism”. In many ways, Restore is the more conservative project, given that its central mission is to return Britain — in more explicit terms than Farage has dared — to a glorious past from its Blairite present. When it comes to presentation, Farage and Lowe — tweed-clad former public schoolboys with past lives in the City — are far closer to one another than they are to the intense, prodigiously academic Powell. Former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan found him unsettlingly zealous, complaining: “Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes.”

Where Lowe differs from Farage, though, is that he has done less to distance himself from figures and ideas which might be classed as far-Right. While the Reform leader has condemned Tommy Robinson for “stir[ring] up hatred” and stated that the activist has no place in his party, Lowe has praised Robinson’s campaigning against grooming gangs cover-ups. In 1974, Powell rejected the chance to stand as a candidate for the far-Right National Front, having left the Tories because of their stance on the European Economic Community. 

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Lowe would be wise to take such an approach with some of the groups and activists now attempting to tie themselves to Restore. Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right Britain First, has said he won’t stand candidates against Lowe’s party at local or national elections. Steve Laws, a prominent ethnonationalist who advocates for the expulsion of everyone who is not ethnically British, has committed his vote to Restore Britain and called Farage a “traitor”. On Monday, he posted to his 140,000 X followers: “I fully endorse Rupert Lowe to be PM. He will implement the majority of what I want to achieve in terms of remigration over the next 6-7 years.” 

These activists are unlikely to appeal to swing voters. Lowe, if he follows conventional electoral logic, is therefore presented with a dilemma: how to attract smart collaborators committed to immigration restrictionism, without also drawing in the cranks? The problem is that a cruder vision of nationalism pervades even the upper echelons of his party. Harrison Pitt, a writer who has been a key figure in devising policy for Restore Britain, has previously referred to mass immigration as the “ethnic cleansing” of white Britons, as well as highlighting the “erasure of [Britain’s] host population”. Additionally, he has appeared to suggest that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose parents were born in Pakistan, should return to her “homeland”, and vowed in December to make 2026 “the year of mass denaturalizations” for those who presently hold British citizenship. 

In an interview in December 2024, Lowe said that “I don’t care about people’s religion or their color,” but Restore has taken a far more robust approach to Islam than Reform has. Lowe is set on “resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam”, and his new party’s platform includes policies on outlawing the burqa, sharia courts and halal slaughter. Some of its senior figures also champion a notably muscular Christianity. For instance, Lowe’s campaigns director Charlie Downes, a Catholic convert, declared this week: “Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.”

Both Downes and Pitt are still in their twenties, and Lowe has a notable following among a particular group of politically engaged, digitally-savvy young men. There’s even a collective term which can be used either pejoratively or affectionately: Lowemosexuals. The online sphere has become a battlefield between the Restore leader and Farage, who boasts more TikTok followers than the other 649 UK MPs combined. Lowe last year labeled the Reform boss’s leadership style “messianic”, yet his own role in Restore follows similar contours, the party’s profile relying largely on his social media reach.

Capturing wider support, of course, is a different proposition. According to polling from this week, 92% of Britons are unable to name Lowe when shown a picture of him. He is popular among his constituents, viewed as a committed and unpretentious champion for Great Yarmouth, but he has a majority of less than 1,500. He is expected to stand at the next election under the banner of Great Yarmouth First, which he established as a political party in December, yet his personal appeal may count for less when divorced from a Reform UK platform. 

So the question remains: is Restore a credible Right-wing movement — able to distinguish itself both from Reform and from the crowded field of nationalist groups on the more radical fringes — or just Lowe’s revenge project? County councillors are already moving over from Reform, providing some local infrastructure. Even if Restore doesn’t win seats at the next election, it will surely still prove a spoiler for further Farage gains. 

Here, Lowe could receive extra ammunition from an alliance with another of Farage’s jilted exes: Ben Habib. Having served as co-deputy leader for Reform, Habib was demoted in favor of Richard Tice, and quit the party in November 2024. The following spring he referred to Lowe’s treatment by Farage as an “injustice”, subsequently setting up a new party of his own, Advance UK, in June. 

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On Saturday, Habib extended an open offer to Lowe to merge their two parties. Lowe politely demurred by suggesting that Habib join Restore, which “would be stronger with you in it”. But Habib, who was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK as a teenager, is not widely popular among the hardcore Lowemosexuals. David Kurten — who leads the Heritage Party, another bit-part player in Britain’s hard-Right scene — summarized the dynamic thus: “Ben loves Rupert. Rupert’s fans would deport Ben.” Richard Inman, a prominent Advance UK member and organizer for Tommy Robinson, has accused Lowe of being “driven not by love of country, but by a massive ego”, adding that many of Restore’s supporters are “ethno-nats”. 

Advance has built up a respectable profile: it now has more than 40,000 members, nine councilors through defections from Reform, and outsized publicity thanks to endorsements from Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. But the Tesla mogul, as well as boosting Habib’s party, has in recent days cheered on the progress of Restore Britain. On Wednesday afternoon, he went so far as to accuse Reform of being “Nazis” because “THEY are the ones who want race extinction.” As the world’s richest man, armed with 234 million pliant X followers, Musk’s overseas influence is considerable; his amplification of posts about the grooming gangs helped push the Government into ordering a national inquiry. 

Musk is widely reviled among British voters, but his support — both X-based and financial — could boost Restore’s international profile and increase the chance of collaboration with like-minded parties such as Alternative for Germany and Spain’s Vox. Farage endorsed the AfD in 2017 but has, in recent years, kept a deliberate distance. There is a gap here for Lowe to exploit as anti-immigration groups build ties around Europe: these are parties which are gaining influence but which are still considered too dangerous by Reform and the Tories. 

While Farage might think he flies in the face of such squeamishness, and that he is dismantling the “uniparty” consensus, Restore supporters believe he instead represents little more than a continuation of the New Labour-inflected order which has governed Britain for the past three decades. According to Downes, Reform’s senior figures “basically agree that the vision Blair had for Britain was admirable and desirable”. In his view, “it will come to pass that Farage is the Regime’s lifeline, not its nemesis.”

Lowe’s calculation may well be that he doesn’t need to expunge the less savory elements from his party’s message, and that the electorate will instead move closer to him. The UK’s Overton window has undeniably shifted on immigration; Labour’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is taking a harder line than her Tory predecessors, even as the polls are led by a party with a plan for mass deportations. Almost half of Britons say they would support an agenda in which no new immigrants are admitted to the country and large numbers of recent arrivals are required to leave. British voters’ conception of national belonging remains chiefly civic, but some of Lowe’s most influential cheerleaders believe there is further room for that ideological window to move. 

Either way, the Restore leader is not one for apologies. On Wednesday, he wrote that he is “entirely uninterested” in “being called unpleasant names”. He has repeatedly made clear that being labeled racist is no deterrent for him. Pushed to recant a suggestion that illegal immigrants should be sent to remote Scottish islands for the “midges to do their work”, he doubled down. Lowe, evidently, has a thick skin. In his previous life as chairman of Southampton Football Club, disgruntled fans used to sing about hanging him from the Itchen Bridge. 

It’s easy to forget that, even after “Rivers of Blood”, Powell was immensely popular. Polls carried out shortly after the speech demonstrated that a majority of the British public agreed with his assessment of race relations. In 2002 he was voted one of the 100 greatest Britons ever. On his death, the Telegraph wrote that he “would survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill”. Just as Powell’s fears around integration proved prophetic, Lowe may now find himself a 21st-century equivalent — an emissary from a future Britain whose decline has been contingent on its tolerance.

Ferdinand Mount, who headed the No. 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, wrote of Powell that “always, he is restlessly pursuing the ultimate safe haven: the nation.” Nationalism’s great strength, for Mount, is its “iron framework” — the “insistence that the nation is the supreme political fact”. The very act of restoration inherent to Lowe’s project is its own safe haven, as inarguable in its logic as “Make America Great Again”. He, like Powell before him, has recognized the British state as the sclerotic, rulebound husk it is. And now, as Powell was, he is filled with foreboding.

In the event of Farage entering No. 10, we now know Robert Jenrick would become the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Richard Tice, meanwhile, will ascend to Deputy Prime Minister — as well as overseeing a new department of Business, Trade and Energy. Given the party’s plans for migration, which would mark a break with the post-war trajectory, it’s little surprise that Zia Yusuf, the party’s logistical supremo, will shadow home affairs. Suella Braverman’s focus, meanwhile, is education. 

Glossy press conferences in London may be part of Reform’s reality. But so too, increasingly, are the efforts of the party’s membership. It’s one thing to read headlines declaring Reform has overtaken Labour to become Britain’s largest party, or seeing Zia Yusuf share a viral graphic on social media. It’s quite another to observe hundreds of party activists making voter contacts and collecting data — the meat and veg of political campaigns. 

And that’s exactly what I saw on a rain-lashed Saturday in Gorton and Denton a few weeks ago. Some of those Reform activists, slogging through the mire, came from far away: I met one group freshly arrived from Shropshire. Others were from the seat itself, or elsewhere in Greater Manchester. Across all of those conversations, I was reminded of an important shift. Reform, for all of its brand recognition among opinion-makers — not to mention the fact that its candidate, Matt Goodwin, is a TV presenter — is now a mass party.

In races like Gorton and Denton, there is typically only one party campaigning in such a fashion. During the Corbyn years, the Labour hope was that deficits elsewhere — such as a generally hostile media — could be countered by mass canvassing, social media and in-person conversations. That approach yielded impressive results in 2017 before failing two years later. Before, and since, the Liberal Democrats mastered the art of flooding constituencies come by-election time. In the twilight years of the last government, they were the bane of the Conservative Party. 

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And yet, in Gorton and Denton, I saw something new: not just the rise of Reform as a serious national force, but three parties fighting a strong “ground war”. Labour remains a mass party, just. And besides the emergence of Reform as a genuine expression of popular politics, there is now also the Greens. Walking up a residential street, a little past six in the evening — as several St George’s flags fluttered from lampposts — it was hard to miss the party’s campaign HQ. From a distance it seemed reminiscent of a kebab shop: narrow glass shopfront, fluorescent neon sign, people packed inside.

But rather than jolly punters in search of a late-night doner, here were dozens of activists arriving to collect leaflets for delivery. That isn’t normal — most certainly not for a party which, until two years ago, boasted a solitary MP. Zack Polanski’s outfit, as with Farage’s before the last election, should not be discarded as a social media confection. There is real substance beneath the viral TV appearances.

But while the Greens and Reform are both mass parties, the similarities end there. Because for the latter, not only do connections flow down to activists and members, but also up to powerful figures in the media and civil society, like Jim Ratcliffe, as well as much of the disintegrating Tory party, especially donors. Left populism — think Bernie Sanders or AOC — seeks to juxtapose plutocrats against the people. That’s a powerful frame Polanski has adopted, with the Green leader — in his first speech on the job — contrasting a “nation of neighbors” against the billionaire class. The extraordinary thing about the gauntlet Reform has thrown down to the Left is an ambition to be both. Its members are as likely to own an Audi Quattro as a horse.

Multiple motivations drove Farage’s announcement yesterday. One is to signal how Reform is no longer a one-man band, with different figureheads responsible for discrete areas of policy. The bigger point, though, is experience. Remarkably, there are more politicians from the Liz Truss government in Farage’s top team than in Kemi Badenoch’s entire shadow cabinet. That is no accident. If Reform wishes to form the next government, it must perform the political alchemy of being both the party of change, while having familiarity with the apparatus of the state. After all, how else could it hope to change things? 

While rarely mentioned by its progressive critics, this is Reform’s greatest vulnerability. Polling last year revealed that a looming concern among the party’s “soft considerers” is they have no experience of running the country — even when those same respondents agreed with Reform across multiple policy areas. Though most agree that Farage’s insurgents are driving the national agenda, almost half the public believes the country would go from bad to worse with the former MEP in No. 10, not least because he has no experience in government. To take the top job having never been the Leader of the Opposition or served in a Cabinet would be without precedent in the modern era. It’s almost impossible to imagine.

So it is little surprise that while a frankly astonishing 42% of the public think Reform “understands the problems facing Britain”, they are still more likely to perceive Labour as “fit to govern”. The more data you see, the more Farage’s strategy of embracing former Tories — like Braverman and Jenrick — makes sense. Despite the personal popularity of both figures among the Reform membership, their admission to the party’s ranks at Westminster is intended as a signal to the wider electorate. Having built a mass organization, Reform is now trying to look like a party of government. 

It would be naive not to foresee a tension emerging here. Indeed, that has already come to the fore. Last week, Rupert Lowe, formerly a Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, launched a political party of his own: Restore Britain. Restore is the fully-leaded version of Reform, with one critical addition: its politics are, for better or worse, more heavily inflected by online discourse. Lowe’s virtuoso social media game is a big reason why the party has allegedly attracted tens of thousands of members in under a week, with Lowe himself announcing on X that it had overtaken the Liberal Democrats. But that strength is also a weakness, with the former businessman’s online superfans not necessarily reflective of the wider public. According to one poll, just 8% of voters even know who Lowe is. Perhaps Farage’s greatest strength over the years — whether it was judging public sentiment for a second Brexit referendum, or here — is to appreciate that Twitter (and now X) isn’t real. Besides being more fun, it turns out that going to the pub is a better gauge of public sentiment. 

Could a fragmenting radical Right, partly fueled by Reform’s pursuit of elite credibility, come back to bite Farage? It’s too early to say, but that by-election in Gorton and Denton could provide a clue. Standing for Advance UK, yet another Reform offshoot founded by a one-time Farage acolyte, Ben Habib (reputedly recognized by just 4% of voters), is Nick Buckley. A local campaigner around homelessness and anti-social behavior, Buckley was awarded an MBE in 2020 for his services to young people and the community in Greater Manchester. Intriguingly, his campaign seems more interested in attacking Reform’s Matt Goodwin than either the Green or Labour candidates, with Buckley even attacking academics who enter politics (Goodwin is a former professor of political science). 

Speaking on Tuesday, Farage sounded like one of the Gallagher brothers as he castigated Lowe, insisting that the two had never even been friends, and that the former Southampton chairman is someone defined by crises and needless confrontation. That enmity was tinged with a certain recognition, though. Of all the parties on the Right seeking to steal a march on Farage — from Advance UK to UKIP and the Heritage Party — it is Restore which presents the greatest challenge. 

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It is an inescapable fact that British politics increasingly resembles a proportional representation (PR) system, on both the Left and Right, only without the voting system. Hours after the Reform announcement yesterday, a new poll from YouGov put four parties — Reform, Labour, the Conservatives and the Greens — between 17% and 24%. Suddenly Lowe’s wrecking project feels like it could make the difference, while the need to win wavering Tories becomes ever more critical for Farage and his friends. 

For more than two decades, I’ve heard the arguments against electoral reform. A first-past-the-post system guarantees strong mandates, I was told as a student of A-level politics. It provides stable, competent government, I was informed a few years later as an undergraduate. Most important of all, as I learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it means — in contrast to the Continent — that the extremes can never define the center. Increasingly, none of this makes sense, and it feels curiously similar to the cope pumped out before the Brexit vote in 2016. Nobody believes this stuff anymore, least of all those with any power. If anything, our first-past-the-post system seems to contribute to the abiding sense of permanent dysfunction. 

Lord Hailsham was right when he said that the Westminster system can lead to a form of “elective dictatorship”. It’s just, in the case of contemporary Britain, we persistently concentrate power onto two parties incapable of running the country. They are both, ideologically and in terms of personnel, exhausted. Farage’s job, as witnessed on Tuesday morning, is to convince enough people that he offers a genuine alternative. But it’s a sign of the times — and an important one at that — that the radical Right could be balkanizing before it’s even achieved power.

International affairs might also play to the Conservative advantage. Farage has benefitted from being Donald Trump’s favorite Englishman, but Trump will not last forever and anyone who cares about British interests will be in despair about an American president who threatens to invade a Nato country and punish those who get in his way.

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Will the Tories go extinct?

By Richard Vinen

In the next few months, the future of the Tory party will likely be decided. Farage has said that Tory defectors will no longer be welcome in his party after the local government elections of May of this year — not, incidentally, a remark that suggests that he has great respect for the motives of those Tories who jump ship. If significant numbers of senior Tories defect, Reform may become the new force on the Right and the terrified remnants on the Tory benches might force Badenoch out so that they can do a deal with Reform that would save some of their seats.

It is fairly certain that the local government elections will see a big vote for Reform (because voters use these occasions to protest against established parties); it is also fairly certain that this victory will be a pyrrhic one, because nothing is more calculated to reveal the weakness of the party than having lots of its ill-tempered and inexperienced activists installed in local councils.

Things will start to get easier for Badenoch, though, if she makes it through the spring. Her position will be stronger because her most dangerous rival in her own party has gone and also because she has begun to show the ferrous qualities of her character. Like Margaret Thatcher, she is beginning to look like someone who is at her best when the going gets tough.

There are other things in her favor. Farage and his Tory admirers may talk about “uniting the Right”, but the truth is that the struggle between Reform and the Conservatives is a civil war within a fairly extreme part of the Right — one that is obsessed with nationalism and, increasingly, with race. One wonders what Edward Boyle, the Conservative MP for Birmingham Handsworth until 1970, would have said about Jenrick’s remark that one does not see a white face in the area.

Reform now seems to be abandoning free-market principles, at the very moment when Rachel Reeves has made even the most socialistically inclined voters think that perhaps entrepreneurs might understand the economy better than politicians and civil servants. This opens up the possibility that the Conservatives might spend a little less time hanging union flags on lampposts and return to their natural territory as a party that exists to defend capitalism. Badenoch might even think of bringing economic liberals such as Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak back to the center of power in her party.

If Reform supplants the Conservative Party or takes it over, then, in a strange way, the British political party system will stay the same. There will be a single party of the Right confronting a single party of the Left. In fact, having Farage as the effective leader of the official opposition is probably the only thing that could save Keir Starmer’s political career. A significant minority of British voters would vote for Farage but a majority would vote for anyone but Farage. In 2002, the French Left rallied behind Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election under the slogan “vote for the crook not the fascist”. One can imagine a variety of similarly unappealing slogans under which the anti-Farage electorate might grudgingly vote for Starmer’s Labour Party.

The tectonic plates of British politics will really move if the Tories survive as a significant force. If this happens, Reform will not go away. Rather there will be two parties on the Right. There will also be fragmentation on the Left — partly because it will be harder to rally the Left-wing vote behind a single party if there is no single party on the Right to oppose. To an extent, this is already happening: there are already more than 120 Members of Parliament who do not belong to either Labour or the Conservatives (in 1951 there were just six) and the great majority of these identify as Left-wing. Badenoch’s survival would, in itself, damage Starmer — because her decisiveness highlights his weaknesses: the more she looks like a pitbull on speed, the more he looks like a robot with a flat battery.

In Britain, we have taken the two-party system for granted. Third parties have either been absorbed into an established party (as Joseph Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists were absorbed into the Tories before the First World War) or have replaced an established party (as Labour replaced the Liberals after the First World War). But there is no reason why the two-party system is bound to survive. Most European countries are governed by multiple parties (sometimes fairly ephemeral ones) that move in and out of alliance with each other in a perpetual Brownian motion.

Tories who are nostalgic for the huge Thatcher majority of 1983 do not find multi-party politics appealing. But, in fact, Conservatives have often done well from allying with other parties — they were the dominant element in a succession of coalition governments that ruled from 1931 to 1945.

