2025: The Year of Farage
Mr Junker!
Despite the various allegations that have been levelled against Nigel Farage in this very publication, I confess, the warm afterglow of 2013 still suffuses me when I consider the headline ‘Prime Minister Nigel Farage’. If any readers still have access to the old Roger Helmer memes from the 2014 Newark by-election I would be most grateful if you would share your digital archive with me via email.
I find it hard to believe that any young man who grew up on politics YouTube and Britpol has a heart so made of stone that they do not stir at the memory of Nigel speaking on the morning after the Brexit referendum. With all of his peccadillos; the love for the Commonwealth, the real ale and the First World War battlegrounds, Boisdales, he is the living embodiment of an English nationalism which, while imperfect, still has an emotional resonance with me.
His are the prejudices of North Kent, the winding lanes and war memorials, the Sunday Roasts and Top Gear. Farage the man may have character flaws but the sentiment he represents has a deep hold over me.
It also has a hold with the public, for the majority of whom, whatever the whimpering of the Bully XL disrespectors, believe Farage is the person you vote for if you oppose immigration. Yesterday, J’accuse carried an excellent case against the growing tendency against Reform and I won’t rehash it at length, only to point out just how dangerous another political split on the right is, and indeed, how well it would serve the Conservative Party.
Thanks to the feeble minds of a few elderly Scottish men, the Tories have managed to select a leader who is being outflanked by both Labour and Reform to the right on the key issue that lost them the 2024 election.
The Conservative Party still has two assets that can keep it afloat in 2029. One is that there is a small core of true believers; there are a lot of old pensioners who will vote Tory no matter what and there are a smattering of ‘one nation’ and ‘progressive’ conservatives in middle age who will back Kemi in the outlying suburbs on London over Farage. More importantly, a section of the population will, after five years of Starmer, default to switching their vote from Labour to the main party of opposition. That there are only two main parties in most people’s minds means that a fairly high proportion of anti-Labour votes will go to the Tories, no matter how feckless they are.
Winning the election with Kemi in place will require much more skulduggery. CCHQ’s best bet will be to encourage/hope for the growth of a third party on the right to compete with Reform. This would reflect the relationship that UKIP had both with the Referendum Party and later the BNP, where politically engaged people who oppose the Tories from the right end up split and less powerful as a result.
Ben Habib seems to believe he has the national profile to make this happen, I doubt it, and I also doubt that the ‘Homeland Party’ is anything more than a dead end that will wreck a few twenty year olds life chances. See below:
