A Farage barrage

Having scrapped for so long, how can the leader of UKIP let go when the prize of Brexit is in sight?

LONDON — I had lunch with Nigel Farage a couple of Thursdays ago, a few hours after the first shots were fired in what has been misdescribed as the UK Independence Party’s civil war. It would be much better to call what happened that week, in the emotional aftermath of the general election, a failed putsch against a certainly irritable, but far from autocratic ruler. Which is why I offered to cancel lunch.

“We set a date, so let’s stick to it,” Farage said, after walking in on me in a toilet just as I had zipped up and washed my hands.

I often don’t lock toilet doors, because I’m claustrophobic and fear the consequences of a gammy lock. No awkward moment here, though: Farage doesn’t really do awkward. “But haven’t you got a crisis to attend to, Nigel?” I asked. “Yes, but we must have lunch,” he replied, before ordering a pint of London Pride, and seeing that I had the same. Moments later we would be sharing a very good bottle of Burgundy and some excellent Welsh lamb.

This was just about tolerable for me, as I was on a day off to attend to some personal business. But Farage doesn’t take days off. Later that evening, having spent the whole day with UKIP’s travails leading news bulletins on the BBC, Sky News, and just about everywhere else, including Twitter, Farage would be on Question Time — Britain’s flagship weekly political show, with a national audience of millions — where he put in a commanding performance on his 28th appearance there.

Relieved by defeat

It would be hard to overstate how rewarding a lunch companion Farage makes. He is mobbed most places he goes, whether by fans or foes. The first time we ate together — in the Wolseley, the favored canteen of London’s media class, located near the Ritz — several people spanning the generations and genders came up to him to offer support and thanks, or just to say hi. He is a celebrity now, and loves it. He is also a raconteur, with a bank of excellent anecdotes built up over several decades in business and politics, and a range of specialist subjects that is dazzling. He can talk for England, literally, on the key moments of both the Great and Second World War; he knows phenomenal amounts about cricket; and his knowledge of European politics is far more sophisticated than is suggested by his tub-thumping reputation, which still owes a heavy debt to a scintillating speech he made against Herman van Rompuy (“the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk”), which went viral and was a YouTube sensation.

On this particular afternoon, civil wars or putsches notwithstanding, he was very engaging on the fact that what nobody in Britain has grasped about the European Commission is the remarkable relationship between President Jean-Claude Juncker and First Vice-President Frans Timmermans. Both embody the federalist project Farage has spent over two decades fighting, and yet his respect and empathy for them is huge. If your ancestors were as bloodied by the Nazis as Timmermans’s, he says, it’s understandable why you would want to bring Europe together.

None of which makes us natural boozing partners, of course. I represent, and love, three things that Farage’s party has risen to prominence denouncing: immigration, globalization, and the much derided liberal metropolitan elite. I’m a proud version of the former and member of the last, and strong advocate for what goes in between. I also find most of what UKIP stands for nasty, brutish and short on imagination and decency. But despite all this, Farage is probably the most fun politician to have lunch with that I know. And I can’t help but admire his achievement in creating a people’s army of nearly four million voters, which owes so much to his being the most articulate populist in English culture since Enoch Powell, and just as much to a work ethic that is nothing short of phenomenal. My own father aside, Farage works harder and longer than anyone I have ever met. He does so while drinking and smoking more than any politician I know, and — perhaps most remarkable of all — enduring permanent and often acute neuralgic back pain.

And also, of course, while overseeing a party stuffed full of eccentrics. Three hours before we met, Patrick O’Flynn, MEP, UKIP’s economics spokesman, had called Farage “snarling, thin-skinned and aggressive.” As a former political editor of Richard Desmond’s Daily Express, which backed UKIP at the election, his words were calculated to hurt and have a big impact, both of which they did long before he unreservedly apologized. That week Farage had been reinstated as leader of the party having resigned after the election, when he failed to become MP for Thanet South. By the time I saw him, his basic tiggerishness was clearly subdued through exhaustion. He hasn’t taken a two-week holiday for over 20 years, knows he could make a lot of money in the private sector, and wishes he saw more his children from his second marriage. That is why he was, as he admitted, so relieved by his defeat in Thanet South.

But he can’t let go, for one reason above all. The Tories’ promise of a referendum on EU membership could deliver the prize for which Farage has spent these past decades fighting: a British nation freed, as he sees it, from the suffocating grip of Brussels and Strasbourg. Having scrapped for so long, how can he let go when the prize is in sight? He might have done that, had his party let him. But after the national executive committee unanimously demanded his return, he reasoned that with the plebiscite imminent, now is no time for novices.