Coalitions do have their advantages. Politicians can do things that they know to be necessary, but which would be unpalatable to their own party, by explaining that they need to please their coalition partners. This might be particularly useful to the Tories now — because the party has given rank-and-file members the final decision in leadership elections. It is said that David Cameron promised the Brexit referendum because he assumed that his coalition with the Liberal Democrats would endure after the 2015 election and that his political partners would save him from having to honor his promise.

A multi-party system and the resultant coalitions might, in fact, allow a re-alignment of British politics. Once the two major parties reflected a real social division that pitted the cloth cap against the bowler hat. But the old maps of politics are less reliable now. The working class is much reduced and a large part of the middle class now works in the public sector.

This might simply mean a coalition of Lefts confronting an alliance of Reform and the Conservatives, but it might allow for more complicated alliances. Blairites in the Labour Party and those in the Liberal Democrats who remember Gladstone (or even just David Laws) might be willing to support a free-market government. There must be Tories who privately dream of reversing Brexit. Some important Conservatives — including Boris Johnson — took climate change more seriously than Starmer does.

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Will Robert Jenrick sink Reform?

By Jonny Ball

There is one politician who has, effectively, been operating in a European political system for many years: Farage. His only real experience of elected office was gained in the European parliament. He has long understood that having a majority in parliament may not be the key to getting what you want — he has, after all, placed himself at the center of the political system when he still has only half a dozen MPs in parliament. He has no institutional attachment to a particular party, beginning life as a Conservative (though he much admired Enoch Powell who had left the Conservative Party) before joining UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform. His parties have always been built around him and his freedom of maneuver is greatly enhanced by the fact that he has not had to worry about votes by the rank and file. His political language derives from business: he talks of Reform as a “startup” and once suggested that he might engineer a “reverse takeover” of the Conservative Party. All this suggests a view of politics that revolves around deals and opportunism — there is no one who feels more at home in the smoke-filled room than Farage. His political style would be familiar to, say, a Radical in the French Third Republic or an Italian Christian Democrat in the Seventies.

Perhaps it is time that the defenders of political convention at Westminster began to study the skills that Farage picked up in Brussels and Strasbourg. As for the objection that multi-party systems produce weak governments, has Britain ever had a weaker government than it has now at a time when the ruling party has a huge majority?

Biscuits, bigots, and boom and bust also provide the backdrop for the latest politics-related Mumsnet storm in a teacup: news that a voting intention poll on the site revealed, for the first time ever, a higher share of Mumsnetters intending to vote Reform than Labour. The poll itself is un-weighted, but it’s culturally significant: ever since 2010 was billed as the “Mumsnet Election”, the site has served journalists as a barometer for political sentiment among the nation’s mothers. With good reason, too: for example the Times reports that analysis of Mumsnet discussions correctly predicted that Britain would vote to leave the EU in 2016. 

So are the nation’s mums really swinging behind Reform? No: it’s more that they have declared a pox on Keir Starmer. There is a story here, but it’s more about three fractures captured all those years ago, in Brown’s three utterances: cracks that ran through all of British politics, and that have only widened since. It is not about Reform’s triumph, but the collapse of the entire mainstream political consensus, in both “center-Left” and center-Right” flavors.  

Founded in 2000, Mumsnet is a classic online forum, aimed (as the name suggests) at mothers. It has millions of users, mostly British, predominantly between 24 and 45 and with (according to The Times) around a third living in London and the South-East. Over the years, I’ve spent many happy hours scrolling and debating there: the culture mixes lively, often very funny mom-chat with a piquant Middle England undertone of bourgeois one-upmanship. Whether in the rivalry with the “huns” (ie more working-class moms) who supposedly prefer Netmums, or the long-running forum joke about “nice ham” (you probably had to be there), the site captures both a genuine concern for the welfare of children and the wider social fabric, with a supportive space for sharing that mild feeling of satisfaction that comes with not needing, in every shopping decision, to choose the very cheapest. 

None of this describes your classic keyboard warrior type. The only reason someone might imagine this particular community to be a hotbed of Right-wing sentiment is that Mumsnet is a key platform for gender-critical feminism. Several of the campaign groups that successfully opposed the Tories’ daft “gender-self-ID” legislation in the 2010s spun out of forum debates there, aided by the founders’ commitment to civil, open debate. 

But unless one becomes “far Right” merely by knowing biology is real, that tells us little about Mumsnetters’ overall politics. And in all the time I’ve spent there, this has always been broadly social-democratic, pro-welfare, and pro-family. As you might expect from ordinary people who are not politics junkies, the issues that exercise Mumsnetters tend to be retail: healthcare, tax and benefit policy, schools, and the cost of living — plus, latterly, a preference for politicians who acknowledge that sex dimorphism exists. 

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This makes it all the more notable that Labour are now trailing Reform here, of all places. Should we take this to mean that even the normie moms of Britain are now hanging flags from motorway bridges? I don’t think so. What evidence there is of a tilt to the Right is ambivalent at best: discussion threads on Reform over the last year don’t appear to skew very strongly in Farage’s favor, even on his strongest topic, immigration. The normie moms of Middle England haven’t suddenly discovered a deep love for Nigel Farage. Many still hate and blame him for Brexit. A number of posters believe he wants to ban abortion. And while I couldn’t find a single post expressing faith in Farage’s theoretical ability to form a competent national government, I found several expressing practical disappointment at the performance of their existing Reform-led council.

The Mumsnet Reform surge isn’t even all that much of a surge, comparatively speaking: from 14% in 2024, to 20% recently. By far the largest category of respondents were the “Don’t know/Wouldn’t vote” group, at 29%. In other words: there are far more politically homeless Mumsnetters than Faragist ones. 

The more significant story, though, is the fall in support for the Labour Party. Labour’s share of the poll fell from 41% in 2024 to 18%. Among a demographic staunchly supportive of social welfare, this is damning. Presumably a few have broken for Reform, bumping that 14% up to 20%; but the biggest beneficiary is “Don’t know”, rising by 20%. In other words, a proportion greater than Farage’s entire poll share has abandoned Labour, mostly for political homelessness. 

Why? It’s never one thing, but you could sum this up in terms of Gordon Brown’s: boom and bust, bigots, and biscuits. Or, more prosaically: it’s partly the economy, partly immigration and the related politics of scarcity, and partly how the internet has shredded politics.

The first two issues, migration and the economy, are of course connected, a fact reflected in Mumsnet debate. It’s also linked to the New Labour of Blair and Brown, who, for ideological reasons, were committed to mass migration from the get-go. But these issues only began to grow really fraught after Brown’s “end to boom and bust” climaxed with the biggest bust of all, then a colossal bail-out to the bankers who caused it and a decade of austerity courtesy of the other half of the “sensible centrist” consensus. 

Since then, Britain spent 15 years enjoying the Tory version of that approach: strangling infrastructure investment, while juicing asset owners and big employers with financial and human quantitative easing. For everyone else, the result has been frozen or downgraded living-standards, crumbling facilities, salami-sliced services. At the same time, and relatedly, social cohesion is faltering. Against this backdrop, the still-high migration levels required to keep the engine running has ceased to feel like the exciting Blair-era experiment in openness, and more like a bitter one in resource competition.

Mumsnetters are, in general, socially-minded and comparatively reluctant to blame migrants for this unhappy state of affairs. This is compounded by the fact that (in part, again, thanks to Blair and Brown), in modern Britain, hostility to outsiders is strongly and negatively class-coded. It is, implicitly, vulgar to be anything but maximally cosmopolitan. But if there’s a class-inflected taboo against coming across as nasty and “gammon”, chances are that Mumsnetters are also the ones doing the weekly shop. And I doubt I’m the only one to have noticed the price of “nice ham” rising, along with the price of pretty much everything else. 

For millions, the election of the Labour Party after 14 years of “Tory austerity” brought a surge of hope that things, at this very practical level, would begin to look up. That surge is already over. As hope dies, even those who prefer to style themselves as “open” are beginning to shift from wanting to protect everybody to focusing on protecting their own. 

And here we run up against the second Brownite snafu: the issue of “bigotry”, or more neutrally of who is included in “our own”. The original 2010 “Bigotgate” was less about racism than a disagreement over the scope of taxpayer generosity. In their exchange, Duffy told Brown that state welfare was for “looking after the people who are vulnerable”, which is to say looking after our own. She then expressed a concern that outsiders to that “own” were taking goods that weren’t for them. Brown dismissed this as “bigotry”, but really it’s a question about resource allocation.

When resources are abundant, this question doesn’t arise so often. But resources are no longer abundant, and the hope that Labour would change this is dead. As costs rise, a growing segment of the once-comfortable middle class is glumly forgoing nice ham – worrying about bills and their children’s futures. With each pack of sweaty processed ham that goes into the cart, and each bad headline about youth unemployment, the longing for radical change grows — and the fear of being re-classified as “gammon” recedes.

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In turn this is amplified by the third Brownite snafu: the cookie. Cookiegate itself reportedly happened because, due to his partial sight impairment, Brown had pre-prepared copy-and-paste answers to the anticipated questions and largely ignored any spontaneous ones. In this sense, it stands for just how hopelessly ill-equipped he was for the immediacy, volatility and occasional surrealism of digital communications. With the possible exception of Farage, most contemporary politicians are similarly ill-equipped, Starmer more painfully than most. 

And this isn’t just about personality types; it’s about whole political systems. From arguments over “misinformation” and foreign interference, to networked diaspora communities resisting integration, the digital revolution is changing the face, reach, means, and subjects of politics faster than politicians or political systems can adapt. 

Some on the Labour side seem to believe that their problem is only one of communications, and if only they could be more charismatic/censor opposing content/otherwise control the message then everything would be fine. This is wrong. The problem is also that when nice ham is so expensive, people resent being taxed so hard — especially when you start hearing whispers that it’s being spent on housing Afghans in seaside hotels. But communication is also part of the problem: Starmer is awful at it. And the breakneck pace of digital change really doesn’t help.  

None of this is, properly speaking, about Nigel Farage. I don’t know that the moms of Middle England will ever like him. He, or perhaps the character he plays, is a type that regular English women often meet in real life, and often view (with some justification) as a slippery customer. But when the culmination of 14 hapless Tory years turned out to be a Labour Government still more useless and hateful than the one it displaced, seemingly unable to do anything but tinker as Britain circles the drain, we’re at an impasse. 

What to do? The Don’t Knows don’t know. But if Farage manages to convince enough of them that making common cause with the dreaded “gammon” is the route back to nice ham, perhaps a decisive share of Middle England’s moms will quietly take the risk.

Swift was, no doubt, inspired by his native Ireland, until now the historical benchmark for poor British governance mismanaging a nation under its purview, and inspiring spasms of inchoate anger among its benighted people that led eventually to revolution. Yet the portrait of a distant governing class obsessed with extracting solar energy from cucumbers as the cities they rule fall into squalid ruination, trying and failing to make reality conform to their ideal theories, is an uncomfortably apposite one for the British mainland today. British politics now looks less like the collapse of a party than of an entire regime.

If Keir Starmer did not exist, the governing caste he represents would have had to invent him. Indeed, so rigid and robotic are Starmer’s certainties, so unwilling to face reality and so strangely devoid of interior life is he, that we half-suspect they did: the Prime Minister seems less a person than a tulpa collectively dreamed up by this class at its moment of terminal trial. An idealist of a failed Utopia, a technocrat who cannot govern, a manager who cannot control the underlings who despise him, his failings are those of his caste as a whole; he is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime. Over just the past couple of years, the British electorate has eviscerated both parties of its two-party democracy: historic landslides have immediately crumbled into electoral extinction, rendering power illusory and the country ungovernable. Five prime ministers in a decade have tried and failed to impose some order to the chaos. And what is surely now the most revolutionary electorate in the Western world is drumming yet another leader to the scaffold.

It is useless, in these circumstances, for Starmer to remind his rebellious party that he won power barely a year ago with a landslide mandate; that he is, as his allies desperately brief the press, just one of two living persons to have ever won an election for Labour. Starmer’s devious and sharp-elbowed internal climb to power, then, reveals him as probably the most competent and successful politician that the modern Labour movement can produce. That he is already so weak, so luckless and so widely despised highlights the essential problem neither he nor any Labour successor can overcome: he is the incarnation not so much of a party as of an entire cohort about to be swept from the stage.

In a democracy — we are told often enough, anyway — governments win and hold power by giving voters what they want. Yet British democracy works in quite other ways: those who hold power are fearful of what the voters want, repelled by it on moral grounds, and instead see their role, like a stern Victorian nanny, as forcing down the bitter and improving medicine it is their duty to administer to its ungrateful charge. That the voters may grumble, sulk and spit it out is all, for them, an expected part of the process. The very existence of British democracy is, we may say, a testable proposition: in its greatest test so far, the Brexit referendum, our governing caste entirely failed. Viewing the result as a tantrum to be ridden out, rather than a demand for total reform, every element of our governing caste congealed together in a single mass to frustrate and subvert the vote. Brexit’s winning voters were, they told themselves, merely deluded and misinformed.

There is a pleasing synchrony, then, in the collapse of the Starmer project, and of the BBC’s latest and perhaps last great scandal: they are both, after all, the death pangs of an elite that has lost its legitimacy. When we see the BBC’s defenders mobilizing, like worker ants scurrying to defend their threatened queen, we see revealed an entire class struggling to maintain its grasp on power. The narrow sweep of those who, in declaring the BBC’s non-partisan nature, reveal how precisely partisan the organization has become, underlines the scale of the problem. From the Sixties onwards, through to winning power in the Nineties, a set of ideological assumptions became dominant within the Westminster State and its class allies in what we euphemistically term “the professions”. The BBC transmits the worldview of this class, whether those who pay for it wish to watch it or not. Gleefully adopting a role as combaters of “disinformation” — that is to say, opinions conflicting with this worldview — the Corporation has veered ever more tightly to its own narrowing set of approved beliefs.

As its latest scandal shows, what is objectively true is now of less importance to the BBC’s tastemakers than what ought to be true, or simply feels true to them. From history documentaries to morning pabulum to the tired, court satire of Have I Got News For You, whose doddering panelists still trot out flaccid jibes at their caste enemies, it is now impossible to watch the BBC’s content without wading through its intrusive ideology at every step. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”, Keats wrote: yet having long foregone any pretensions to artistry, all that is left of the BBC’s output is the designs its makers wish to impose on those who fund them. Like the rest of their caste, in Westminster or in Whitehall, within the BBC’s management there is not the slightest hint of self-doubt or wavering, even out of self-preservation, in the face of the nation’s growing contempt.

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This caste, when expressing the righteousness of its beliefs, likes to think of itself as the Sensible Ones, setting itself against the base enthusiasms of the British public. We may instead call them, as the ancient Greeks euphemistically did the Furies, the Kindly Ones. For the early results of their imposed ideological project are in, and their punishing regime of self-regarding kindliness has brought both daily horrors and petty humiliations into the routine of British life. Indeed, the collapse in wealth, liberty, public safety and basic capacity to govern that has so rapidly ensued is so dramatic that Britain has become, to America’s reigning Right, the whipping boy for an entire failed ideology — the cautionary Ruritanian end state, as Hungary once was to its liberals, of the opposing domestic faction’s worldview. From the American government’s perspective, a narrow ideological and cultural class has seized control of the entire British state, and the mismanagement that has ensued may yet be fatal. With all the unsentimental precision of an imperial bureaucrat taking stock of a failing colony, it is a more accurate assessment than anything in lobby commentary.

That Reform will come to power now seems increasingly certain. That the party is capable of governing Britain now — or that anyone can — is doubtful in the extreme. For Reform to win power, it must transition into a middle-class as well as working-class party, a process that is already well under way. After all, the Epping homeowners protesting migrant accommodation beneath their sea of flags are surely a more affluent demographic than the average Leftist wavering between the Greens and Your Party. Yet as Starmer’s fate reveals, winning power is not the same thing, in modern Britain, as wielding it. Reform’s ability to actually govern rests on either inspiring mass defections among the current professional class, or in the total personnel renewal of the entire British state. The BBC’s fate, under the incoming regime, will serve as a useful benchmark for their progress: does Reform intend to disestablish the Corporation, and all the other lavishly funded, senile and corrupted monasteries of the British state, or does it wish to reshape it in its own image? Will the crisis of the British state be resolved by the renewal of its failing institutions, or in starting afresh?

Yet unseating, or replacing, an entrenched and unelected shadow state, firmly convinced of its moral right to eternal rule, is not a simple task. Let us imagine that, in assuming power, Reform were to embark upon a great rolling series of referendums on the questions dividing the nation from its rulers: on immigration, on crime and punishment, on the headlong rush to Net Zero. Would the governing class, spread across all its perches in the British state, accept the likely results, or would it seek to frustrate and undermine them? Would the democratically expressed will of the British people be respected, whatever the nation decides, or would it be delegitimized as the populism of the base urges, with the establishment’s role being to protect the British people from their own desires? We already know the answer.

British politics now resembles, rather than a crown in the gutter, an ancient sword of great power asking to be drawn from its calcified and rusting matrix, with the current establishment preferring instability and collapse than deigning to touch it. As long as their grasp on power lies beyond the reach of British democracy, the worst is yet to come. Just like Swift’s Laputans, “instead of being discouraged” by their failure, those who rule us “are Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”. The nation has not yet escaped Laputa’s burdensome shadow. If the failure of the Starmer project was an inevitability, the failure of Farage’s last-ditch attempt at reform presents a far more worrying prospect.

Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty once boasted the world’s finest erudition — Erasmus, Archbishop Whitgift, and the “greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred”, Richard Bentley. Now it’s the kind of institution that “challenges itself… to think more deeply about race and to learn from those who have been marginalized”. A few years ago, Jordan Peterson was offered a visiting fellowship; a gaggle of students and academics ensured that this was abruptly rescinded. When Peterson was re-invited to Cambridge some time later, a group within the faculty, calling itself “Divine Dissent”, resolved to expose the “alt-/far-Right influence” in their midst. They doubtless had a particular character in mind.

James Orr, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty, is best known to the world as JD Vance’s “British sherpa“. He has recently acquired a further title: Nigel Farage’s Svengali. He has been dipping his toes into turquoise waters for some time: his think tank, the Center for a Better Britain, is housed with Reform HQ at Milbank Tower, and has been busily supplying the intellectual foundations for Farage’s wider project. Orr might be to Farage as Keith Joseph was to Thatcher, or Anthony Giddens to Blair. As Farage’s senior adviser, Orr’s principal task is to prepare for government.

The Britain which Farage and Orr hope to inherit has, it would be fair to say, seen better days. It is plagued by sporadic bouts of violence; its social contract seems to be falling apart; there is little economic growth to speak of, and even less any notion of national ambition or self-belief. The British people are responding to the hanging sense of gloom in various ways: some by throwing their lot in with Zack Polanski or Zarah Sultana; others, who made their presence felt at the Unite the Kingdom rally, by committing themselves to a renewed kind of Christian nationalism. Orr is convinced, like many, that Britain’s present crisis is fundamentally spiritual. Who better to cure the nation’s souls than a Cambridge divine?

