Stumblingly, young Nige is starting to live out the two contradictory impulses that will frame his life. One: a conservative’s respect for, and needy desire to be part of, institutions. Two: a libertarian’s outsider fantasy of bomb-tossing nonconformity. Yeah, the boy loves the club, but he quite fancies running a bulldozer through those front doors too. Luck will let him do both.

Nigel Farage, for all his talents, was lucky. He was time-and-place fortunate. His pampered enemies underestimated him, and thought him a punchline until the joke brought their house down. Many of them were no life experience professional political hermits like Danny Alexander or Ed Miliband. They raised no whirlwinds. Mostly, as David Foster Wallace put it, they weren’t “enough like human beings even to hate.” They were overpumped with focus-grouped shrewdness, not human instinct.

Farage was messily and chaotically human. He is, in that dreaded national formulation, a character. He has an anuran face, an aquatic aspect — the ideally fishy tribune of an island where the moss is still damp and the rain is still thin.

In the 2010s he smashed through the Overton Window like a breeze block. First with Ukip, then with the Brexit Party. And even as he did so, he was being very badly behaved — not that this ever made a scratch in his popular image as a plain-speaking common sense merchant. Fortune favours the charming miscreant sometimes. The rest was Britain’s exit from the European Union.

At least, that’s the life that emerges from Michael Crick’s new biography of Farage. One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage feels, quite simply, long. Five hundred beigely judicious pages read like 5,000. Crick’s annoyingly pokey reportorial style — a staple of Channel Four News for decades — is absent here. It’s a dull, reasonably objective attempt to tell the truth. There is voyeurism (we buy books like this to peep through the bedroom keyhole, don’t we?) but not a single nose-turning jab of biographical GBH.

Crick comes perilously close to making Farage… boring. He drowns him under mudslides of irrelevant detail. There are paceless accounts of infighting among Ukip’s National Executive Committee; a whole chapter about a dodgy party call centre in Kent; more information on Neil Hamilton’s time as an MEP than even the most deranged politico could be expected to digest. Still, sanding away the trivia reveals two major themes: alcohol and luck. In Farage’s life they combine and recombine like clouds on a windy day.

More from this author

Farewell, then, Gina Miller

By Will Lloyd

His luck was personal and political. Ukip’s rise was only possible after the unexpected death of the wall-eyed billionaire tyrant James Goldsmith in 1997. His demise took his Referendum Party, Ukip’s lavishly financed rival, into the soil with him. Tony Blair’s decision to approve a new proportional voting system for the UK’s European parliamentary elections gave Ukip their first big breaks — and Farage’s first media appearances proper — in 1999.

Later on, Farage was sceptical about the need for a referendum. Ukip’s central policy was so outrageously unthinkable for most of Farage’s career that, in spite of his crashingly loud public idealism, it seems like he doubted whether it could ever happen. His electoral successes (not luck) eventually pushed David Cameron into promising a vote on exiting the EU in 2013 — but it was Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015 that made the referendum happen.

During the campaign, Farage had the lowest personal popularity rating of any of the major party leaders. Jeremy Corbyn was more popular. Farage did have political nous, though. Like Cummings, he understood that the old Left and Right labels were meaningless. “We don’t want to represent a wing,” he said in 2004, “but the heart and wishbone of the nation.” He didn’t think that English politics had changed since the 17th century. “You are either a cavalier, a democrat, and a libertarian, or you are a doctrinaire, morally intolerant roundhead.” He had identified one of the oldest, deepest, most durable divisions on the island. Spookily, the political map of the Brexit vote ended up resembling the regional distribution of support for the King, Court and Tories against Parliament, Merchants and Whigs in the Civil War. Except in 2016 the cavaliers won. Whoops.

More from this author

Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

For years, Ukip suffered from the pandemonium of being a party staffed entirely by cavaliers. Crick (without any sense of humour) gives the impression that the whole trembling structure could come crashing down at any moment. But Farage’s luck holds. The early Ukip days are clogged with writs, squabbles, and changes to office locks. The dramatis personae are livestock auctioneers, umbrella makers, undertakers, investment brokers, hoteliers, Rowan Atkinson’s brother, and a barrister described, in a simile that is too fun to be Crick’s, as “an escapee from a Joanna Trollope novel”. Tiny factions of them argue obscurely in the bitter wilderness.

Like Shakespearean fools, they tell unspeakable truths and babblingly predict a future others cannot see. The first full-length account of the party, Mark Daniels’ Cranks and Gadflies, described the membership as “idiots, paranoiacs, and conspiracy theorists.” Daniels — real name Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker — was also Ukip’s press officer at the time. Farage admitted they were all “bumbling amateurs”.

Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane — “rather like a tractor” Farage thought — would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. “I just hope the plane doesn’t blow up and crash,” Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. “Oh, fuck!” said Farage.

Suggested article

What can we learn from Southend West?

By Tanya Gold

​​He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life he’d escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.

Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke “fluent human”.

​​He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a “shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best”. He was right. At times he seemed to hold England’s spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.

Anger wasn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: “Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that.’” He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.

Suggested article

Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEP’s in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. “His ability to get by on a few hours’ sleep,” says Aaron Banks, “even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.”

It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farage’s gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was “not actually very confident. He’s quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.”

Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the public’s mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.

Crick’s biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesn’t tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesn’t have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? “Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union.” Well, duh.

Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; he’s now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.

Of all the 2010s populists — Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry — only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.

Martin Amis literally loved “multiracialism”. In the late Sixties, whatever race prejudice teenage Mart was lumbered with had been pantingly released. “At the time I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim… The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernise. You would — I don’t know — just look at her and just feel eons between you.”

How had 1984’s best novelist pretzeled himself into this position? Forced to deal girlfriend receipts to a smarmy journalist, in order to prove he was not listing around the same weedy moral pond as a Klansman, or Nick Griffin?

Amis’s problem — like so many other problems — began at 9:03am on September 11 2001, when United Airlines Flight 175 was swallowed by the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the dust, debris, and people rained eerily down on New York City that day, the outlines of this grand tragedy, and many more tragedies to come, for America, and for everyone else, could be discerned.

But it may have been an even bigger tragedy for our novelists. Or it seemed to feel that way to them. What were they supposed to do now? Write craftily about unhappy marriages when the world was curling at its edges?

In the days, weeks, and months after the attack, they filled the pages of newspapers and magazines, scrounging around for the right words. Salman Rushdie wrote of a “dreadful blow”, and the war to come: “We must send our shadow warriors against theirs.” John Updike wondered whether America could afford “the openness that lets future Kamikaze pilots, say, enrol in Florida flying schools”. (He reckoned America could.) A sage Jonathan Franzen suggested that this dreadful new world would have to rediscover “the ordinary, the trivial, and even the ridiculous”. Ian McEwan — somewhat strangely given the widespread sense of shock that day — accused the hijackers of a “failure of the imagination”. Zadie Smith felt sick: “Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen.” David Foster Wallace wrote a melancholy (even for him) essay about flags. A weepy, angry, depressed Jay McInerney was probably the most honest. He admitted to being glad he didn’t have a book coming out that month. The collective tone was nervous, eschatological, distressed. Novelists sounded, just this once, like everyone else.

Apart from Martin Amis. He continued to sound like Martin Amis: flashy, forceful, in-your-face. 9/11 was the “apotheosis of the postmodern era.” The collapse of the towers was the “majestic abjection of that double surrender”; the second jet was “terror revealed — the terror doubled, or squared”. He even minted a neologism (a very old Amis tick): “worldflash”.

More from this author

The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

In retrospect, nobody writing for a living seemed more affected, more thwarted, more plainly knocked off his rocker that day than Amis. He took 9/11 very personally indeed. And spookily, like W.B. Yeats describing his youthful hatred of progress, in Amis’s September palpitations you can sense that he “felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin”. He called it “the age of horrorism”. Then he called it “the age of vanished normalcy”. Which was it? He began to write for his entire profession: “After a couple of hours at their desks, on Sept. 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.”

It didn’t happen. Zadie Smith wrote her novels, so did Jonathan Franzen. John Updike wrote a terrible picaresque about terrorism (imaginatively called… Terrorist), then died shortly afterwards. Rushdie wrote creatively across genres. Ian McEwan would eventually seem far, far angrier about Brexit than he ever was about the attacks. There were few obvious changes in course; writers kept writing.

But Amis did change occupation, sort of. For an uneasy decade after 9/11, he transformed into a crusading polemicist, no longer a mere novelist. In lengthy essays for the Guardian and the Observer, eventually collected in The Second Plane (2008), Amis became the explainer-in-chief of “Islamism” to Britain’s liberal middle-classes. Given the trouble he would soon find himself in and the drubbings he would receive, it is difficult to work out why Amis thought this would be a good idea.

He was the best comic novelist in England, the hothouse of comic novelists. He accepted that his gift was for “banalities delivered with tremendous force”. Yet there was also a sense — one confirmed by the terrible reviews amassed by 2003’s Yellow Dog — that Amis was stuck with, and marooned in, his talent for macho-comedic wordplay. (Maybe this is why he had tried to change course once before in the Eighties, by writing plaintive non-fiction about nuclear weapons.) Shortly before 9/11, at Jonathan Cape’s launch party for Amis’s autobiography Experience (2000), his editor prophesied that this was “a book which would be read in 200 years time”. There is nothing wrong with hyperbole, and Experience is a good memoir, but even Amis might have suspected the difference between hype and truth here.

Political journalism about the fallout world that emerged after 9/11 would be different though. Here was a subject truly, finally big enough for his talent. Perhaps Amis saw a chance to write himself into History by writing about history — to write a book that really would be read in 200 years.

More from this author

England's other Saint George

By Will Lloyd

The Second Plane, which is full of howlers, sweeping statements (“All religions are violent”; “Islam is totalist”), and ramblings, may well be read in 200 years’ time, but not in a way that would please Amis. His cavalier embrace of polemic — his decision to go out to bat, unasked, for the West in the 2000s — was a minor, yet telling, sideshow during the War on Terror era. In Amis we see the clumsy analysis of Islamism (born entirely of sexual frustration apparently) and Iran (the population there he thought, was “strongly if ambivalently pro-American”) that passed for commentary in that period. And Amis embraced pat comparisons of al-Qaeda with the Nazis, Stalinism, and the Khmer Rouge, which now look as if they were written to satisfy emotional, not intellectual needs.

In one essay Amis describes an abandoned novella, The Unknown Known. It imagined the story of Ayed, a “diminutive Islamist terrorist” who has the bright idea of ransacking “all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country”, and releasing them in a small town in Colorado. Ayed is a potential rapist too, sexually curdled, standing beneath elevated walkways so “he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants”. As a pervert of short-standing, whose icky yearnings are described in great detail, Ayed could have tumbled out of London Fields or any other Amis novel. The only difference is that Ayed is an Arab who has never seen the inside of a pub. Amis knew he was reissuing his old insights and insecurities like this, and he believed they reverberated even more strongly: “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is.” But was it helpful, as the battle lines were being drawn, to believe that the West’s new foes were so many Ayed’s — mentally deranged death cultists, whose lives turned on the problems they had with girls? These caricatures belonged in novels. They made sense in novels, but now they were being passed off as an accurate representation of of the world and the people in it — and these, looked at properly, would always be ambiguous.

Literary critics called Amis “chuckleheaded” and compared him with “a man who sounds increasingly like the embarrassing uncle screaming at the television”. But Amis was not really in literary mode at all. He was simply ventriloquizing, as his friend Christopher Hitchens did, the establishment consensus in Washington and London at the time — that this was a struggle between good and evil, between modern civilisation and medieval barbarism. It’s plain now that there is a direct line — a “worldflash” even — between these recklessly simple ideas and the disaster that unfolded in Kabul last month.

More from this author

The many deaths of Virginia Woolf

By Will Lloyd

In the end though, it was not The Second Plane that forced Amis to detail his liaisons with Muslim girls in Sixties London. It was a grenade tossed in an interview in 2006, more explosive than anything he wrote elsewhere in this phase: “There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.” Even Michel Houellebecq never went this far.

For this Terry Eagleton compared him to a “British National Party thug”. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said Amis was “with the beasts” and “the Muslim baiters and haters”, making him a “threat to society”. Amis defended himself by discussing his sex life (“I was the first man she had ever kissed” etc.) and then retreated back to safer territory in the 2010s — another novel about the Holocaust, another novel about London. He would admit in 2012 that he “said something stupid” when he talked about collective punishment.

His pose changed. Amis seemed sadly self-aware. “I’m like Hugh Hefner” he told the Times in 2017. “When he started out, he was the hero of liberalism and then the culture changed. And he became the villain of liberalism.”

In his latest book, Inside Story, (a tricksy meander around the contours of his own life) his tone is gentle and generous and grandfatherly. It’s like he wants us to forget all the things he wrote and said after 9/11 — like George W Bush showing off the oil paintings he made of injured veterans on late night shows, with his please-forgive-me eyes.

Who would forgive Martin Amis? In his writing life he had always insisted that critics didn’t matter. “As you get older you realise that all these things — prizes, reviews, advances, readers — it’s all showbiz, and the real action starts with your obituary.” Only posterity counted, only 200 years hence as his editor put it, and Amis wanted to be remembered then. When the real action of remembering Amis begins, you almost hope for his sake, that his small and silly contribution to these 20 years of hubris will be forgotten.