Anti-immigrant icon Nigel Farage could reshape Britain’s Tory trajectory

LONDON – At first, Mr Nigel Farage kept his cool. When protesters disrupted an election victory speech by Mr Farage, Britain’s veteran political disrupter, anti-immigrant activist and ally of former US President Donald Trump, he ignored them.

But as the chaos persisted at the media conference on July 5, Mr Farage began heckling back, drowning out critics by shouting “boring!” into the microphone no fewer than nine times.

With Mr Farage around, things are rarely boring, however, as Britain’s centre-right Conservative Party has just discovered to its cost.

Driven from power after 14 years by a Labour Party landslide,

the Conservatives collapsed to their worst defeat in modern history,

a stunning loss that has left the party’s remnants in disarray. By contrast, Mr Farage’s small insurgent party, Reform UK, is on a roll and has elevated him to a central determinant of the future of Britain’s political right – and perhaps the overall direction of the country.

His presence on the political scene,

and his harsh, anti-immigration rhetoric, could have a crucial influence on the trajectory of the Conservatives, whose leader, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, said on July 5 that he would stand aside once a successor was chosen.

Not only did Reform candidates win five Parliament seats – including Mr Farage, for the first time after eight attempts – but the party also secured around 14 per cent of the vote nationwide. By that measure, Reform was the third most successful party in Britain, inviting comparisons to France’s burgeoning right-wing National Rally party.

“Reform have a foundation to build a serious challenge to not just the Conservatives, but also to Keir Starmer and the Labour Party,” said Dr Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent, referring to Britain’s new Labour prime minister.

“The question is: Can Nigel Farage put in place an organisation and a party structure and a professional operation that is capable of delivering on that which, historically, he’s struggled to do with his previous parties.”

Bombastic, pugilistic and charismatic, Mr Farage, 60, is a polarising figure who has long been an irritant to the Conservative Party, which he quit in 1992.

During that time, he and his allies have often been dismissed and ridiculed – including once by Mr David Cameron, a former leader who called supporters of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, that Mr Farage then led “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”.

But it was pressure from UKIP that forced Mr Cameron to promise a referendum on Brexit that he went on to lose in 2016, ending his time in Downing Street.

Recently, Mr Farage had retreated from politics and only

decided to run in the general election at the eleventh hour.

But his impact was electric, his campaign against immigration touching a raw nerve among Conservatives, whose government has presided over a tripling of legal migration since Britain quit the European Union.

“He’s got that common touch,” said Dr Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.

“He’s a consummate political communicator and has the charisma that many more mainstream politicians – because they have to deal with real issues instead of confected ones – find difficult to match.”

Some right-wing Conservatives would like to invite Mr Farage back into their party. Others fear he would repel their moderate voters.

He has suggested that Reform could supplant the Conservatives and that he could even stage a takeover of the party.

But without doing either, he already has proved the threat he poses.

In 2019, the Brexit Party, which Mr Farage then led, chose not to run candidates against many Conservative lawmakers, avoiding a risk that the right-wing vote would split and helping Mr Boris Johnson, a former prime minister,

to a landslide victory.

Last week, Mr Farage’s new party fought the election all across the country, costing the Tories dozens of seats. Dr Goodwin calculated that in around 180 electoral districts, the vote for Reform was larger than the margin of defeat for the Conservatives.

“They have problems on multiple sides,” said Dr Goodwin, noting that the Conservatives had lost votes to Labour and the centrist Liberal Democrats, “but Farage is by far the biggest problem facing the Conservatives.”

The party now faces a critical decision on who should lead them and what type of politics to embrace.

One faction wants a shift to the right to combat Reform, which, in the general election, ate away at the Conservative Party’s vote in Brexit-supporting areas in the north and the middle of the country, often easing Labour’s path to victory. Dr Goodwin argued that, after Brexit, Conservative Party support is now more concentrated among voters who are more socially conservative and hostile to Europe.

But the Tories also lost votes to Labour and to the small, pro-European and centrist Liberal Democrats, who won 72 seats by concentrating their campaigning in Conservative heartland districts in more socially liberal southern England.

“The Conservatives lost this election on two fronts, but they seem far more concerned with one front than the other,” Dr Bale said. Conservatives seem to blame Reform for their defeat, he said, while ignoring the fact that right-wing policies they promised to counter the threat from Mr Farage had cost them votes in the political centre.

The final choice on who becomes Conservative leader is made by party members, who tend to be older and more right-wing than average Britons.

“It’s difficult to imagine that a more moderate Conservative is going to be selected by a membership that is so ideologically and demographically unrepresentative of the average voter,” Dr Bale said.

Speaking before the election, Mr Farage told The New York Times that he “genuinely cannot see that the Conservative Party as we know it is fit for purpose in any way at all: Brexit highlighted the divisions between the two very clear wings”.

Asked whether he could rejoin it, Mr Farage said: “It’s not going to happen.”

Assuming that is correct, much rests on his ability to turn the upstart Reform UK, which has only a skeletal infrastructure, into a force able to challenge in the next general election, which must take place by 2029.

And Mr Farage, as Reform’s leader, has struggled to delegate or share the limelight. He also has a reputation for arguing with colleagues.

Mr Farage “clearly does find it quite difficult to brook any kind of opposition or alternative direction for the party suggested by anyone else”, Dr Bale said.

“He is the ultimate one-man band.” NYTIMES