Orr has already been engaged in some soul-curing closer to home. Not far from Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty is Orr’s sprawling estate. The Catholic writer Rod Dreher once excitedly described it as a “form of the Benedict Option”, putting into practice his recommendation, in his book of that name, for Christians to retreat from the world and form communities of their own. Orr, for his part, jokes that Orr’s home is a “Right-wing Mecca”. The whole place sounds almost like a Cambridge college, perhaps even a “safe space”: somewhere for young people of a particular disposition to rub shoulders and nourish their minds, far away from the Harry Potter shops and Progress Pride flags that have taken over the city center. Clearly it is not quite Benedictine: it’s more like a Cambridge Asturias, preparing for an anti-woke Reconquista. Half the Right-wingers at Cambridge seem to have moored themselves there at some point or other, lodging in huts in the garden like a revolving cast of Catholic gnomes.

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Orr is very much a man of the establishment. Like Boris Johnson, he grew up in Brussels and read Greats at Balliol; in the intervening years, he was the year above Rishi Sunak at Winchester. He is a devout follower of Sir Roger Scruton, whose bust watches over his home and whose Legacy Foundation he helps to run. What sets him apart among Scruton’s many scions on the conservative landscape is his fluency in both languages of the contemporary Right. Here his middle-agedness is an asset. With the old Tory patricians, he can harp on about faith, family, flag, freedom, and “common sense” — although, since his jump to Reform, he has been able to speak about the “dinosaurs” more freely. He is equally in his element with the younger, hard-edged “new Right”, which is laser-focused on immigration and views all else as a frivolous sideshow. When interviewed by Steven Edginton on GB News, Orr is at ease in such “very online” matters as “Yookay Aesthetics”. He endears himself to his interviewer with his knowledge of Lee Kuan Yew quotations and his roster of statistics about demographics. It’s hard to imagine a “postliberal” of the old school launching into the conversation with such gusto.

At one point in that interview, Orr laments that Cockney English is in decline. His affection for Cockney may help explain his improbable friendship with Tom Skinner, who describes Orr as “one of the most educated geezers” he knows. Orr’s mission in Reform is to bring in talent, and Skinner has been touted as a potential standard-bearer, even perhaps a London mayor. Interviewing Matt Goodwin on his podcast, First Light, Orr worries that Reform has a personnel problem, and urgently needs to attract bright young things to prepare for government. One wonders whether there will be any Orr-backed alumni on the ballot in 2029.

But strange things are afoot on the religious Right, especially on the younger end. The self-declared “Reactionary Catholic Zoomer” Connor Tomlinson, who is close to Liz Truss and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and boasts almost 100,000 followers on X, questions whether those adhering to “any faith other than Christian”, or belonging to “any ethnicity besides British”, should be allowed to hold public office.

Then there’s the Reverend Calvin Robinson, who, like Tomlinson, is an affiliate of the Lotus Eaters podcast, and who has spent the last few years jumping from one Christian domination to another. Earlier this year he was defrocked by the Anglican Catholic Church in America for doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute at the National Pro-Life Summit. Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, loudly proclaims that he has found God, and what remains of UKIP marches under the Cross. In reaction, perhaps, to rising sectarian politics under other guises, Christian nationalism is now finding form on the fringes. Fearing that Reform might follow suit, Neville Watson — until recently the party’s only black branch chair, and himself an evangelical Christian — has decided to quit.

Towards the end of his conversation with Edginton, Orr expresses some reservations about the more radical elements. He is eager to disavow any conspiratorial thinking about mass migration. Nor, he maintains, did it ever occur to him or his fellow Wykehamites in the Nineties that the teenage Sunak was anything other than English. In response to Edginton’s insistent call for mass deportations — he tends to close his interviews this way — Orr insists that Farage has to “broaden out” and can’t “keep throwing red meat to the base”. The Caerphilly byelection has since proved the point: Reform must be careful not to frighten too many people into tactical voting. Part of Orr’s task will be to rein in the overexcitable youngsters, for pragmatic as well as conscientious reasons.

Orr might, however, compound Reform’s problems. Farage’s closeness to the Trump administration is already a millstone around his neck (he will be painfully aware of what happened to Pierre Poilievre in Canada): 55% of British voters dislike the American President. Orr’s buddy Vance is running at net disapproval even among Reform voters; of those who supported the Conservatives last year, 68% views him negatively. Nor will Reform be much helped by Orr’s views on social policy. His opposition to abortion under all circumstances is shared by only 6% of the public — hardly the stuff of a populist mass movement.

American conservatism is off-putting to the British mainstream in part because of its religious style. The gaudy enthusiasms of the evangelical Right are liable to produce an aesthetic revulsion in the British observer; something of this was conveyed even by Orr himself, when he remarked, of Charlie Kirk’s memorial extravaganza, that it was “not quite how we do things in Britain”.

Ultimately it would not be in Reform’s interest to become, or to be seen as, a “Christian party”. Indeed, the nonreligious currently outnumber Christians among Reform voters. The politics of the established church, meanwhile, are far more “Divine Dissent” than Orr: observe the recent furore over graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral, criticized by JD Vance, and Farage’s quarrel with the Archbishop of York. Britain’s actually-existing Christian politics, then, it is not one that Right-wingers tend to care for.

Orr is but the latest conservative Christian public intellectual to find himself swimming upstream in this manner. As another resolutely Right-wing Cambridge don, Maurice Cowling, once recognized, “the habitual sensibility in contemporary England is post-Christian or anti-Christian [and] it will require both intellectual effort and an effort of the will if it is to be modified”. Cowling was hopeful on this score, but it must be admitted that it hasn’t happened yet for a reason. There is plenty of effort and plenty of will coming out of Orr’s farm, but their fruits will find little appetite among the secular British public.

Over the past 15 years, Gramsci’s so-called “interregnum” passage has been quoted and repeated ad infinitum. This is because it speaks so appositely to our current condition: an era of economic stagnation, collapse in liberal norms, and destruction of old party loyalties. There’s a sense of permanent flux, of implosion. We are in a void between the old regime of globalized economic and social liberalism, which began crashing down in 2008, and whatever system eventually emerges to take its place. 

But for now, nobody is in control. Growth remains elusive to Western governments of all political stripes. State capacity is shot, which means that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver on projects or promises. As a result, economic stagnation has been corrosive to the authority of both the Tories and Labour.

And so Nigel Farage has the opportunity to end the interregnum by leading a new type of government in 2029. For now, he sits at the head of a top-down, personalized party. If Reform wins, it would be the first government in over a century not headed by a Labour or Tory politician, and it would enter office on the basis that it would reconstitute the British state: rewired for harsher, harder times. Liberal Britain, watching Farage’s ascent in horror, has not yet processed the full implications of a Reform government. The commentators read the polls, and know the numbers, but on some level still think of a Farage majority as an outlandish nightmare scenario. Yet it is a Farage majority that is the likely outcome of the next general election, even though the contours of Farageism are still being formed. We still do not know whether the British New Right would govern in the vein of a Giorgia Meloni or a Victor Orbán. 

These two respective leaders of Italy and Hungary represent two poles of possibility for Reform. Orbán’s self-described “illiberal democracy” in Budapest has combined big-state interventionism, and pro-natalist, pro-welfare policies, with economic nationalism and authoritarian creep. Meloni, meanwhile, has eschewed her roots on the fringes as part of Italy’s neo-fascist movement, and has instead governed as a traditional center-right politician — reserving additional rhetorical venom for migration and the culture wars. Farage has praised both leaders at different moments: Orbán, he once said, is “the future of Europe”, while he has also praised Meloni’s uncompromising stance on migration. His policy prescriptions veer unpredictably between Meloni’s relative moderation and Orban’s more robust, statist, abrasive populism. 

But Farage, like the best continental populists, has managed to successfully crystallize into a single issue all the fears, anxieties, and collective fantasies of a desperate public. Crime, dilapidated high streets, shoddy public services, falling real incomes, ballooning state spending — all have been distilled into the symbolic subject of the Migrant. Progressives still object, but within every creation myth is a kernel of rationality. In recent years, inward migration has hit an unprecedented scale. The electorate has made repeated injunctions to keep migration within sustainable limits, but the Left-liberal cultural and political establishment has refused to listen. The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible “adults in the room”, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.

Reform’s task, therefore, has been to articulate a broad message that explains the country’s malaise. The party’s offering — big tent, low-migration patriotism — is enough for them to pose as a “none-of-the-above” option for the growing proportion of the electorate that is now prepared to reject technocracy. But beyond Farage’s intuitive communicative flair, and his instinctive penchant for projecting good-humored but no-nonsense defiance towards Labour and the Conservatives, Reform still does not quite know what the party is for. This week, the party attempted to add a veneer of economic credibility to its fiscal plans, abandoning the last manifesto’s promise to replay Trussomomics with a splurge of deficit-financed tax cuts. Instead, Reform promises that spending reductions will now precede any changes to the tax code. Deregulation will summon the animal spirits of British entrepreneurialism, Reform claims, and the state’s ever-expanding welfare commitments will be scaled back. This is a strategy of Meloni-ism writ large.

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And yet it is a model of political economy that is wildly unsuited to our age of chaos. New political forms are emerging from the interregnum. For decades, Chinese state planners have been administering breakneck growth and dirigiste development via industrial subsidy, currency and capital controls, state-owned enterprises and hard protectionism. In the US, Donald Trump has upended 50 years of globalization and open markets, embracing a dog-eat-dog American nationalism that brings the age of liberalized trade and economic integration to a close. On the continent, the formerly austerity-happy EU and Germany have belatedly adopted public investment in strategic industries. In a geopolitically febrile climate, they are “derisking” and “reshoring” domestic production of critical commodities.

Set against this global context, a dogmatic return to free-market fetishism appears inadequate. The Austrian School, and the disciples of Hayek and Friedman, no longer have the answers. Farage, a consummately protean politician, appears to have understood this. In his more Orbánite moments, he has parked his tanks on the fallow lawns of the Left. The steel sector could be nationalized, he has mused, along with water and utilities. Domestic industry would be supported by public procurement, and an industrial strategy would aim to boost manufacturing. The two-child benefit cap would be lifted for working British couples: a policy reportedly adopted after Reform’s meetings with Orbán officials. And, perhaps most radically, the Bank of England would be subject to political interference not seen since high Blairism’s granting of its independence in 1997. (The Old Lady would be instructed to end the loss-making rounds of quantitative tightening, and cancel the high interest rates paid to commercial banks.) 

Earlier this year, Farage even saw fit to talk approvingly of a fellow rebel from the other side of the political divide, Arthur Scargill. There’s a case to be made that during the miners’ strike it was, in fact, the “dry” cabinet monetarists who were the iconoclasts and radicals. In this view, it was the miners’ leader, fighting to protect provincial Britain’s traditional communities, families, and dignity of labor, who was the unlikely “small-C” conservative. And yet all this tentative Left-coded positioning, as well as the reheated Thatcherism, is belied by this week’s more anodyne, conventional pronouncements. In a speech on Monday, Farage tried to calm the nerves of onlooking deficit-hawk think-tanks and quangos. With Reform consistently ahead in the polls, the party is trying to demonstrate its commitment to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy, lest the markets begin their dangerous jitters.

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As the Farageists attempt to build their own grand coalition from the army of the dissatisfied, glaring questions are coming to the fore. How will commitments to a small state and lower tax be reconciled with improved public services? How will a commitment to lower the welfare bill go down in Reform’s own constituencies, in which an increased share of the populist vote correlates strongly with the share of adults who are dependent on benefits? How will the angling towards free-markets and low-regulation sit with public ownership, or robust industrial policy? And who will win in the inevitable clash between Reform’s pro-development, anti-planning law Yimby free marketeers, and the homeowning voters and local councillors in peri-urban England who oppose new building at every turn? 

If Michael Gove’s favourite Marxist, Gramsci, were alive today, in analyzing the chaos of our interregnum he may have identified Nigel Farage as an embodiment of “Caesarism” — a “great ‘heroic’ personality” that appears, in either a reactionary or progressive form, to either break an impasse or resolve a “historico-political situation characterized by an equilibrium of forces, heading towards catastrophe”. Our interregnum may be reaching such a Caesarist conclusion, or else reaching catastrophe. There is a space for a hard-edged, syncretic brand of politics that combines elements of an unleashed free-market with a statist reflation of national production, critical industries and infrastructure: just imagine a mixture of Chinese, Singaporean and East Asian developmentalism. But this is yet to be articulated; Reform is still without a governing ideology. And if the party absorbs all the trappings of respectability that launched us into the age of perma-crisis in the first place, they will merely be placeholders, the next in the queue to manage decline. And in that case, our long interregnum will stretch out further.

The inaugural Thatcher Fest is not exactly an ancient Grantham tradition. “It’s just a way of getting people into the town,” one Conservative councillor soberly explained. The festival’s events apparently offered something for everyone: Edwina Currie, Giles Brandreth, a drag queen doing a bit about Section 28. “Are you worried about protestors?” the leader of the council was asked by local news. “No I’m not, I want to know are they bringing in money, and are they spending it in the pub and the hotels?”

There were no protestors, but something the town found even more uncomfortable: a quiet trickle of devotees from all over the world. At 2pm we gathered near her statue. A dozen in all: a corporate vice executive from Dusseldorf; a young Tory boy (“he’s furious about the rise of Reform,” explained his attendant mother); a squat, belligerent woman from Sichuan who had, as she was keen to show me on her phone, been working on an amateur translation of Carol Thatcher’s memoir into Mandarin.

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This was the most immersive of the festival events, a psychogeographic retracing of Thatcher’s childhood steps: fields where she might once have tobogganed in snow; the Methodist hall where her father once preached; the walk to school where she would spend the twice-a-day half-hour hike contemplating Grantham and its incarnation of England. Walking up the hill towards Thatcher’s old grammar, the market town was resplendent, triumphant in its autumnal color, offering us for a briefest of moments that crucible of nostalgia and memory that once informed her vision of the country.

The historian David Cannadine certainly believed this was the case. “Thatcher’s social vision for Britain,” he wrote, “was in many ways Grantham writ large.” It was only through this time and place that her seemingly contradictory vision of the country could be properly understood. Her father’s shop was squarely on the High Street, literally in the twilight zone between well-heeled aspiration of England’s provincial bourgeoisie and the degradation of a nearby slum. It birthed an almost revolutionary conception of class and society: both hierarchical, with its “Burkean reverence” for petty provincial officialdom, but also one enterprising and disruptive, through which the “Victorian values” of hardwork, thrift, self-reliance and independence still ruled. Altogether, Thatcherism represented a paradoxically modern expression of an old moral order, one that continues to shape the ethos of 21st-century capitalism.

Cynicism toward Thatcher’s fondness for Grantham has reigned supreme in recent years, alongside a fondness for Peregrine Worsthorne’s quip that in “setting out to recreate the country of her father” she ended up creating the country of her son: dodgy businessman and sometime coup-plotter Mark. “Reheated Thatcherism” is now the ultimate insult in British politics, used to prod at a dying Tory corpse and undermine Reform’s push for power. But what this ignores, amid the apparently revolutionary temper of British politics, is the extent to which Thatcher and Grantham, as they exist today, still articulate our desires and revealed preferences.

As the walking tour indulged in this Thatcherite mythos, there was a reverential mood — a sense that, in an era of looming upheaval, this was the last Prime Minister to seep out of the dour realm of scripted politics into the collective consciousness. In 50 years’ time, there will be no nosing around the streets of Durham in search of Blair’s youth, no life-size recreation of Keir Starmer’s bedroom, as the local museum once did for Thatcher. Our own politics, indeed our inner lives, are still entranced by the contradictions of her vision. In the end, most Britons still hope to live quiet lives in market towns like Grantham, with their historic centers and abundant suburban shopping centers. We want good schools and meritocracy. We want prosperity and security, enterprise and community, history and an enduring relevance to the outside world.

Behind the scenes of the Grantham festival, a struggle to represent these interests was taking place. “If we lose Grantham,” Gareth Knight of the local Conservative Chairmen’s Association tells me, “I’m not sure what we have left as a party.” During this year’s Lincolnshire County Council election, Reform took 44 out of 70 seats, part of a quiet realignment of defections and local contests taking place across provincial England. Then, in July, came yet more symbolic defections, including former town mayor Graham Jeal, the man who’d worked to bring the statue of Thatcher from Westminster to Grantham.

If Thatcher’s vision for life in Grantham remains, the methods have had to change. A statement issued by the local Reform Party regarding the festival, amid its recent triumph, is both celebratory and distancing. “Mrs Thatcher,” it read, “is now an important historical figure rather than one that informs the challenges of 2025.” A new “post-liberal conservatism” is apparently the cure for Britain’s malaise: “One that spends its money wisely, backs domestic industry, and rebuilds resilience — not the managerial state that meddles in every aspect of life.”

When I asked Jeal to expand, he talked only of the excitement of this new endeavor. “It’s like working for a startup,” he says during a 30-minute phone call in which he mentions the word growth 22 times. “I think that Reform is clearly attracting people who have never voted before, so there’s a whole new constituency coming forward.” In this, Jeal’s pitch is similar to one Farage has tried out from the Welsh Valleys to the Dorset shires: a blend between lowering corporation tax for small businesses and rebuilding state capacity. It is, as sociologist Dan Evans describes, the most important class divide of the 21st century — between global and family capital — expressed in the “frenzied fear of falling from the lower middle class”.

Despite this more statist pitch, Reform has nonetheless just dropped its £90 billion program of tax cuts, after stern criticism by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Despite this, the party’s supposed profligacy offers the Conservative its final, desperate line of attack. To old Tory voters, it’s seen as a “statist, Left-wing party”, says Gareth Knight, among the few aspirational burghers left in Grantham who still cling to the familiar brand of grocer-shop accounts. It’s the Labour areas of the town, he insists, that Reform is sweeping up — and for the Conservative Party to survive here, it’s about tying Reform to the statism, and indeed, the old snobbery, of Thatcher’s distinction between those in the town “who drew salaries from white-collar employment and those who did not”

What of Labour in Grantham? In the last election, they came second, despite Reform eating up most of the Tories’ losses with a 20% swing. Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about Grantham, and indeed Thatcher’s recollection of the town, is its industrial heritage, which Reform is now trying to court. Its munitions factory saw it targeted by the Luftwaffe, and full employment continued well into the Sixties. Today, light industry still exists in Grantham and the rest of South Lincolnshire. One notable example is the area’s niche in garden conservatories: typical, perhaps, of its provincial aspirations, yet one crippled by high energy costs. But symbolically, at least for Reform, its mix of entrepreneurism, state enterprise and market town aesthetics is a way of bridging a new divide between the old Tory establishment and the Grantham’s disenfranchised blue-collar workers.

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Confronted with this rising coalition, the local Labour Party shares one thing with its old rivals: if Thatcher is capable of uniting a Tory Party potentially entering its death throes, she’s even better at bringing together an increasingly irrelevant Labour. In the Grantham Railway Club, at the “alternative” Thatcher Fest, a rejected scene from a Ken Loach film unfolds. Billy Bragg’s “Thatcherites” is strummed out by a pair of greying folk-rockers. The audience is similarly frail and nostalgic for misery and hardship. A portly, bearded retiree presents me with poems of fastidious bleakness from his travels across the Midlands via buses and estates. “Could this be about Grantham?” I ask. “Yes, of course,” he says. The German corporate vice-president has turned up from the walking tour with a half pint of Madri, surveying the scene with the sort of morbid curiosity reserved for an amateur museum exhibit.