Pride kicked in

This is one of the two central conflicts at the heart of UKIP, which Farage is trying to resolve, but ultimately will not be able to. The immediate cause of the tension in his party after the election wasn’t the fact that, despite nearly four million votes, it returned only one MP — Douglas Carswell, the Tory convert who sits for Clacton, and of whom more in a moment. The tension comes from the fact that Carswell, Mark Reckless (another Tory convert, but one who lost his seat), and Dan Hannan, a maverick Tory MEP, don’t want Farage to front the referendum campaign for the ‘Out’ (of Europe) camp. These Oxbridge “posh boys” believe there is a sober, pragmatic, and economic case to be made for British exit, or Brexit, and that Farage’s brand of populism is toxic to it. Having garnered those millions of votes, and worked tirelessly to build UKIP up from a bunch of loonies to the electoral force it is today, Farage quite understandably disagrees. Pride has kicked in, too, and he feels that any attempt to keep him out of the campaign is symptomatic of a metropolitan mindset which he’ll be damned if he lets triumph.

The second conflict within UKIP is deeper, and related. As the party’s only MP, Carswell ought to be well-placed to be Farage’s successor. But his views on immigration are different to those of the party’s current leader, in being fundamentally more relaxed and tolerant. This is one reason why Paul Nuttall, Farage’s Liverpudlian deputy, remains the most likely next leader; the other is that he would increase the party’s chances of eating into Labour heartlands in the north.

Carswell’s views on immigration put him at odds not just with Farage, but most of those millions of voters — and illuminate both the remarkable short history of UKIP and the dilemma of its future. The party came from the Anti-Federalist League, with help from the Referendum Party set up by financier Sir James Goldsmith, whose son Zac may well be Tory candidate for mayor of London. In other words, the animating vision of UKIP’s founders, and what brought Farage into politics, is a desire to leave the European Union. On this point, Carswell, a radical democrat who sees the EU as an attack on British sovereignty, agrees.

Yet UKIP has evolved, over the course of its history, from being a party against the EU to a party against globalization. The issue of immigration has allowed Farage to fudge the difference. Immigration, a product of a globalized era, is the top concern of British voters. They see through David Cameron’s stupid pledge to reduce it to the tens of thousands, “no ifs or buts,” while it has risen to 318,000. Farage has argued, rightly, that if Britain is to radically reduce immigration, it must first leave the EU. That is one of the main reasons UKIP have been so popular: voters actually believe Farage’s pledge.

The main appeal of the party is that it appeals to voters left behind by globalization, which has ripped asunder the stable labor markets of yore. Voters living in post-industrial towns, particularly in the north of England and on the east coast, lose their jobs to technology, or foreign workers, whether those workers are in countries that have successfully outsourced work (China, India) or immigrants to Britain who work harder and are better qualified than natives. UKIP offers a coherent if wrong answer to that problem: reduce the number of immigrants, and in so doing turn the clock back to an era of greater certainty and less flux.

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Won’t let go

Nostalgia versus modernity: This is the conflict between Farage and Carswell, and even if the former can keep a lid on it until that referendum, it is bound to explode afterward. Carswell was born in Africa and grew up partly in Kampala. He has contributed smart ideas on how the internet is changing democracy, blogging extensively, writing a decent book on the idea of “iDemocracy,” and describing his own politics as “Gladstone.com.” Farage is no technophobe, and has made tremendous use of social media, but his deep, visceral patriotism is a long way from Carswell’s comfort with rapid global change.

Whether or not Farage steps down after the referendum — likely next year — depends on much more than the result. After all, his party may not let him; and one reason he probably won’t get the electoral reform he pines for is that senior Tories believe that if they win that referendum and Farage steps down, UKIP will implode and they will have another two million voters at least come back into their fold. Farage had hoped that, having built a mass movement from scratch and delivered the plebiscite he came into politics to achieve, he could hand things over to a party mature enough to become a fixture in our politics.

That may never happen. The upper echelons of UKIP may lack the necessary discipline; and the members’ nostalgia for a disappeared England will always struggle to overcome the inevitable and accelerating fact of globalization. Like Enoch Powell (who, of course, left the Tories to become an Ulster Unionist), Farage may be remembered in history not for a phantom civil war he unleashed within his own party, but a real civil war he fought within British conservatism itself — one that he ultimately lost, but not before a phenomenal effort, and several memorable lunches.

Amol Rajan is editor of the Independent. He Tweets at @amolrajan.