The local Labour Party chairman, Rob Shorrock, a teacher at the local college, offers a dose of realism on Farage’s hoped-for realignment. “At least one of the Reform defectors told me he voted for Blair in 1997. They get excited at anything.” The railway connection to London, he insists, is the real growth opportunity. “There’s also a shortage of skills,” he says, underpinned by the belief that a dose of pragmatic investment of infrastructure could yet breathe life back into an old Blairite instinct.

But Grantham seems to have moved beyond such trite solutions. When I asked one festival speaker about Thatcher’s legacy and her desire to “separate the person from the politics”, she sent back a ChatGPT response of nonsensical buzzwords. That seems appropriate not just for Labour in Grantham, but for the Government’s whole understanding of how to remember the Iron Lady and her legacy. Which begs the question you end up asking everyone at “Thatcher fest”: what would the grocer’s daughter herself make of her town now? The answers vary, from tour guide Dr John Manterfield (“lack of respect, a loss of independent shops”) to the Tory Party chairman (“the success of Right to Buy, the good grammar schools”). But Shorrock, outside the din of geriatric protest, likely gives the most fitting answer for the country at large: “It still doesn’t quite know what it wants to be yet.”

It’s a logic also championed by the women in Donald Trump’s administration, who deliver home truths from the Oval Office through the fog of hairspray. In a crusade against liberal values, these women have positioned themselves as defenders of the sex, speakers of common sense and protectors of children: they are the successors of the Right-wing women Dworkin observed in 1983.

The Maga line-up is fierce. There’s South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, who has carved out a reputation as a thorn in the side of the “lunatic Left’s” gender politics. Then there’s Karoline Leavitt, a blonde sharpshooter who, at just 28, holds ruthless court during the White House’s press briefings. Leavitt has made her name puncturing liberals with all the deference of a Twitter troll: when a New York Times reporter sent her an email, she replied: “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.” And, of course, there’s Kristi Noem, secretary for homeland security, nicknamed “ICE Barbie” for her beauty-queen brown balayage and tough talk on immigration. Her greatest hits include the catchphrases “Leave now or pay up” and “It’s a warzone down there”.

Uncouth though it may be to point out, these women all epitomize the Magababe look. The “uniform” of the top women in the Trump administration — barrel curls, lacquered lashes, pageant-queen contouring — is not coincidental. Barbara Res, who worked closely with the President for two decades and built Trump Tower, recalled in her admittedly vengeful memoir that he tended to hire “Barbies” and would “criticize his female employees for their looks”, for being too fat or too thin or otherwise unappealing. Gritty glamour is a winning look on the new Right: owning the libs turns voters’ heads when delivered through glossed lips.

Many of the Maga maneaters’ British counterparts appear to have noticed this, and have begun emulating both their look and their language. Take Michelle Dewberry, one of the most astringent voices on the contemporary Right, who won the second series of The Apprentice in 2006 and now presents the GB News show Dewbs & Co. Dewberry echoes Noem, Leavitt et al’s argumentative mode: in her brusque Hull brogue and bright red lipstick, she interviews sacrificial Left-wingers with the air of a stern mother dressing down a tipsy teenager after they’ve stumbled in from a party. Reform councillor Laila Cunningham, another straight-talking footsoldier of the glamorous new Right, is equally happy to devour Blairites on primetime TV like a gleeful lioness.

Like Noem, Dewberry often plays the no-nonsense mum card. Last week Noem, decked out in false eyelashes and a Border Patrol baseball cap, said it was her status as “a wife, a mother and a grandmother” that guided her in going after immigration crime “for American families”. Dewberry made a similar case: “I’m not a Reform representative, I’m just a mum”, she said, while discussing potential school shootings in Britain should Nigel Farage adopt the American approach to gun laws. With the air of an exasperated woman in a playground, she said the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey should be “ashamed of himself” for conjuring the image of British children cowering under desks to hide from marauding gunmen.

Of course, being “just a mom” is surprisingly versatile political dynamite. Fuming moms have advocated for almost every pressure group under the sun, from banning vaccines to boosting gun control. “Mom politics” — duty, protectiveness and common sense — has always had a place in British conservatism, from Thatcher’s economics of the thrifty housewife to the shock troops of Mumsnet who have, more than most women in Westminster, set the agenda on sex-based rights. If Reform’s top women — who call themselves, emetically, Farage’s Fillies — are determined to emulate Maga’s success among middle-aged American women, it will also be by appealing to them as mothers. Cunningham, a likely future star of the party, knows this, and has already used a Mail thinkpiece about her own children being mugged to make a Jenrickian case for tough justice. At a press conference on women’s safety last month, she called herself a “vigilante mom”, a title Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, has also embraced. In this, they are canny: after all, who better to wrangle a chaotic toddler party than a vanguard of moms?

Their leader, Farage, has himself made a bold grab for the female electorate. He has (correctly) acknowledged that protecting women and girls will be the “next big issue in British politics”, and the question has lingered over this year’s two biggest culture-war flashpoints so far: the anti-migrant protests and the preservation of single-sex spaces. As the migrant hotel ruckus rumbles into the autumn, Reform’s candor on these twin concerns will be a tonic to those sick of progressive deflection. Last month, Jenkyns used a Reform for Women press conference, alongside the MP Sarah Pochin, to declare the vulnerability of women and girls a “national emergency … enabled” by the government’s asylum policy. While Labour has been squeamishly evasive on whether unchecked illegal immigration does in fact endanger British women and girls (duh), they have shamelessly handed the argument to the hard Right. Kemi Badenoch has been characteristically forthright, saying “As a mom, nothing matters more than protecting children”, but it may seem too little too late from a party which, after all, oversaw vast numbers of illegal migrants arriving in Britain.

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At present the weakest link in Reform’s case for common sense on women’s issues is Vanessa Frake, whose defenestration as justice adviser must be in the post after an off-party-line refusal to say she’d remove trans-identified men from women’s prisons in August. Farage distanced himself from her remarks shortly after, keen to hold the line: in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of “woman” in the spring, he described the move as an “outbreak of common sense”.

But Farage’s Fillies do have an Achilles’ high heel. Aping transatlantic politics is not straightforward, and following Maga’s tactical roadmap on female voters may have unanticipated consequences for the daughters of the very moms Reform is targeting. If mishandled, the supposed “common sense” approach which worked for Maga could unravel politicians’ credibility on issues which call for more complex consideration. One such issue is our country’s 60-year-old abortion law: Pochin, Reform’s only woman MP, has held the UK’s 24-week limit responsible for “murdering babies”, evangelical language which until recently would have been laughed off stage in Britain. Farage has called the limit “utterly ludicrous”. To be clear, just 0.1% of abortions in the UK happen at or beyond the 24-week mark; 88% of abortions are performed at less than 10 weeks. Of the 260 abortions carried out at or beyond 24 weeks in 2022, all but four were for fetal abnormalities. But such data points do not matter for those inherently opposed to the procedure at all, and it is this willful misdirection which resulted in the repealing of abortion access in the US.

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In other areas, too, Reform’s offering to British women looks like it will be thin gruel: the focus on foreign sex offenders and trans toilet invaders belies relative silence on women’s safety in general. Can this party really be trusted, for example, to secure higher conviction rates for rape? Or to improve the provision of childcare to keep women in the workforce? On domestic violence or maternal health? When an employment bill proposed giving workers protection from customer harassment, Farage decried the death of “pub banter” (banter which presumably involves estimating a barmaid’s bra size). For all that Reform’s movers and shakers claim to champion women, they have very little to say on any of these problems.

Until Labour can point out these policy flaws, the Reform woman will only rise and rise. It would be both stupid and unproductive to chastise ordinary British women for joining their ranks when Dworkin’s prophecy has so far come true: on the biggest, shoutiest issues, Reform seems to have a better offer for women. It is Labour’s job to show that Farage’s Fillies cannot be trusted to protect women’s interests beyond the easy wins on gender ideology and migrant crime: if they fail, they will have their own daughters to answer to.

But such things are anathema to a dying Conservative party, until lately presenting itself as the guardian of Burkean tradition, with a patrician attitude to political contest so leisurely as to be indistinguishable from surrender. Yet if “Burkean” may not be the first adjective to strike the observer of Reform’s recent party conference, in all its Trumpian campness and glitzy bad taste, the shock defection of Danny Kruger, until last week one of the Conservative Party’s few serious thinkers, signals a new and counter-revolutionary mood on the British Right.

For all that Farage styles his party as “radical but not revolutionaries”, Kruger’s vow to undertake “change on a scale that the system has not seen since the modern civil service was created in the 19th century” is a pledge far beyond the Tory comfort zone. The Conservatives have, in recent decades, settled into an intellectual stupor of grouching against liberal innovations, while pledging fealty to supposedly Burkean values of only incremental reform, with a certain effete and cosmetic appeal to tradition unevidenced by their record in power. Yet, like reproaching Reform, now the default party of the British Right, for its “unconservativeness”, this may say more about how we misunderstand Burke, a figure more often invoked than read by conservatives, than it does anything about conservatism itself.

During the Cold War, Burke was reshaped primarily by American conservatives into what the Irish critic Seamus Deane later mocked as “the Disney versions” of his thought. He was reduced to a now hackneyed checklist of banal precepts — revolutions are bad, little platoons are good, timeworn customs are better than radical new innovations — which have functioned, as the great historian J.G.A. Pocock later observed, as a taboo against conservatives taking any concerted or radical course of action at all, ceding the ground for liberal hegemony.

Yet taking Reform, and now Kruger, at their word allows us to rescue Burke from the tweedy hesitancy of the latter-day Burkeans: for first we must recognize that he was less a conservative, voicing support for only slow and incremental reform, than he was an explicit counter-revolutionary, who in his Letters on a Regicide Peace excoriated Fox’s “New Whigs” for making peace with France’s revolutionary government, and instead urged the prosecution of what he correctly foresaw would be a long and bloody Continental war to overthrow the new regime.

For the Burke of Regicide Peace, and of Thoughts on French Affairs, the new order established by the French revolutionaries was “a general evil” brought about by a “cabal” of ambitious and ideological lawyers and journalists. These were “the creatures of the desk, and the creatures of favor”, who undertook to overthrow the time-worn social order and replace it with their “theoretick dogmas”. Their idealist doctrines worked against both custom and human nature, which bore “a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part”, than to politics as previously understood. As Burke declared, “All their new institutions, (and with them every thing is new) strike at the root of our social nature.” The central task of politics, for Burke, is not to draw a line in the sand against future revolution, but to overthrow in its entirety the new revolutionary order: for “He who does not stay the hand of suicide, is guilty of murder.” In the actual Burke of the late 18th century, and not the neutered Burke of the mid-20th, we see the aggrieved and combative conservative mindset of today.

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With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequined conference sing-along. As summarized by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers.

Indeed, Burke’s thundering and apocalyptic discourse against the Révolutionnaires may be more accurately compared to the “divisive” rhetoric of today’s radical Right than to the empty platitudes of the Conservative wets. As Burke’s fellow Irish essayist Seamus Deane would later observe, Burke’s chosen enemy “belongs to no state, is beyond loyalties and affections. He is the first cosmopolitan”. This was an early evocation of a recognizable modern type, who in Burke’s words “broke the locality of public affections, and united descriptions of citizens more with strangers, than with their countrymen of different opinions”.

Deane encapsulates Burke’s view of his opponents: “Those who yearn for abstract principle are those who belong to no community; they live in a state of psychic anarchy and therefore seek justification for themselves in the promulgation of doctrines which would annihilate the very idea of historical community and continuity.” What is remarkable now is how current this discourse sounds, and not how time-worn and safe an expression of staid conservative principles. Burke’s cabal of lawyerly malcontents and insidious revolutionaries, upturning both age-old custom and the bonds of familial and national affection in pursuit of their new order, is little different, in terms of the rhetoric employed against it, to today’s Matrix Chambers set and its Grub Street hangers-on.

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And so, for Starkey as for Burke before him, “the New Labour government of 1997 right up to the present is effectively 25 years of quasi-Revolution which has effectively demolished and deliberately disintegrated the historic constitution of Britain as it was reformulated first in 1660 with the Restoration and again in 1689 with the Glorious Revolution”. The aspiration, for Starkey, “should be for a new Restoration, a second Restoration”.

In just the same way, in his book Covenant, Kruger proposes “a new Elizabethan (or indeed Restoration or Hanoverian)… settlement, a new version of that peculiarly English compromise that accommodates the defeated opponent and involves them in the task of creating the peace that follows” the coming dismantling of the legal architecture imposed by New Labour, which frustrates British governance and democracy alike. The enemy is to be allowed back into the political order only after his total defeat. These explicit calls for counter-revolution are, in their appeal to the age-old constitution, a directly Burkean framing, highlighting the ambiguities and ironies of conservative counter-revolution then as much as now.

For rather than a Tory — he abjured the term, not least for its Irish and Jacobite connotations — Burke was a Whig, whose fundamental loyalty was to the political order installed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. How, then, could Burke condemn revolution when his own loyalty was to a mere century-old revolutionary regime? The answer lay in denying that the Glorious Revolution was any revolution at all, but was instead merely a course-correction back to England’s age-old constitutional order, bringing to an end an aberrant period of Continental-influenced despotism.

As Burke insisted in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “the fundamental subversion of this ancient constitution… justified the Revolution”, a political coup justified “as the only means left for the recovery of that ancient constitution formed by the original contract of the British state, as well as for the future preservation of the same government”. The revolution was no revolution but merely a restoration to the natural order of things, a great reset in line with the country’s hard-won and ancient freedoms.

Just as Burke declared of England’s constitution that “it was formed and grew up among ourselves; that it is in every respect peculiar to this island; and that if the Roman or any foreign laws attempted to intrude into its composition, it has always had the vigor to shake them off, and return to the purity of its primitive constitution”, so can and will today’s conservative Reformists shake off the ECHR as a foreign imposition on parliamentary sovereignty. As Deane, cataloging Westminster’s quixotic ways, observes with Irish nationalist detachment, “All [Burke’s] citations of Magna Carta, Coke, Bracton, the men of 1688, are designed to convey an essential point about the English character — that the English have always chosen the appeal to precedent and to history over the appeal to abstract principle and universal rights.”

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There is no revolution that the English mind cannot derive from ancient precedent, justifying total political change as a reversion to the ancient, hallowed norm. Indeed, Pocock’s wry observation that “there was no reason why that realm’s history, and that of its Burkean capacity for self-reform, should not be traced back to the folkmoots of a Teutonic dawn” today finds uncanny echoes in Liz Truss’s recent claim that “The USA is arguably today the most unadulterated iteration of ancient British liberties that would still be recognized by our Saxon forefathers”, an appeal to America’s tradition of free speech perhaps more convincing a fortnight ago than today.

Whether Tacitus’s Germans, in their gloomy Nordic forests, would have recognized Trump, let alone Truss, as modern avatars of their rude democracy may be doubtful. Yet there is more than a hint here of an appeal to American intervention as a Glorious Revolution 2.0: America as the repository of age-old Anglo-Saxon freedoms, preserved by their own very English revolution, returning to the motherland in her hour of need. For what the Glorious Revolution was, in truth, was the dismantling of an unpopular government at the behest of Westminster political elites through the intervention of a foreign ruler. A revolution is, as Burke warns, “the very last resource of the thinking and the good”, for “Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past”.

What are we to make, then, of Farage’s repeated claims that Reform should plan to enter government in 2027, before the conclusion of Labour’s allotted term? It does not take a great prophet to foresee the already-struggling Labour government entering a period of terminal crisis before 2029: yet the mechanism through which Reform might enter power before then, the nature of the crisis that may supersede custom, is, for now, obscure.

And there are other, so far unasked questions to be raised about the coming, promised Restoration: if the Glorious Revolution was bloodless in England, it was not so in Ireland, as Burke knew well. In a less dramatic way, if the constitutional architecture of the Blair regime is to be overturned through the revival of Westminster’s sovereignty, what is to be done with devolution, in a context where a Reform government adopts the mantle of British Unionism against the peripheral nationalisms of Scotland and Wales? As Deane rightly observes, “Counter-revolution or national resistance could succeed in one sense against their enemy, but they could not reinstate the world that was lost; they could only pretend to do so, while actually inaugurating a new world.”

Reform’s coming Burkean counter-revolution may promise a return to Westminster’s ancient constitutional order, interrupted by the failed experiments of the revolutionaries: but what we will get is something entirely new, perhaps more American than European, and likely more English than British. “The revolutionary is in love with risk; the conservative is in love with precedent,” Deane notes. For now this principle has been inverted, as conservatives set themselves the task of a revolution that, as in 1688, does not quite dare speak its name.

The chattering-class reaction was swift and withering. The Guardian sneered that “No one should have been made to endure this”, and “Once seen it can never be unseen.” But this misunderstands the true import of Jenkyns’ jumpsuit, as an escalation in Middle England’s mutiny against the Everywhere political class. This has been simmering since before Brexit — but now, the mutiny is aesthetic as well as political. And most significantly, Reform’s ebullient, spangly new vibe signals the party’s blossoming relation to a demographic for whom commentators long assumed Farage was radioactive: women.

Contra received opinion on the internet Right, Reform has understood one of Britain’s deep truths: the ladies of this land are not, in fact, “naturally” Left-wing. Stats nerds may point to women’s overall 2024 electoral preference for Left-wing parties, and to the increasingly gendered political polarization of the young, in which young women veer Left while their male peers sidle Right. But more women than men voted Tory in 2024, and the British daily newspaper with the largest female audience has long been the Mail. Ordinary British women, especially mothers, are not precisely conservative, if by this you mean abstract stuff about markets or Edmund Burke. But they are fiercely so, if by this you mean animated by a desire to protect their own. The confusion arises because if you view politics from this angle, it’s less about ideology than embracing whichever political offer seems best calibrated to help you do so.

For much of recent history, this was plausibly the Labour Party. Under Blair, New Labour both turbocharged funding for public goods, such as Sure Start and the NHS, and cracked down on public ills such as street crime: in aggregate, a decent offer from the perspective of looking after your own. But it doesn’t follow from this that more than a minority of mums are ideologically “left-wing”, where such an ideology runs counter to this aim.

Especially since the Boriswave, the sheer level and ubiquity of demographic churn has now transformed this calculus. For one of the crucial background factors that makes the difference between life as a mum being pleasant or stressful is the safeness and familiarity of your everyday environment: for example, how likely you feel to be physically threatened or robbed, or encounter random hostility, or worry about your children going out alone. This sense of safety is both intangible and immeasurably valuable.

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Rapid demographic change disrupts this sense of safety, for reasons that have less to do with prejudice than simple familiarity. As big cities demonstrate, it’s possible to live almost entirely without these goods, in an environment that’s both crowded and high-turnover. But most mothers don’t want to. Families that leave London to raise kids will usually gesture at house prices, but scratch the surface and you’ll find most are also looking for a safer and more stable atmosphere. For while one can manage without, doing so is both stressful and expensive. The costly burglar alarms, gated compounds, and private security patrols that compensate for eroded public trust and safety in effect transform an intangible common good into a luxury for the rich. 

This makes the loss of an existing atmosphere of safety a far graver threat to those of modest means — not to mention one that, for reasons that should be obvious, lands especially heavily on women. So we shouldn’t be surprised if women are beginning to protest, especially as the side-effects of recent, rapid immigration extend palpably beyond big cities into provincial Britain, while the ongoing small boats crisis brings matters to a head. Of course some population turnover is normal, and plenty of newcomers just want to fit in; in the ordinary course of things, such individuals tend to be absorbed in short order. But this is not always the case, and becomes more noticeable as the volume increases.

As things stand, my own small town feels tranquil and familiar enough that primary-age children of both sexes play outdoors unaccompanied. But Reform’s swelling membership stands as testament to the radicalization of Middle England, which is happening in no small part as mothers in similar towns up and down the country fear, or as in Epping simply experience, the rapid erosion of their treasured safety and familiarity. Some women might deride this as “bigoted”, especially if sufficiently rich or inured to big-city social norms to be puzzled by such distress. But far more are motivated not by ideology so much as looking after their own. And these women are on the warpath.

In her sparkly jumpsuit, Jenkyns has offered herself as their warrior queen. No wonder the Mail, house journal of Middle England’s women, hailed her conference appearance as a “ROCKSTAR ENTRANCE”. The same outlet reports sympathetically on this group’s loss of felt safety, recently quoting Carly, 38, on the asylum hotel opened near her tiny Somerset village: “I don’t go out running any more because some of the men hang around in groups and they used to shout things out when I ran past them,” she said. “I found it very intimidating.” Why, such women might be forgiven for asking, should we give up our freedom to exercise outdoors alone? What, indeed, gives the Home Office the right to take away our teenage daughters’ confidence-building freedom to go out un-chaperoned? Accordingly, women now feature front and center in asylum protests. And those in towns that still feel safe think: “This could be me next”. As they face this prospect, Middle England’s middle-aged mums are growing increasingly militant.

In honor of Jenkyns’ conference outfit, if not of her comparatively drab speech, we might describe the resulting mood as less the semi-ironic Right-wing meme of “pantsuit deportations” than its glammed-up provincial cousin, Sparkly Jumpsuit Deportations. It’s a far cry from the performatively macho sensibility that’s come to be associated with the e-Right, which often owes more to the thrusting Top Gun vibe of American conservatism than the England that made smash hits of Terry Wogan’s Floral Dance and the Military Wives’ Choir. The London-based e-Right policy channel Pimlico Journal was duly sniffy, describing Reform’s conference atmosphere as “generally cringe”, and “like I was spending time with an elderly relative and being forced to watch their favorite daytime television programme”.

But while the sequins might put off the boys who lift and post Lee Kuan Yew memes, winning votes is about numbers and these boys aren’t, numerically speaking, a lot of people. By contrast, the normie mums of Middle England really are. This group is also the country’s cultural backbone; and they are, not unreasonably, growing tired not just of having their sense of street safety eroded by “human rights” and government paralysis, but also of being told that this isn’t happening because their culture either does not exist, or — if it does — is “too white” and in need of more halal cafes.

For, just like the sense of small-town safety that allows my primary-age daughter a degree of outdoor freedom now unthinkable in (say) Epping, that culture does exist. It’s just not what the artisan-cheese classes (or indeed anonymous contributors to Pimlico Journal) would like it to be. As a gestalt it resists easy encapsulation, least of all in something as reductive as a foodstuff or institution; but its overall sensibility is, like Strictly, participatory, sentimental and sometimes a bit naff. It is also, despite the Hollywood stereotype of Brits as effete, ironic poshos, upbeat, demotic, and welcoming to whoever shows up and pitches in. Its modern-day avatar is perhaps the barrow-boy turned entrepreneur and influencer Thomas Skinner, a ruddy-faced giant who produces social media motivational messages at the crack of dawn every weekday, while devouring enormous helpings of hearty food. Fittingly, Skinner was recently announced as Strictly’s tenth celebrity contestant; in a sign of the turning political tides, he is also increasingly Reform-adjacent.

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In this he reflects those ordinary Britons, men and women, for whom he has become a kind of living emblem. Luke Tryl of More In Common observed recently that, in sharp contrast to Starmer’s Labour Party, polling suggests that demographically speaking Reform voters simply “look like the average Briton”. The New Statesman concurs, describing this group’s “straight, numbing, cheddar cheese normality”. Reform now lead “among people who, this summer, were looking forward to holidaying abroad, watching the women’s rugby, having a barbecue and sitting in a pub garden.”

When city-dwellers haughtily inform provincial fellow-Britons of this kind that there’s no such thing as English culture, because St George was Turkish or whatever, what they actually mean is that this culture – the culture of Middle England – doesn’t contain anything they value. In more prosperous times, having their “cheddar cheese normality” erased or condescended to in this way didn’t bother Middle Englanders much: this group is generally more interested in local life than the national kind, and takes a “live-and-let-live” approach to those outside their orbit. But it’s grown clear in recent years that the “English culture doesn’t exist” crowd are not going to return the favor, perhaps because Middle England provides too robust a body of sparkly, sentimental, small-c conservative counter-argument to this claim.

In this context, what one commentator described as Reform’s “glorious naffness” is a mutiny that began politically, but has now signaled its burgeoning confidence by rebelling aesthetically too. The mutiny is directed straight at the lanyard class, in their Farrow and Balled period homes in safe and still-homogeneous neighborhoods, self-righteously bestowing asylum hotels on the Mail-reading denizens of provincial towns and chiding their inferiors for worrying about the effect on street safety and their tax bill. For the locally-minded, family-oriented mums of Middle England, this is a bridge too far. It would be a mistake to imagine that the resulting political shift is a testament to Farage personally, except insofar as he now represents, for a growing proportion of Middle England, the last best hope of looking after their own. The resulting mood may be channeled through him, but it does not originate there, and will find a more effective figurehead if he fails. 

For now, though, it’s Sparkly Jumpsuit Deportations. This vibe may horrify the cultural and political mainstream, and make the e-Right wince, but Jenkyns’ weaponization of light entertainment should serve as a reminder to our feckless, faltering regime that Middle England’s public-spiritedness is the engine of grassroots social organizing. And the flip-side of sugary sentimentalism is a vengeful mob. So Starmer and Farage alike should be grateful that the country’s normie mums are still just about willing to trust the political process. Should that trust be disappointed, as it has been so often before, the sequins may be swapped for something more steely.

As I sit among the crowd at an event called “Strengthening the Rule of Law”, an over-loud PA system cuts in to tell us, “Nigel Farage will be signing shirts [for £60]”. Otherwise, his party looks like the Tory Party in Sunday dress: Barbour jackets; Union Flag suits; cocktail dresses; a Panama hat, worn by a man telling a story of how he once met Nelson Mandela. On the first day, the More in Common think tank launches its analysis of Reform’s support base. Their current ceiling is 42% of the vote; supporters are socially conservative but tend Left on wealth distribution and nationalization; most define politics as “broken”, and 59% of them do not believe Britain is a real democracy. New supporters are female, less radical and less online; those who have switched from both Labour and the Tories may switch back; potential supporters do not want the end of Net Zero, do not trust NHS reform, and fear Farage’s fondness for Donald Trump. Reform’s real dilemma is: as their coalition grows, their vulnerability grows with it. Voters want different things, and triumph is hard.

At “How to Reverse the Boriswave and Clean up the Other Parties’ Mess”, I watch the pollster James Frayne hurt his audience by telling them the truth. “Prepare for the first six months of a Reform government being a complete shambles,” he says. “Getting into government is hard enough, but actually being in government is more difficult.” He rebukes Reform’s dreamers and culture warriors: that is, much of the activist base here. “The party cannot rely on bullshit sound bites and ‘everything will be alright on a day,’ and ‘we’re just going to try hard, and we’ll face everybody down. We’ll fight people we don’t like’”. Reform must also, he says, “grow up out of this sort of tub-thumping stuff that sounds great somewhere like this” — he waves his arm at the room that sometimes hosts Crufts — “but when you get into government, the public will despise you within six months, unless you’re getting stuff done”.

I suspect it is no coincidence that Frayne is sharing a stage with Matthew Goodwin, the GB News presenter and tub-thumper who looks like an angry Lego man. Goodwin says the British state and the civil service — “let’s just say ‘the Blob’” — are going “to go to war with this movement. Including the Lords.” His gut instinct, he says, is that “they are just going to use every trick in the book to slow [Reform] down”. Expectation management will be essential, he says. But first win the battle, “where actually you do need a bit of tub thumping”.

Reform is not being propelled into government on a wave of joy, but on a wave of fear, and the fearful are combustible. Voters look to Farage on immigration, Frayne says, but they are nervous about a “perceived lack of competence, a perceived sense of extremism — less around Farage but around the margins of the party — [and] also a pervasive, to use a slightly and politically incorrect term, madness. There’s more than a whiff of eccentricity about the party.” It is true: Farage compares the UK to North Korea, which is absurd, and many activists are in costume, as if wearing their grievances. They love hats. But Reform is not the first political party to be held hostage by its own activists. It happened to Labour under Corbyn; his new project Your Party is the next installment. At heart, Reform have done the same: this is the vengeance of the Tories on themselves, though others will get hurt.

Frayne cites Liz Truss; her budget initially polled OK. “When it unraveled within five days the public were apoplectic, and they have been burned so badly that they now know that they need to look for detail.” The other parties don’t have the answer either: “If you put a microphone in front of Yvette Cooper’s face, it’s laughable. It’s clear that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. So, what we might end up with next time is a real sense [that] nobody can sort this stuff out, and at that point, it makes the next election very difficult to predict.” And the one after that, even harder. I used to think about Britain after a Boris Johnson government. Now I think about Britain after a Nigel Farage government.

Some in Reform, though, fear anything that feels like conventional politics — including detailed polling — because to collude with convention is to lose yourself in it. Zia Yusuf, head of Reform’s DOGE, and the party’s most prominent figure after Richard Tice, the deputy leader, and Farage himself, says: “Certainly, while I was chairman, we never commissioned a single focus group. Our focus group was talking to voters on the doorstep.” Yusuf talks about politics less as a national project than a personal journey, though this tendency is hardly singular to Reform. He walks his anecdotes from stage to stage, the cult of individualism on legs.

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The battle for Runcorn

By Tanya Gold

Reform supporters talk about betrayal the way drug addicts talk about heroin because they have the same sickness they accuse the Left of: over-dramatization. Boris Johnson — who Dorries wants to join Reform to smash Labour — betrayed them. The Fabian Society, higher education, the civil service, the media, the judiciary, the RNLI, which plucks migrants from the sea, and the Labour Party all betrayed them; the Motability scheme and toothbrush coordinators in schools betrayed them; soon the House of Lords will betray them too. Nothing is sacred but their aggrievement.

They want to send illegal immigrants to the Falkland Islands; they would ban public sector workers from striking because they think there will be a General Strike within two weeks of a Reform government; they want to abolish MPs’ expenses, and therefore MPs’ offices.

I listen to James Orr, a professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, and a major intellectual figure in Reform. He looks like a Merchant Ivory hero and talks like a romantic. “With every Government scandal, Reform gets stronger,” he says. “With every Conservative hypocrisy, Reform gets stronger.” At some point, momentum may turn into hubris — only a third of voters think Reform will actually improve the country — but not yet.

I hear stories of hiring thousands of workers — a parallel civil service — but, four years from an election, they hesitate to commit to policy: it is always painful easing a dream into reality. Richard Tice is asked what three things he would do on his first day as Chancellor. Tice, who mimics Farage’s cadences these days, replies that he can’t know the state of government finances; the civil service — the Blob — is not helpful. Essentially, he doesn’t answer the question. Wait for the manifesto, and until then, blame the media.

But some, at least, are hungry for facts: you cannot expect people who want their country back to wait forever. Last year, I am told, members, “spoke of nothing but immigration”. This year, according to one political analyst, “not one mentions immigration”. He thinks Reform know they have won this argument. Now they are talking about “gilt yields, the national debt and welfare. Some people are getting a bit frustrated. ‘We like Nigel, but that [his speech] was all fluff, really. Where’s the plan?’” As far as I can see from the fringe, it is this: tax cuts will be paid for by cutting waste, not public services. Jam for everyone you like, then; no jam for those you don’t.

“They need,” one man tells me, “To flesh out their economic policies: to show their workings-out. Because there is an inconsistency.” He adds: “They cannot be all things to all people”.

“I don’t think the depth is there,” another man tells me. “This is not an intellectual party”.

Even so, the next day, the historian David Starkey and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both Tory exhibitionists, headline an event called “How Can Reform Succeed in Office?” They are here to counsel crowds with their wisdom: this is how bad things are. Starkey says, “The thing that really matters is to understand: we’re all conservatives. What [Tony] Blair did was fundamentally — to use a technical phrase — to fuck Britain up. Our job, ladies and gentlemen, in another technical phrase, is to unfuck Britain”.

It will not be easy. “My great fear,” Starkey says, “is, at the moment you are riding to victory. There is simply no doubt about this, but there’s a terrible danger.” Starkey’s melodrama stirs the room. The reason Keir Starmer won, he says, “was simply they [the electors] got tired of Jacob [Rees-Mogg]. It took 14 years to get tired of Jacob. Jacob is endlessly entertaining.” Rees-Mogg does not flinch. If Reform win, he says, “and a Nigel-led government does not succeed in changing things within six months,” he fears the nation will be, “so angry that we will then be in real, real trouble. There will be nowhere else for them to go.”

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The plan, Starkey says, is this: appoint five hundred new peers to the Lords. “We will have to neutralize the Lords, otherwise all of what we want to do will get lost in a Sargasso Sea of amendments”. I like his phrasing. Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea is about the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre: the raving subconscious of every human being. “We have to be ready with both a blunderbuss and a scalpel. You need the big and the precise, and without that, we will lose.”

“What Reform has got to be is what Disraeli said,” he tells us. “‘The Conservative Party is a national party, or it is nothing’”. Starkey looks around at the sea of faces that look like Tories, and I think he is right: these are, at heart, just angry Tories. This is evidence of both a glut — in communication and entitlement — and an absence here: of compassion, and of hope. “I would hope,” Rees-Mogg says, “that everybody in the Conservative Party is as conservative as everybody in this room”.

“We’re not,” a man shouts at him, but Rees-Mogg laughs the heckle off, and it was the only fringe event which brought the people to their feet with cheers. Despite the pollsters and the Tory grandees attempting to finesse the brand, this is a race to the end: to a Britain none of us yet knows. I leave thinking that Reform is the Tory split over Brexit, reanimated yet again, and its bloodiest manifestation yet.

When, three years ago, she put herself forward to be party leader, the impression was of someone callow — and, in person, she was surprisingly bashful — but she did have that vanishingly rare ability to make her followers cheer. There was an electricity in the room.

By the time of her second go, a year ago, things had changed. The atmosphere was staid. Tory journalists, who ought to have been animated, looked on nonplussed. The careerists were lined up on the front row; they, too, displayed little liveliness. Perhaps they were still in shock from the flagellation they had received from the electorate — even though certain Tories are given to that sort of thing. Badenoch tried to coddle them with the sorts of abstractions that usually make Conservative MPs salivate — personal responsibility, citizenship, equality under the law, the family, first principles. She struggled with the autocue. Had the public been listening in, they would have yawned.

Ever since, her polling has gone from bad to hideous. To Badenoch’s credit, she is unfailingly honest — perhaps to fault. She pleads she will get better, yet has slipped into the party’s reverie. Under her leadership, the Tories are displaying the worst instincts of an ancien régime: excessive self-regard and the unwillingness to understand the conditions which have given rise to their downfall.

This much was confirmed by one of her advisers, who reminded me, with remarks which could have been prefaced with “You know, dear boy”, that being leader of the Conservative Party is not like being leader of Reform, that the party has been around for 100 or however many years, that it encompasses local associations, the National Convention, councilors, parish councilors, and people who have been on the scene since the time of Thatcher. “It’s an enormous institution with a very grand history and we do have to look after it.”

Consequently, Badenoch has chosen a decadent strategy: first, reform internal party structures and set up internal policy commissions; then face the public when it is all complete. I know, because I was recently shown the strategy document itself, a management consultant’s breakfast entitled “The 3+5 Plan”. It lists three phases: 2025 is for “rebuilding trust”, 2026 for “demonstrating credibility”, and 2027 for “getting ready”.

The three phases have five objectives. “1. To win the election, 2. To re-build, 3. To compete, 4. To win the trust of the British people (disconnecting from Labour & winning people to us) 5. To jump ahead.” The party wishes “to become a best in class political organization”. With the replacement of a few words, this could be a strategy for any political party, in any country, in any universe; it does not take into account anything happening in politics now. It gives no indication of what the party stands for.

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Badenoch’s public appearances yield similarly little insight. It used to be convention that Leaders of the Opposition would put themselves up for ritual slaughter by the press, and ridicule by some quarters of the public, by taking stances on the main issues of the day. The convention had the obvious benefit of allowing the public to see who you are, who you speak for and how you think, even as it ran the risk of causing convulsions amongst the Adullamites of the party when they realized their policy darlings were going to be killed. Badenoch, however, is pursuing the politics of procrastination — while convincing herself that she is taking the harder road of coming up with policy quietly and methodically.

Meanwhile, politics continues around her. On the same day in June as Nigel Farage held a morning press conference to introduce a quirky policy on non-doms to benefit the poor, Badenoch was at the Policy Exchange think tank for a gentle midday tête-à-tête with Charles Moore about Margaret Thatcher. Throughout the summer, Reform ran a six-week law-and-order campaign, with weekly press conferences; Badenoch, perhaps responding to criticism that she has not been sufficiently visible, furnished us with the facts that she no longer identifies as Nigerian and was a snitch at school.

Behind closed doors, some in Badenoch’s team questioned her silence as far back as December. The Tories, they argued, were essentially allowing Reform to speak for the Right. Others now mutter darkly of her being in thrall to fawning deputies who have turned her into a politician who dutifully reads the lines she is given. (This is denied by her team, who say that “Anyone who knows her well would testify that she is the last sort of person who would just read out anything put in front of them.”) Someone who has worked with her previously describes her as unwilling to hear criticism; her allies, on the other hand, say it is myth she is cliquey, and instead, though being resolute, is open to challenge. The team, buoyed by Badenoch’s Commons performances before recess, is more upbeat than after the local elections catastrophe. At Wednesday’s PMQs, though, the first since the summer break, Badenoch failed to land a decisive blow on Angela Rayner, who has admitted to underpaying stamp duty. Lord Frost, a senior Tory, retweeted a claim that “Tories have their heads in their hands after that performance from Kemi Badenoch”.

Her camp is convinced that all the Tories need is time, and that memories of the Truss mini-budget, and other misadventures, will eventually fade. As one told me, “When the public start going, ‘I don’t like Labour but I’m not sure about Reform’, we need to be ready.” He insists that the public, at this point, will see “that Kemi has done the hard thinking to put the Conservative Party back in the right place”.

It is true, in the normal run of things, that the British people easily forgive; they do not regard political parties as continuous living persons in the way analysts do, and so it can be reasonably assumed a stay-at-home voter will go back to his flock.

However, a dyed-in-the wool voter who switches party is like a monk who decides to fornicate — he ceases to be a monk. Just as it was wrongly assumed that Labour voters who “lent” the Conservative Party support to get Brexit done in 2019 would return to their old habits, Tories who voted for other parties in 2024 are likely to keep indulging in pleasures of the flesh unless a substantially more attractive proposition is offered. Even projecting competence and offering a coherent set of policies is not going to do the trick unless they have already been shown a lot of leg. On all the issues of unique concern — law and order, immigration, deindustrialization of the British economy — to the 2019 coalition of voters, the only pool from which the Tories could conceivably win a parliamentary majority, Reform is practically tossing garters left right and center. As deindustrialization and dispossession deepens, this cohort grows only larger.

What next? The present predicament of the Tories increasingly resembles the fate of one of Britain’s great country houses — with a modern twist. Its occupants are too foolish to find new sources of income to maintain it, too proud to open it up to the public, and too blind to see that an aggressive developer under the name of Reform 2025 Ltd is about to demolish it and put up newbuilds. They crowd in the one room they can afford to heat, telling themselves comforting tales in denial of the changing world outside. “We understand government”, “It’s too early to say what will happen”, “The Reform lot are a rabble”.

Since the Reform barracks can have no titans of previous generations staring down from gilded portraits — one presumes they might have a few generic prints of the London skyline, as in a city slicker’s flat — the Tories think they are rootless. Yet they are born of a tradition; there is a line of men from Lord Randolph Churchill to Joseph Chamberlain to Enoch Powell who have attempted to dominate the Right by giving vigorous expression to the sentiments which command working-class support. Nigel Farage is but the next. As such, he has a strong whiff of vulgarity for many Tories — and indeed the middle classes.

But in the prevailing conditions, might they hold their noses? Conservatives love to believe that the natural mood of the country is always conservative. Now it is revolutionary. Though the British people may not be able to describe in detail the progressive web of constitutional innovations, human rights and equality legislation and regulatory compliance which is ensnaring all democratic action, they can sense that the practice of governing is characterized by stasis and inertia. They can also see the visible decay of their towns and on social media the sorts of horrors which inspire the most mild-mannered of folks to want to administer brutal punishment.

Farage’s appeal, therefore, cannot be explained alone by his campaigning on immigration. Not discounting fellow-feeling among compatriots, the issue is of little immediate relevance to the pockets of Scotland and the corners of Wales where Reform merrily marches on; pushing it appeals insofar as it marks him as being against the consensus of the other parties. In these Powellian conditions, it follows that Badenoch, however hard it may prove, will have to distinguish herself as being against the consensus in different ways from Farage if she is to have any prospect of power. But with all the careerists in her shadow cabinet, she is paralyzed by the perceived necessity for party unity from repudiating all the shibboleths she would like to. The truth-telling pugilist of 2022 is nowhere to be seen. Badenoch now wants to be the standard bearer of the Conservative Party, Farage of the Right itself.

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Nigel Farage has thrown down the gauntlet

By Mary Harrington

Up to this point, the apparatus has never existed for the British people, having grown exasperated with their politicians, to line up behind the one apparently honest man. Farage is putting it together. His genius lies in the recognition that the lifeblood of any political party is not its membership, campaigning machine, corporate structure, or policy formation process, but popular support in the country. All of these must follow, but are secondary. Having cannibalized the Conservatives’ heart and liver, he is making sure they stay down.

In direct contrast with Badenoch, as he builds his party, in a style wholly unusual to politicians, he gives intelligible progress updates as well as commentary on his foes. Policy is drip-fed, which gives confidence to supporters and keeps the media spotlight on the party. The impression is that while Reform work hard in public, the Tories waste time in private.

Meanwhile, in public, at the dispatch box, the Prime Minister has accused Badenoch of not being a serious politician. This criticism has some accuracy, for she lacks the quality which is necessary for political success above all others: guile.

Political guile can take the form of cunning, boldness, ruthlessness. Not without it could Margaret Thatcher have wrenched her party away from an economic consensus shared with Labour. Guile enabled David Cameron to turn the Tory party from something ossified into something skeletal. Guile enabled Boris Johnson to withdraw the whip from 21 of his MPs despite it leading to the loss of his majority. There is no more visible example that she lacks it than in her tolerance of Robert Jenrick. Gone are the days when the party regarded merely encroaching on another minister’s or spokesman’s brief as being as ungentlemanly as poaching the next man’s pheasants on a shoot. But even in these ungallant times, permitting a fellow shadow cabinet member to openly campaign for the leadership is extraordinary. She claims she wants to change everything “without destabilizing my party”. Can she not see that as stab follows back, one naturally follows the other?

For now, though, her position is safe; party rules do not allow a formal challenge until November, and next year’s local elections are likely to deliver further punishment. Knowing this, her rivals consider it too early to strike. But like the king who preceded Robert the Bruce, she has already been mercilessly rendered a Toom Tabard, another forgotten figure in the procession of the mediocre. All that remains to be seen is whether in 50 years’ time her name is the answer to the pub quiz question, “Who was the last leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party?”

As a country on the front line of migratory waves from Western Asia and North Africa, popular opposition to mass migration in Greece is a given — I once had my camera thrown into the sea by angry locals who presumed I was working for an NGO — but the issue has been largely neutralized by the hard approach to extra-European migration displayed by the Right-wing government. The adoption of national-conservative stances has brought none of the liberal opprobrium which targets countries like Hungary; certainly, none of the affluent British tourists crowding the local beaches and tavernas, who would view Farage as a threat to their nation’s deepest values, appears to view Greece as a benighted pariah state.

What passes beyond Greek understanding, then, is the pose of assumed helplessness displayed by British governments: it is generally assumed that in a democracy, for a government to survive, it must do what its voters wish. Nigel Farage’s unveiling this week of Reform’s policy of detention and deportation of illegal migrants represents Britain lurching towards this European mainstream status quo, and not the one which parochial British pro-Europeans would wish it to be. For everything that Farage announced is already being implemented in Greece, under the stern eye of the country’s new Minister for Migration, Thanos Plevris, a convert to Greece’s governing and notionally center-right National Democracy party from the national-populist LAOS party, far to the right of Reform.

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The Greek coastguard has managed to stem the flow of migrant boats from Erdogan’s Turkey, which openly uses migration as a weapon against Greece, by the simple expedient of pushing them back, illegally and often forcefully. It deals with European and NGO criticism by blankly denying it is doing so. Facing a new migration wave from eastern Libya, which overwhelmed the southern island of Crete this summer, the Greek government suspended the right to claim asylum for any migrants arriving from North Africa. In what the Washington Post, with the solipsism of American journalism, describes as the country’s “Trumpian turn”, migrants are now detained on arrival, and held in prison-like internment camps until they can be deported. Those who accept deportation will be sent on their way with a €2,000 stipend: those who refuse face prison terms of between two and five years. In Greece, it is now a criminal offense for NGOs or anyone else to help migrants reach the country’s shores. Such hardline measures balance “the rights of third-country citizens to seek asylum and the right of Greeks, who cannot see boats coming and a government not reacting”, Plevris has declared: “Greek citizens should know that under no circumstances are we going to become a country of open borders or a country where those who come will be welcomed with flowers.”

Like Poland, whose new liberal government suspended asylum claims from its eastern, and now heavily militarized, border in February, Greece’s suspension of the asylum process is taking place within the ECHR which Farage has vowed to leave — in both cases citing the provision for overriding the right to asylum in the event of “in time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. Poland’s confrontation with Belarus, and behind it Russia, eases the process within the context of Europe’s embroilment in the Ukraine war. For Greece and Plevris likewise, the migrant wave from North Africa is an “invasion” and a threat to both Greek and European security. The European Commission’s migration spokesman has merely stated that “We are in close contact with the Greek authorities to obtain necessary information on these measures”, citing Greece’s “exceptional” situation. Indeed, as Greek officials declared to Politico, “neither EU ministers nor the Commission raised any objections regarding the suspension”, but instead “the new Greek legislation has aroused particular interest among [European] ministers, as it is seen as the strictest ever submitted at EU level”.

Returning to Britain’s more parochial debate, it must first be noted that the detention and deportation of irregular migrants is now the stated policy of both conservative opposition parties as well as, credibly or not, the Labour government. The same Farage who a less than a year ago declared he would not be “dragged down the route of mass deportations”, because “it’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people”, is now promising the mass deportation of 600,000 irregular migrants in his first term. The Conservative Party is accusing Reform of “copying its homework”, declaring its ownership of mass deportation as a policy, while the Prime Minister vows: “If you come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return.” The entire framework of Britain’s heated and decades-long migration debate has been changed, perhaps irrevocably. Contrary to the fantasies of the migration extremists who have brought us to this point, Britain’s political parties have not weaved a dark spell of extremism over a pliable electorate, sadly unenlightened by their Bluesky threads. Instead Britain’s politicians have been dragged here, against their will, by a popular anger now uneasily straddling the line with open civil disobedience. As in the old coarse joke, now that the principle has been firmly established, all that remains is to haggle over the details.

And it is the details we may rightly quibble with in Farage’s dramatic announcement. As Poland and Greece have shown, while Reform’s stated policies are provably achievable, it is not necessary to leave the ECHR to do so. Indeed, attempting to do so will likely mire Britain in a second coming of the interminable Brexit crisis, with low-information liberals declaring that the ECHR is all that stands between the ordinary voter and the return of slavery, torture and summary execution that apparently typified British life before 1998. Given the convention’s political importance to Irish Republicans distrustful of unencumbered Westminster rule, leaving its purview would likely return Northern Ireland from its current position of an irrelevant anomaly to its traditional role as a baffling and unresolvable irritant to mainland British governance. As with so much of Britain’s tangled and unhappy relationship with continental legislation, the issue at hand is not so much the ECHR itself, but rather the problem of factions within the Westminster state, in its courts and civil service, using it as an excuse to pursue their own ideological ends against the will of the British people, for decades expressed democratically to no effect, and now in the streets with sudden, startling success.

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The populist revolt isn’t over

By Aris Roussinos

As the venerable American observer Christopher Caldwell recently observed of Britain’s increasingly unhappy and volatile state, while “Blair enshrined the European Convention of Human Rights in British law and empowered a Supreme Court to vet parliamentary decisions”, the “democratic prerogatives of the British Parliament are almost absolute”, such that “Britain’s proudly (or notoriously) sovereign parliament could abolish these Blairite guardrails in an afternoon”. Both simpler and more transformative than leaving the ECHR, the obvious course open to the now probable incoming Reform government, preparing for a landslide victory, represents something closer to the transition between political regimes than winning an election. It is indeed the reversal of Blair’s own constitutional revolution, now sanctified as an ancient pillar of the state by the apparatchiks it empowered. When even New Labour grandees such as Jack Straw and David Blunkett propose sacrificing the ECHR, we must view it as we would a general’s ceding of an already untenable border fort to preserve his deeper lines of defense.

To preserve the British state, Farage must strike deeper, and return its institutions to democratic control. The alternative to total political reform, as the not-especially excitable historian Robert Tombs observes, is not an endless continuation of Blairite high summer but the gathering stormy clouds of an “English Revolution”, whose ramifications for the British state and the various peoples it claims to represent are impossible to predict. Just as Tombs declares, a period of political transformation “as momentous as the 1832 Reform Act”.

In his Oxfordshire aircraft hangar, unveiling his mocked-up departure board, Farage presents the country, and is himself presented, with the choice between a controlled descent from a disastrous course or an uncontrolled crash landing. The nation’s stability increasingly rests on his unproven ability to take back control, returning Britain from its parochial isolation to the European mainstream. If those who brought us here fear Farage’s course correction to the Britain of the 1990s, the prospect of his failure should frighten them more: if the British state cannot reverse its mistakes, the logic of events will cast them on a far more hostile shore.

It’s long been an assumption of that international order that national and international interests are naturally coextensive. For Farage, though, the effect on national migration policy of international human rights law proves that the latter is the enemy of the former. So, in the name of British women and children, international law has to go.

Reform’s “Operation Restoring Justice” would see illegal migrants securely detained in former military bases, before deporting them without any right of appeal, even to countries currently deemed “unsafe”. Reform would, Farage pledged, use persuasion and, if necessary, clout to force countries to accept returnees, while negotiating “fallback” deportation options in third countries. Destroying identity documents would be criminalized, as would returning after deportation. The whole operation would be powered by a new deportation force, driven by enhanced data-sharing between bodies such as police, social services, DWP, HMRC, and the DVLA.

If this feels vastly more radical than any Tory proposition to date, this is thanks to the structural changes Reform has proposed to Britain’s legal and institutional frameworks, in order for the program not to be killed by lawfare. Farage proposes to do what neither Labour nor the Tories has to date been willing to attempt: repeal or disapply every international law, treaty, and membership whose provisions might obstruct deportations. This would, he pledged, include leaving the European Court of Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act that entrenches ECHR governance in British law, and disapplying treaties governing treatment of refugees and people at risk of torture or human trafficking.

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What is wrong with the Right?

By Mary Harrington

If Farage is now proposing to go goblin mode on Britain’s legal and institutional architecture, this is surely downstream of the political and sociocultural permission structure created by Trump’s unapologetically nationalist “America First” second term. In particular, this has included far-reaching measures to close the southern US border, and to deport those currently working in the USA illegally. At the policy level, this has naturally invited reflection among British migration restrictionists on what measures would be required in order for something equivalent to be implemented here; but the impact is also cultural. Online, British and American public conversations are effectively one undifferentiated Anglophone discourse. And in this space, the post-Trump gulf between British and American approaches to border enforcement has inflamed our simmering migration debate.

This issue was already contentious. It played a central role in the Brexit vote, and has since only grown in salience as successive governments have sought to offset faltering growth with the economic sugar-rush of population increase. The actual scale of Channel migration is dwarfed by the legal kind, especially since the so-called “Boriswave”. But as the volume of illegal small-boat migration has increased year-on-year, leaders’ apparent inability to prevent the boats arriving, or expel their passengers from the country on arrival, has become as emblematic as EU “free movement” once was, of the way government after government promises to curb migration, only to admit that sorry no, we can’t control the borders after all because reasons.

Pent-up public frustration at this studied inertia now bubbles up with ever-greater frequency, and in ever more frankly race-delineated terms. It lay behind last summer’s Southport riots, and fanned renewed concern earlier this year over the persistence of largely Pakistani rape gangs in many British towns. Starmer is now evidently so concerned about the ambient condition of Britain’s “community relations” that as Baroness Casey prepared to publish her report in June that some active grooming cases include alleged perpetrators who are asylum seekers, Labour sought to anticipate and defuse public disorder by rushing out a slew of new mitigatory measures. But the mood since has continued to sour, and a steady flow of headlines this year, documenting sexual attacks on British women and girls by migrants hasn’t helped. One such attack triggered this summer’s wave of asylum hotel protests.

The contrast between Starmer’s thus far ineffectual efforts to “smash the gangs”, and the online feed of viral Trumpian border-control content, also lends credibility to Farage’s claim that the failure of successive British regimes to grip this issue is a matter not of political possibility, but political will. Though he stopped short of calling Starmer a traitor, in his speech Farage accused the Labour PM of taking the “side” of international courts over that of the British people. The small boats crisis, Farage thundered, “poses one fundamental question. Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of women and children being safe on our streets, or are you on the side of outdated international treaties, backed up by dubious courts?”

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In presenting the question as a Schmittian one of “sides”, that pits vulnerable women and children against abstract treaties and impersonal courts, Farage has launched a fresh broadside in the metapolitical battle that’s raged since before Brexit, between particularists and universalists. The choice of women and children makes the picture more emotive, but in its most general terms, the divide is between those who imagine “citizenship” as drawing an imaginary line around a subset of people in order to define the political in-group, and those who wish to expand the in-group to include everyone on the planet.

For those most committed to the universalist vision, it’s obviously right and just that universal human rights should take precedence over national ones, even where foreign criminals are concerned. This outlook tends to cluster at the top of the social scale, and in its home-grown form arguably has roots in the globe-spanning mentality typical of the erstwhile British imperial ruling class. In its modern, postcolonial form, the regime it produces is — pace Farage — still very British, whether in its generosity to outsiders, its punctilious respect for rule of law, or its assumption that everyone in the world is as individualistic as we are. It is also deeply British in the exceptionalism underlying its core premise, that it’s only by an accident of birth that most people didn’t have the good fortune to be born in Britain, and this unhappy predicament should be treated with sympathy.

Many otherwise quixotic-seeming features of British policy in areas such as migration, naturalization, social housing, and “community relations” make perfect sense in the context of this Anglo-universalist mindset. But the difficulty, for its adherents, is that people are generally much more willing to be generous about who counts as “us” under conditions of abundance. When resources grow scarcer, people naturally prioritize those closest to them. In this sense, the Left is correct to argue that austerity is a driver of anti-migrant sentiment; but they are mistaken to imagine it’s the driver. Some people are simply more interested in their immediate community than “all of humanity”. And even in relatively individualistic cultures such as Britain’s, this instinct will loom larger as scarcity bites, as it very much has after decades of deindustrialization, financial crisis, austerity, trade chaos, pandemic, rising taxes, flatlining wages, inflation, and political instability.

But even as the particularist muttering has grown louder, it’s done so within a legacy policy environment that institutionalized the optimistic, expansionary universalism of the End of History, back while the good times were still rolling. And this institutional setup is tended by the kind of comfortably-off politicians, lawyers, and journalists who are generally less affected by scarcity than those they govern, and thus still willing to be generous. Whether through this simple lack of awareness, institutional conservatism, moral conviction, or who knows what other motivation, this class has clung to a political regime designed for a more optimistic age, even as the British electorate has begged repeatedly at the ballot box for leaders willing to change tack and prioritize the in-group, even in such simple symbolic acts as deporting serial criminals to their country of origin.

One can fill endless Right-wing column inches with arguments over how exactly to define that in-group. The deeper Schmittian battle, though, is between those who accept in principle that some boundary must be drawn, and those who think “us” means all of humanity. That the media class still skews to the latter view is attested by the fact that three of the first four press questions, after Farage’s press conference, focused on the danger to asylum seekers in being sent back to unsafe countries. To a universalist, the interests of those coming to Britain from around the world should obviously weigh equally with those of the people already here. To a particularist, meanwhile, this seems at best impractical if not actively disloyal to the in-group.

Even Brexit didn’t dislodge the universalists, though the presence at Farage’s press conference of reporters from every major mainstream paper suggests that their worldview no longer sets the agenda quite so effortlessly as it once did. But even if the mood has unmistakably changed at the level of the electorate, so far the only Western leader to make more than symbolic efforts to undo the internationalist regime has been Donald Trump. Results have, so far, arguably been mixed, and most of America’s vassal nations have responded by reiterating their commitment to America’s pre-Trump program of internationalism, presumably in the hope that things will go back to normal after he leaves office. But should Reform be elected (a big if) and actually deliver on Operation Restoring Justice (an even bigger if), this would make Britain the first major American imperial ally to set about re-ordering itself in the image not of the old, internationalist America but the new, Trumpian particularist one.

This prospect faces many hurdles, not least Farage’s personality, Reform’s to date relatively thin talent pool and (unless something unexpected happens) four more years of Starmer’s lawyerly devotion to the very human-rights architecture Farage wants to destroy. Even so, this week Farage’s uncanny ability to catch and capitalize on the public mood effectively shunted “human rights” another step away in popular perception from axiomatically positive, and another step closer to general opprobrium as a Schmittian enemy of the British people.

It’s too soon to call when, but I have every expectation that even if Farage doesn’t achieve it from No. 10, this consummate politician will eventually score his second Brexit. This time, it wouldn’t be from entanglement with Europe; it’d be from an international system of rules and ideals that, underwritten (until Trump) by America, set the terms for 75 years of Western geopolitics. What comes after that is anybody’s guess. For the sake of public order, though, we have to hope that when it does happen, this second Brexit is more successful than the first at reducing immigration.

To make the point more vivid, the Telegraph helpfully ran an article about what ordeals the Soham child murderer might face in the El Salvadorean megaprison CECOT, where prisoners are “allegedly beaten, sexually abused, fed rotten food, and leave with missing teeth”. (The last part, at least, is fake news — prisoners rarely ever leave CECOT at all, except in a box.) It’s all a far cry from Huntley’s reported current schedule of “DVDs, chess games, and frequent trips to the gym”.

With the UK judicial system now looking partisan and/or arbitrary to many, taking a leaf out of the Trumpian playbook might seem a natural move for fellow populist Farage. Earlier this year, the US President’s officials sent 238 Venezuelans accused of gang membership to CECOT; they have since been repatriated to their home country, and have spoken of the experience as “hell” and “like a horror movie”. During a summit with El Salvadorean leader Nayib Bukele in April, Trump talked of his intention to send “homegrown criminals” to the foreign megaprison too. But transferred from the symbolic realm of mirror-shaded American thug machismo to that of bumbling, half-cut British prevarication, there is surely something fantastical about the idea of our ever actually emulating the US scheme in practice.

The Americans have ICE, which sounds like a superhero franchise; we have the Home Office, which sounds like an expense declared on a tax return. They have Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, filming her videos standing in front of tattooed men in cages; we have Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, sending viewers to sleep with long answers about her one-in-one-out scheme on TikTok. And of course — for the moment anyway — we also have the European Court of Human Rights. But anyway, the optics of outsourcing criminal punishment to foreign chaps seems a bit weird for an arch-Brexiteer like Farage — weren’t we supposed to be taking back control?

Still, whether or not Huntley eventually finds himself enrolled on the world’s most brutal Spanish language immersion course, it is clear that attitudes are changing. The British Right is increasingly happy to play up the idea of criminal justice as both retribution and deterrent, and not as the attempted rehabilitation of social unfortunates, as many progressives would prefer to frame it. And it seems that the general public approves. One recent poll has 67% of respondents “strongly” or “somewhat” supporting chemical castration for serious sex offenders. Other polls suggest there is significant backing for reintroducing the death penalty for specific crimes. Stuck in cheek-turning mode for decades, we now seem to be heading towards an explicitly eye-swapping phase.

Partly, this expresses a simple desire to get some order back into a chaotic situation. On Tuesday, Dame Anne Owers’ independent review into prison capacity was published, identifying a raft of Tory planning failures that eventually led to last year’s government decision to release thousands of offenders early, including some with convictions for violence. At least one of those released went on to immediately reoffend. It was also reported on Tuesday that, faced with the prospect of a massive Palestine Action protest this Saturday, the Ministry of Justice has launched its “capacity gold command” emergency protocol to deal with an influx of dangerous placard-wielding Quakers and Anglican priests into a prison system already 97.5% full.

While Reform voters might not care much about the fate of pro-Palestinian protesters, they certainly care about that of Lucy Connolly, still in jail for an inflammatory tweet while delivery drivers who sexually assaulted a child have received exactly the same sentence. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” was a familiar playground chant in my childhood. It may not be true, strictly speaking, but the implied common-sense message about policing priorities now seems entirely lost on both Left and Right.

But the increased enthusiasm for harsh measures is perhaps also a reaction to the inability of some naïve politicians to see the law as having any deterrent function at all. This myopia was apparent in two recent parliamentary decisions: to decriminalize abortion for mothers up until birth, and to make doctor-assisted suicide legal. In both cases, the thought that the existing law, with criminal penalties attached, might be deterring people from abusive, coercive, or dangerous decision-making was ignored by supporters of the changes in question. Instead, we were exhorted to think mainly of those poor, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves killing a viable baby in the womb or offing an aging parent, and who are then undeservedly tormented by the prospect they might be put away.

Still, noticing that a law has a deterrent function, among other useful things it does, is one thing. Inventing highly theatrical punishments, only or mainly to act as sources of deterrence is another. In response to Trump’s CECOT initiatives, there have been lots of progressive-badged pieces ruefully lamenting that for this President, the “cruelty is the point”. But while this analysis fits with the usual depiction of Trump as cartoon villain, in fact it gets things exactly backwards.

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The biggest problem with CECOT-style ventures for those of genuinely liberal sensibilities is not that cruelty is being pursued by politicians as an end in itself. Rather, it is that cruelty is being used quite calmly and deliberately as a means, calculated to send a wider message as its main object. The performative infliction of painful, humiliating punishments on particular individuals is done for the supposed wider good: to intimidate onlookers into avoiding behavior harmful to the perceived social order. (And the people who have spent the last few years making denunciations and signing open letters really ought to know this stuff.)

Though they are often thought to go together, this utilitarian attitude doesn’t sit very well with the classical goal of retributive justice, which is tightly focused upon the wrongdoer and attempts to calibrate his punishment to exactly fit his crime. In the retributive paradigm, improving effects upon onlookers are treated as welcome by-products, not the main event.

But equally, punishment viewed mainly as a deterrence strategy doesn’t fit with the liberal attitude to personhood. Pantomime displays of punishment pour encourager les autres dehumanize their targets and are meant to, turning them into edifying symbols for the masses. As with the ranks of shaven-headed prisoners in El Salvador, the visually humiliated figure becomes replaceable with any other warm body that would have done the same off-putting job. Steeped in the inheritances of 19th-century liberalism as we are, this is unpalatable even when applied to manifest wrong ‘uns — though reflecting on the likes of Huntley helps with the qualms.

And as Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish, there is another aspect of a deterrence strategy that unnerves modern minds: namely, the naked display of state power. Rather than public acts of violence carried out on behalf of a single strongman ruler, the 19th-century liberal mindset came to prefer judicial power to be distributed across many separate institutions and mechanisms. It also liked punishment to happen behind closed doors. This radical change — from hangings, burnings, beheadings, scaldings, skinnings, drawings, and quarterings, carried out in full view of the crowd, to more bloodless acts meted out behind prison walls — had two consequences, according to Foucault, and each of them seem highly pertinent to the present situation.

The first is that punishment, once hidden from the public gaze, left “the domain of more or less everyday perception” and entered “that of abstract consciousness”. In other words: most of us, liberated from any concrete knowledge about what goes on in the prison system, are free to imagine whatever we want about it, whether that involves outrageously cushy set ups or horribly brutal regimes.

And second: once displays had been abolished, what was officially supposed to discourage crime and to instill confidence in the general public was no longer “the horrifying spectacle of public punishment” but rather the “certainty of being punished”. And since these days there is in fact no certainty of being punished — except perhaps for placards or tweeting — it is not surprising that the system is on the verge of losing public confidence, nor that political opportunists are going for the Danny Dyer pantomime option instead.

In ancient Athens, democracy meant government by the people, but the word demos had a resonance of the common people, what some might see as the rabble or riff-raff. In a similar way, the term “the people” might include William Hague and Lady Gaga, but it has a more specific reference to people who don’t usually count, the extras or background artists of human life, individuals who fall outside the official social framework. Mick Lynch is more authentically part of the people than Stephen Fry, but not because he’s “uneducated”. Jeremy Corbyn is “educated” but part of the people. (In the 19th century, “uneducated” meant often enough “didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge”.) In the New Testament narrative of the birth of Jesus, the angels are countless, the people are counted (there’s a census under way), and the shepherds don’t count. [1. Sticklers for historical accuracy might be interested to know that there wasn’t actually a census going on when Jesus was born, since if there was we would have heard about it from other sources. It’s simply a narrative device for getting the Messiah born in Bethlehem, the royal city, as opposed to Nazareth, a scruffy little rural backwater.]

Things are defined partly by what they exclude. All the individuals, or a nation taken together, constitute the population, but you arrive at the idea of the people by subtracting from this unwieldy mass. Some of them — slaves or “aliens” for example — may live in the country but not be citizens. What other people don’t belong to the people? Intellectuals, for a start. The intelligentsia has no loyalty to any particular place or set of national institutions. Because the mind can roam restlessly over the globe without local constraints, these cosmopolitan figures are thought to constitute a threat to both piety and patriotism. They represent what has been called “the view from nowhere”, and such bloodless abstractions are far removed from the living, breathing reality of the common folk.

This is why the phrase “conservative intellectual” has a mildly oxymoronic ring to it. Conservatives are enamoured of the local and parochial, of family, region and nation, whereas intellectuals are supposed to subject all that to a critique governed by reason rather than affection, logic rather than partisanship, universal principles rather than local allegiances. People who seem to come from nowhere in particular have a sinister, slightly alien quality about them, which accounts for the spooky music of the TV programme Mastermind. The music of University Challenge, by contrast, is a jolly little jingle, but this is because students aren’t exactly intellectuals, in fact sometimes not even intellectuals in the making, and in any case nobody finds them creepy.

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By Terry Eagleton

The stereotypical intellectual, then, is really a Jacobin: cerebral, emotionally anaemic, eager to impose his abstract schemes on the messiness of human reality. Both Swift and Shakespeare were aware that ideas which have come unstuck from reality have a touch of madness and violence about them, and the great “English” antagonist of this deranged condition was Edmund Burke (he was of course Irish). In the English empiricist tradition, ideas must be rooted in the senses in order to be real. This is one reason why the novelist Anthony Trollope has always been popular among the British middle classes (Harold Macmillan once remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope), yet hasn’t an idea in his head. Once the Jacobins had passed into history, the stereotypical intellectual became the Marxist. The emotional anaemia of these outlandish creatures, not least their lack of humor, is clear enough to everyone who reads them.

Can aristocrats be part of the people? In one sense obviously not, since populism is nothing if not anti-elitist. In this respect, an essentially Right-wing ideology overlaps with a Left-wing one. Yet, successful elites aren’t those which maintain an aloof distance from ordinary people, but those which seek to sink their roots into the common soil and draw their energy from this source. The cultivated landowner admires the honest-to-goodness peasant. Hence the Wooster/Jeeves syndrome so central to English culture. Master and man must keep a certain respectful distance, to be sure, but beneath this they maintain a bond almost as intimate as that between man and wife. My Cambridge tutor had a civilized distaste for clichés but referred to his gardener as “the salt of the earth”. In The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot tries to reconcile the minority culture of patricians like himself with the broader life of the nation. The poet W.B. Yeats saw shrewdly that if the Anglo-Irish landowning class to which he pledged his allegiance had managed to assume political leadership of the people, they might not have ended up having their grand houses burnt to the ground or being wheeled around Bournemouth in bath chairs.

Populism, then, can trade on the little man’s admiration for the great man. In the case of Nazi populism, the great man in question was of course Adolf Hitler. But Hitler was also a little man, morally as well as physically. No more commonplace incarnation of the destiny of the nation smirches the pages of history. The Spirit of the people shouldn’t have floppy hair and speak in a hoarse rasp. It was as though Jesus Christ had appeared on earth with a badly fitting wig and a wooden leg. As far as size goes, Nigel Farage has a similar advantage to the Führer. So the little man — the thrifty, industrious, aspiring member of the petty bourgeoisie, to whom both populism and fascism make their appeal — could look up to the Leader while at the same time finding in him a reflection of his own banality.

By pitting the people against the elite, populism aims to achieve an important political goal; but it does so only at the price of running into self-contradiction. It hopes to homogenize the people, and in doing so to suppress a number of vital conflicts within this supposedly unified body. Grotesque disparities of wealth, power, respect and recognition are brazenly papered over. Merchant bankers and garbage collectors share a common front against conventional liberal politics. The contradiction is that denouncing the elite also involves denouncing the faceless corporations on which populism ultimately depends. Despite their much-flaunted radicalism, populist politicians are no more eager to challenge the material interests underpinning the Western way of life than is the liberal metropolitan establishment they despise. The CEO of Tesco is part of the elite, but populists show a marked reluctance to send him packing. Deporting George Monbiot strikes them as a more attractive proposition.

In populist eyes, the people is self-identical — a single organism free of divisions or potentially subversive differences. Individuals may squabble over this or that, but the people itself is never wrong. The voice of the people is the voice of God, as Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked (in Latin, no less). His tongue was, of course, lodged firmly in his cheek: populists believe in the people, but this isn’t the same as having faith in what actual men and women do and believe, such as chucking Rees-Mogg out in a general election.

Far from being self-identical, however, the people is always incomplete. In order to be itself, it needs an Other, whether you call it Jews, immigrants, Arabs, illegals or some other theatrically demonized bunch of aliens. You need to be reminded of who you are by contemplating the fearful sight of who you are not. Where would Farage and his cronies be without a regular supply of small boats?

Sometime towards the end of the 18th century, Europe was gripped by a peculiarly bad idea. The idea was that every ethnic group had a right to its own political state, a notion which lies at the heart of Romantic nationalism. One nation, one Reich. For democrats, people have the right of self-determination; for populist nationalists, the people, ethnically defined, have this right. The distinction turns on the definite article. Ethnicity had been introduced into the argument about whether we should be ruled by ourselves or others. People, in all their conflicts of ideas and clashes of interests, had been transformed into a homogenous entity by virtue of being Poles or Slovenes. This proved from time to time an effective way of shaking off colonial oppression, but in some circles it also made being a Pole or a Slovene more important than anything else about you.

And this proved highly convenient for those governing powers who didn’t want men and women to go around describing themselves as socialists or feminists, Christians or Hindus, traditionalists or modernists. The problem was that if you looked far back enough, ethnic identities tended to disappear. Everyone turned out to be an outsider, interloper, carpetbagger, migrant or blow-in. Exile seemed natural to the human condition. No piece of land was the intrinsic possession of a specific tribe. Like Robinson Crusoe, what you find when you land on an apparently unoccupied island is a human footprint.

A decade later and he’s back. Not in the capital, but in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, the site of today’s by-election and a place that in many ways no longer resembles the Scotland that jeered him in 2013. Here, in a ferociously working-class patch of South Lanarkshire, Reform UK is polling competitively. In a place where elections have long been two-horse races between the SNP and Labour, public opinion has angrily shifted. Frustrated by stagnating living standards, and ignored by Westminster and Holyrood alike, these down-at-heel suburbs are hunting for change.

While the SNP is defending the constituency with a majority of around 4,500 votes after the passing of MSP Christina McKelvie, you might have tipped Labour to comfortably take the seat from a tired, scandal-struck party. But Labour seems to have vanished from the fight, its candidate, Davy Russell, dubbed “the invisible man” for refusing to debate. There was scant enthusiasm for him outside Labour HQ this week — only crude signs and a growing anger. “Migrants adored pensioners ignored”, read one, flapping desolately in the wind as trucks whizzed by. “Free Lucy Connolly”, proclaimed another. These are seen daily in Parliament Square and at anti-immigration protests across England. But here, just 10 miles from Glasgow, they could be banners for a Scottish revolution. As Davy avoids hustings and botches media appearances, the SNP and Reform feel like the only real choices.

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By Kathleen Stock

“The Labour Party have completely sold us out — they absolutely hate the indigenous people of Hamilton,” one of the men securing the banners to the railings tells me, explaining he belonged to a group called Patriotic Alternative Scotland. While Labour had clearly spent money refurbishing its campaign headquarters, the rest of Hamilton town center painted a dreary picture. Part of the main street had been dug up by construction workers, with heaps of concrete left blocking the pavement. Litter languished in the ditches, exposed pipes poking out. Many of the baronial crow-stepped gables that frame the main drag have been left to rot. The rest have been spoiled by Turkish barbers and vape shops, making the whole place an eyesore.

None of this surprised me: I grew up 20 minutes away. But what did was what I heard next. The man from Patriotic Alternative spoke of a “white genocide” coming to Scotland — the sort of Trumpian rhetoric rarely heard in these parts. Scotland, after all, has far lower levels of immigration than England. But politics here is becoming increasingly racialized. The culture wars have left no place untouched. Another of the banners — “Scotland too white Anas?” — refers to Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar who, in an eerily similar speech to former first minister Humza Yousaf, bemoaned the “whiteness” of the Scottish establishment. It all points to an unexpected division, ready to be harnessed by Farage, who is already in trouble for a Facebook ad which claimed Sarwar was prioritizing Scotland’s Pakistani community.

That division echoed through the normally quiet streets of Hamilton, as an anti-Farage protest made itself heard. “Nigel Farage! We see you! You’re a racist through and through!” The socialist banners and keffiyehs were on show. I speak to a man called Sean Clerkin, a trade unionist. He had been screaming that Farage was a “crypto-fascist” and should “fuck off back to London”. Even so, Clerkin understands why some here might go for Reform. “The mainstream parties are neoliberal, only for the rich and the powerful,” he says. “People feel completely betrayed. So they’ll turn to Reform because it offers them rage, anger, blame.” Arguments break out, tensions rise, and the police close in. Each side screams that the other is full of liars. An older woman called Margaret tells me she’d never seen anything like this in her life for a by-election. “The [2014] referendum was horrible enough,” she says. “We cannae go back there.”

In the end, the anti-Farage protest succeeds. The Reform UK leader changes his plans and instead goes for a walk around Larkhall with candidate Ross Lambie. A councillor, architect and farmer, Lambie has proven himself to be a competent communicator on the streets and online, something that’s helped his party scoop up working class support on what was formerly known as Red Clydeside.

As for Farage himself, I eventually track him down at a brick factory on the outskirts of the constituency. Three black Mercedes and bearded men with Barbour jackets mill about outside.

I arrive just in time. As Farage is leaving, I ask him if he feels that Scottish politics had moved on from the anti-Englishness he was subjected to in 2013. “It’s really unpleasant,” he says. “I think it’s a small part of the nationalist movement, to be honest, but it is there, undeniably. What was amazing about being assaulted in the way that I was, was that Alex Salmond refused to apologize. If any of my people behaved like that I’d be ashamed. And yet they’re the ones that call me the nasty names.” And did he really think Anas Sarwar was a racist who would prioritize his own ethnic community? “I just think many in the Scottish political class are obsessed by race and gender,” he says. “I think we should just treat everybody the same.”

If the political disenchantment in Hamilton shadows the sort of thing we’re seeing south of the border, that’s because there is a great unifier: poverty. Once astonishingly wealthy — first off slaves and sugar, then off building 20% of the world’s shipping tonnage — the Dear Green Place, as Glasgow is known, has had a torrid few decades. Deindustrializing at speed, it has struggled to transition to a service economy. The persistent poverty rate is the same as it was in 2010, while half of the top 20 areas in the UK with the highest proportion of working-age people claiming out-of-work sickness benefits are in or around the city. That’s partly the SNP’s fault, with its quixotic focus on trans rights and other culture war manias over basic services. But the numbers equally speak to a Labour Party, on both sides of the border, bereft of radical economic ideas in an age of neoliberalism.

In a town that’s lost its purpose, it is perhaps not surprising that Glasgow would become the epicenter of Scottish independence. Like Brexit for many voters in the red wall, the 2014 vote was seen as a chance for a fresh start and a clean break from post-industrial decline. Other than Dundee (post-jute, post-jam, post-journalism), Glasgow and the surrounding areas recorded the highest percentages of “yes” votes, though “no” still won in most councils. Yet given Britain actually left the European Union and Scotland remained part of the UK, both the legacies of Brexit and Scottish independence are defined by unfulfilled promises made by their parliamentary masters. In Hamilton and Larkhall, voters feel let down by both SNP and Labour — and into the gap slips Farage, tapping into the disillusionment with political elites of every stripe.

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For some, these failures have prompted apathy. Many I spoke to said they were never voting again. “They’re [politicians] aw just in it tae line their pockets,” says Jim, a 35-year-old plumber, with a nonchalant grin after a draw of a cigarette. A gale picks up and the rain begins beating down. “That Farage might be saying different ‘hings, but does he really care aboot people like me?”. Yet for all such despondency, the Glasgow suburbs have a fierce political tradition. Here, nationalism brushes up against some of the staunchest unionism in the country. In Hamilton but especially in nearby Larkhall, sectarianism is a way of life. Union Jacks flutter and many Orange walks start from here in the summer. The classically protestant football team, Rangers, is sacrosanct, and anything green is associated with “Old Firm” rivals Celtic. The Subway sandwich shop is painted black and it’s been known for green traffic lights to be vandalised.

But now, political tribalism is displacing these former religious loyalties. A Rangers man once might have quipped that there would be “sair hearts in the Vatican” after a win — but today the divide cuts through politics: Palestine flags in Celtic Park; anti-woke banners at Ibrox. “It’s not about religion anymore,” explains David, a local marketing director. “Back then it was more fights and that. It’s political now. I’m Hamilton Accies [the local football team] so I’m no caring. But it’s Palestine and Kneecap and everything else now.” It has become custom and feeling.

In the past, the most spectacular site of sectarian tensions was the Old Firm derby — when, to quote Tom Gallagher’s The Uneasy Peace, “the crust of civilisation” almost seemed to vanish. These days, though, the antagonism in places like Hamilton has moved from the pitch to politics. Where Celtic fans revel in their progressive credentials, chanting for Palestine and attacking the legacy of the British Empire, their Rangers rivals hold up banners at games reading: “Keep woke foreign ideologies out. Defend Europe”.

Still, caricatures fall short. As the man who hung up the Lucy Connolly banner tells me: “folk fae both teams support us”. I ask him if you could still infer someone’s politics from their footballing allegiance. “That would be insulting to the people of Glasgow,” he scoffs. Perhaps that explains why Reform is cutting a swathe through both sides of Glasgow’s traditional sectarian divide. Strongly pro-union, it attracts voters who might be disillusioned with Scottish nationalism and feel betrayed by the SNP.

But, equally, Reform promotes a vivid anti-establishment tone alongside its pro-British, anti-immigration discourse. In other words, then, the tide Farage is riding here is arguably, quite simply, populist — against SNP’s technocracy, Labour’s silent centrism, and distant Westminster elites. While Glasgow’s Catholic-Protestant rivalry might have once served as a “tension-releasing valve,” as Gallagher once observed — today, economic hardship unites far more than identity divides.

And Reform is seeking to weaponise that economic frustration and cultural grievance. It wants to carve out a political message that can co-exist — possibly uneasily — beneath the Saltire and Union Jack both. Certainly, Farage’s economic message, delivered at an Aberdeen press conference earlier this week, that Reform would be committed to reversing deindustrialisation, easing net zero restraints and trying to reduce the highest energy prices in Europe would go down well in Hamilton, and not simply because it was once Scotland’s coal and steel capital.

For many Scots of a certain age Farage and Tice will always be “sons of Thatcher” as Clerkin put it to me. But for a younger generation, Farage is no longer the arch-villain of progressive nightmares. Many don’t remember Thatcher. All they know is economic stagnation, rent they can’t afford, and a political class that has consistently failed to improve the lives of working people. “I’m scunnered wae the whole thing,” one local chef tells me. “What have I got to lose?” So many voters, on both sides of the border, are now asking themselves the same question.

George Osborne was the one to implement the two-child cap, but he didn’t invent it. Nor did Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of austerity-era welfare reforms. In fact, the two-child benefits cap was originally a Ukip policy. The Tories adopted it, and then a cowed Labour opposition declined to oppose it, but Farage the arch-Thatcherite truly believed in it (or at least, he seemed to at the time). Benefits, he argued in his 2011 autobiography, Flying Free, infantilized the nation: “Every welfare payment, grant, regulation, intervention of government in health, parenting and other individual responsibility increases dependence and makes change harder.”

If Farage now accepts that removing the cap would make having children easier for low-paid workers, that’s a tacit admission that the aim of his previous party’s policy was always to make it harder for low-income families to have children. His reversal is an enormous act of chutzpah, and few besides Farage could get away with it. In the most cynical terms, it’s an attack on Labour where it’s most vulnerable: the two-child cap is unpopular in the Northern “red wall” seats, where Reform is already running Labour close on support.

But it’s also an astute reaction to the changing politics of demography. Today, everyone knows we have a population crisis: collapsing birth rates, an aging population, and a fractious reliance on immigration to make up the difference. Framing the removal of the two-child cap as a pro-natalist policy sits very comfortably with Reform’s radical Right-wing populism. In theory, there’d be no need to import people from overseas if the UK was capable of growing its own.

Back at the beginning of the 21st century, when the two-child benefit cap was conceived, anxieties about baby-making had a very different shape. The birth rate was in decline already, but politicians rarely referred to this as a problem. Instead, the big concern was that the wrong kinds of babies were being born. The 2000s and 2010s were terrorized by “pramface” teen mums and grotesquely supersized families living at the state’s expense.

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All this fit very neatly with the Conservative opposition’s thesis of Broken Britain — a state of social decay caused, according to the Tories, by a decade of Labour government. In 2009, The Sun introduced the world to 13-year-old Alfie Patten, who was supposedly “Britain’s youngest dad” having conceived a daughter with 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman. A later DNA test showed the father was actually a (marginally less shocking) 15-year-old boy and not Patten, but by then his angelic face had already harrowed a nation.

Tory leader David Cameron wrote a column for the paper, bemoaning the fact that this was “not a one-off”, and praising a “landmark report” by Iain Duncan Smith “that helped bring these issues on to the political agenda”. That “landmark report” had plenty to say about family breakdown, the rise in lone parents and the alarming spectre of teen pregnancy — but nothing about supporting families to have more children. If anything, the popular belief was that some families should be very much discouraged from having them at all.

Like the Smiths, who became notorious in 2010. A story about them in the Mail was headlined: “$95,000-a-year benefits family of 12 re-homed in a $1,000-a-week house… ‘after they trashed the last one’.” The article prodded the reader to envious comparison: “The money — five times the starting salary of a teacher — goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rent-free four-bedroom house.” And then, making explicit the logic of the two-child benefits cap: “Critics said it was disgraceful that the family pocketed huge amounts of taxpayers’ money and called for urgent reform to the benefits system.”

Thirteen-year-old fathers and families of 12 were extreme outliers who probably said more about their own problems than society in general, but they tapped into a mass anxiety about excess reproduction. The emblem of this was the character Vicky Pollard from the sketch show Little Britain, which ran from 2003 to 2006 — a chavvy schoolgirl who says she’s had “six kids by seven different blokes” and is constantly hoping for a council house, because she believes someone else should pick up the tab for her promiscuity. The snobbery and the misogyny were undiluted. That was pop culture’s idea of a mother (played by a gay man in drag).

There was discourse around childlessness too, but this was very much focused on the idea that middle-class women were delaying reproduction for the sake of their careers, and then being punished for their hubris. “Women want to ‘have it all’,” declared an editorial in the BMJ, “but biology is unchanged; deferring defies nature and risks heartbreak.” Lord Steel, who had piloted the 1967 Abortion Act through parliament, declared regretfully that the law had contributed to an “irresponsible” mood, with women turning to abortion “if things go wrong”. (Exactly, one might imagine, when abortion would be appropriate.)

Given that both birth rates and maternal age continued on the same trajectories (respectively, down and up) it seems that women were not going to be bullied into maternity by rhetoric like this. More successful were the efforts to frighten those who did get pregnant. In 1999, the phrase “too posh to push” was coined in a Mail article about Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) giving birth by caesarean. The moral intent was obvious: women who didn’t have a “natural” labor — which is to say, vaginal and with minimal pain relief — were spoiled, unnatural creatures.

The increase in C-sections was treated as a national disgrace. In 2009 a senior (male) midwife told The Observer: “More women should be prepared to withstand pain.” Without suffering, you could never become a real mother. There was no evidence that maternal demand drove the rise in caesareans, and no evidence that women had contraction-shirking cowards; but there was evidence that women absorbed these attitudes then felt shame and failure for the interventions they needed anyway. In 2022, the Ockenden review found that targets to avoid caesareans left 300 babies dead or brain damaged, and contributed to the deaths of 12 women.

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Given all this, perhaps you could say it’s unsurprising that during this period women started opting out of motherhood. Judged for being too young, judged for being too old, given to understand that both having children and being unable to have children should be experienced as punishments. Add that to the obvious economic pressures caused by dropping out of the workforce, and how could fertility have gone any way other than down?

But all these pressures only added to the general trend of population decline, which is a global phenomenon with two dominant causes. The first of these is female education: the longer girls stay in school, the fewer children they will go on to have (male education doesn’t have the same effect). The second is urbanization: for farmers, every extra child is an extra field hand; for a family with factory or office jobs, more children are just more mouths to feed.

Children are expensive — not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time. Only one of those can be subsidized by the government. In theory, modern families should be able to share the load as fathers become more active caregivers. In practice, some research shows that the more paternity leave fathers take, the fewer children they go on to have. One plausible explanation is that once men experience childrearing as work, they decide they would rather do less of it.

Reversing the two-child benefits cap is the right thing to do for the sake of the children currently in poverty because of it, but doesn’t reverse any of those things. No state-level intervention tried in any country ever has. Nordic-style family friendly policies don’t work, but nor does the Right-wing approach of loading families with cash. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán implemented a system of family subsidies that makes the amounts drawn down by the 12-member Smith family look family puny — spending on the program is equivalent to over 5% of the country’s GDP.

All that Hungary appears to have achieved is to encourage families, at very great expense, to have babies slightly earlier than they would have done anyway. The initial fertility boost has now faded to near-nothing. Farage is enough of a student of Orbán’s Hungary to know that his own, comparatively trivial, giveaway will do little for birth rates (though it will lift some children out of poverty). This policy’s chances of success on its terms are negligible.

More significant is what it says about Farage’s judgment of public feeling. He is an arch-populist, and right now he has judged that birth-boosting is more popular than Noughties-style benefits-bashing. Pay attention, too, to what Farage said after his speech. Asked about abortion, he described himself as pro-choice but called the current 24-week time limit “utterly ludicrous” when hospitals will “move heaven and earth” to help a premature baby survive.

It is a push on the door to see what’s permissible: the logic he uses here could easily be extended to hospitals “moving heaven and earth” to prevent a miscarriage, or implant a fetus during IVF. Abortion has been a settled issue in the UK for decades, but Farage can surely sense some profit to himself in unsettling it. If Reform come to power and manage to reverse the Abortion Act, it might even lead to more babies: in the US, states that have enacted abortion bans since the fall of Roe v Wade have seen an increase in the birth rate.

But those same states have also seen a rise in infant mortality, not only from congenital disorders which would once have been reason for termination, but from all causes. The largest differences, concluded researchers, were in “states with among the worst maternal and child health and well-being outcomes”. Being pro-birth is not the same thing at all as being pro-mother and baby, and only by being pro-mother and baby can any country hope to ameliorate (though probably not to reverse) the fertility slump.

What would being pro-mother and baby look like? It would mean evidence-led, woman-centered care in pregnancy and labor, not moralizing targets. It would mean treating childbearing as a normal thing a woman might do in the course of her life — not her singular purpose, and not a strange indulgence on her part to be grudgingly tolerated. Women who have children are performing a social good, and neither the state nor her employers should penalize her for it. It would mean private homes and public spaces that are fit for purpose and accessible for everyone.

Without those things, all any country has to look forward to is becoming an older, poorer place. The population problem will affect every part of politics in the decades to come, and governments have no choice but to contend with it, however difficult that may be. Farage’s benefits U-turn is the first stirring of natalism as a serious issue in the US. What never seems to change is the disdain and cruelty aimed at the people — the women — who are expected to have the babies.

The Year of the Rat is a revealing book, but not in the way it aspires to be. The extreme fringes of the British far-Right, it turns out, are, well, pretty extreme and the oleaginous assortment of oddballs, cranks and grifters Shukman meets there are racist, sexist and homophobic. Which is to say that the big revelation of the book isn’t all that revelatory. What the book reveals instead, despite its driving thesis, is the dire state of Britain’s far-Right, which, far from becoming “mainstream”, is so exotically fringe and weird that most normies wouldn’t even have heard of its various ideologues and acolytes. It also reveals the dire state of a progressive mindset that can’t seem to discriminate between Alan Partridge-sounding populists such as Nigel Farage on the one hand and mouth-frothing racists on the other.

What little drama there is in The Year of the Rat depends on the conceit that Shukman’s cover could be blown at any moment. As part of his disguise as Chris, a zip-up fleece-wearing everyman who is “concerned about demographic replacement”, Shukman grew a mustache and cut his hair short. “I wanted to get close to the British far right, find out what kind of people join, and, if possible, do what I could to disrupt their operations,” he writes.

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To read Shukman’s breathless prose about Chris’s “infiltrations”, “safety protocols”, secret meetings with his “handler” Patrik Hermansson (who himself went undercover in 2016) and the many near-misses where his hidden camera is almost discovered, you could be excused for thinking that he’d breached the inner sanctum of a terrifying Mexican drugs cartel or a sword-wielding, spy-hating jihadist group. But the far-Right activists with whom Shukman ingratiates himself are more ridiculous than terrifying. People like the Basketweavers, a “far-right community” that no one has ever heard of.

According to Shukman, the Basketweavers are “a kind of clandestine discussion group” that scorns online communication and only meets in person. Indeed, Hermansson “has good reason to believe that this is no ordinary community”. It soon transpires that instead of weaving baskets, the Basketweavers trade in racist conspiracy theories, doing this in the backrooms of British pubs where they regularly meet up in small and exclusively male groups. It also transpires that the number of people who belong to the Basketweavers is tiny: around 2,000 worldwide, with “hundreds” from the UK.

Shukman devotes a whole chapter — his first — to the Basketweavers and in it we learn that once he infiltrates the group, he discovers that they are very racist and harbor an especial antipathy toward Jews. Revealingly, Shukman observes that it’s “remarkable” that the Basketweavers “have so far escaped media attention”, seemingly oblivious to the idea that no one cares very much about the Basketweavers’ racist pub chitchat.

Next Shukman goes to Tallinn, Estonia, where he infiltrates a far-Right conference organized by someone called Fróði Midjord. He runs into a host of unsavory characters who are very racist and make little or no effort in concealing that they’re very racist, such as an American white nationalist who talks about the “capture of America by non-whites” and a Holocaust denier who insists that African-Americans should be repatriated “back” to Africa. Indeed, almost the entirety of The Year of the Rat is organized around Shukman meeting a lot of racist people no one has ever heard of and surreptitiously recording them saying racist things. It is thus quite a boring book, enlivened only by the bits where Shukman comes close to having his cover blown.

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One activist who I had heard of and who Shukman met and skirted around is Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right party Britain First and the protégé of Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP. Britain First, Shukman explains, is no ordinary party: it pickets refugee centers with flash mobs and conducts “mosque invasions”, where its activists berate Muslims about the evils of Islam. And Golding himself is no ordinary party leader, having been found guilty of hate crimes and a terrorism offense (the latter because he refused to hand over the pin codes for his electronic devices to counter-terrorism police on re-entering the UK from Russia in 2019). “I want to understand what Paul Golding is like,” Shukman confides, with all the sincerity of a pick-up-artist who feigns interest in a woman’s point of view. In Shukman’s telling, and to no one’s surprise, Golding is a nasty piece of work: a bully and grifter who trousers party donations which he duly splurges on a 10-day holiday to Thailand.

Golding’s crew of minions, which includes a coke-head with missing teeth, isn’t much better and Shukman soon discovers, with “horror”, that many believe that the Holocaust is made up. “Here was proof that Britain First is a nasty party whose activists traffic in some of the vilest conspiracy theories,” he writes, as if relaying some dark truth he’s just brought to light. But most people who have heard of Golding know full well about the nastiness of his politics, which is why his party has so few members — no more than 40 active ones, Shukman estimates — and why it has failed so abysmally at the ballot box; in the London mayoral election of 2024, Britain First received fewer votes than a candidate called Count Binface.

This is emblematic of a deeper problem with The Year of the Rat, which is that it’s a profoundly dishonest book. It is so, in part, because it suggests that the far-Right activists who Shukman infiltrates have a hidden agenda, when in fact only an imbecile would be surprised by Shukman’s “revelations” about the far-Right, not only because it’s so unabashed about what it believes but also because so many journalists and experts have been loudly warning us for years about how its odious beliefs — about race science and the “great replacement” — have gone mainstream.

It’s also dishonest in the sense that it attributes far more political power and cultural sway to the far-Right than it actually possesses. Not a few, he says, are “sophisticated” campaigners and “enjoy the support of American tech tycoons and Conservative policymakers”, which may well be true. But most of the characters that populate his book are the sort of people that any normal person would determinedly avoid on the street or in a pub. Shukman clearly knows this and takes no small amount of pleasure in reporting on the abject political failures, internecine squabbles and ineptitude of the sorry activists he joins and spies on. For example, when canvassing with Britain First in Finchingfield, Essex, the entire village makes it very clear that they’re not welcome. This must have heartened Shukman, but it’s a detail that doesn’t exactly flatter his thesis about a powerful and ascendant far-Right in Britain. No less dishonest is Shukman’s use of the term “far-Right”, which he uses to refer to figures as ideologically far apart as Golding and the Reform Party’s leader Nigel Farage. But because the latter has a substantial following and sounds the alarm about tens of thousands of undocumented migrants milling around in the towns and villages of Britain, he is “far-Right” and hence proof-positive that it has gone mainstream.

If Shukman has a bad conscience, it’s not chiefly because he’s deceived so many people in the process of researching his book — he actually justifies deception as a necessary if regrettable tactic to get close to the far-Right, which is suspicious of outsiders, and to expose all its unpleasantness. Rather, it is because he felt morally tainted — “complicit”, as he puts it — by participating in their activism while undercover with them. On several occasions, he uses the word “grubby” to describe how this made him feel.

Shukman should feel grubby, not just because he lied to people, but because he lied for no discernible benefit. Indeed, he has not advanced the study of the far-Right one inch. He has no theory of mind of the far-Right activist and nothing of interest or originality to say about why or how people become part of its orbit, other than referencing some trite clichés about loneliness and alienation. And the revelations he discloses are scarcely earth-shattering.

In fact, Shukman, along with several other researchers who shamelessly tout their proficiency as undercover infiltrators, has likely set back the study of the far-Right, making it much harder for genuine researchers to study its members up close and to win their trust. The next time such a researcher approaches the far-Right with a research project in mind they ought to be prepared for something decidedly more earnest than the mock punch Paul Golding launched at Shukman when they first met.