Nigel Farage has spent three decades reduced to speaking loudly from the political fringes, but now it seems he’s destined to become Britain’s next Prime Minister. Mr Farage finally got his wish last year when he was elected to the House of Commons following his eighth attempt (a British record), having first stood for Parliament in a by-election all the way back in 1994. Though Farage’s opponents have been quick to dismiss and ridicule him with this unenviable record, it is this very record of perceived unelectability that has delivered him to the precipice of Number 10.
Through a thirty-year slog of perceived irrelevancy and electoral failure, Nigel Farage has achieved something entirely unprecedented in modern British politics: without piggybacking on one of the three historic major parties of right, centre, and left, he has built his own separate movement, and it may well take him all the way to Number 10.
Shifting Political Fault Lines
Over the last decade, British politics has undergone a paradigm shift. Since World War II, elections have been largely decided by income and class. A narrow band of around 100 middle-income constituencies would typically decide general elections. This is no longer the case. The dominant political fault lines have shifted away from wealth and class. Now, the electorate has realigned itself along cultural lines, so that the major issues are those of culture, specifically Social Liberalism versus Cultural Conservatism, or more simply: Remain versus Leave.
The question: Why not Labour? is, on the face of it, perfectly reasonable to ask. Why is a party that has only recently secured a landslide victory having its prospects at the next General Election written off? Well, Labour’s landslide is not as overwhelming as it first appears. Labour only achieved one-third of the national vote — the lowest ever vote share for a majority government, and barely an increase on the bruising defeat endured in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn. The ‘landslide’ victory, therefore, was not the result of an overwhelming vote for Labour, but rather the result of a decisive vote against the Conservatives. The latter saw their support collapse and the Culturally Conservative vote splinter between the Conservatives and Reform. This shift allowed Labour to slip through the middle and achieve a landslide owing to the quirks of the British electoral system, rather than any sort of sudden love for Labour or the Socially Liberal, Remain-voting group the party represents.
These electoral quirks conceal the difficulty Labour now finds itself in. The party is effectively trapped by the shifting sands of British politics. Today, Labour represents hundreds of Culturally Conservative, Leave-voting constituencies, and when (if) the Culturally Conservative vote does coalesce around one party, it will be wiped out in these areas.
To survive, Labour has to find a new base. The obvious answer to this would be Socially Liberal, Remain-voting seats in the South that have historically voted Conservative. The problem, however, is that these seats are far from guaranteed. Socially Liberal, Remain-leaning constituencies in the South that the party needs to gain are mostly in suburbs and affluent rural areas where the Greens and the Liberal Democrats hold the voters’ attention. In short, the competition is stiff.
The Popularity Game
Presently, the Culturally Conservative vote seems to be coalescing increasingly around Mr Farage. If the idea of Nigel Farage as Britain’s PM doesn’t appeal to you, then we need to start thinking about who could realistically stop him. The answer may be Boris Johnson.
The most recent MRP poll expects Reform to win almost 300 seats, mostly in the Red Wall and rural constituencies in East Anglia, the Midlands, the North and Wales. To thwart this, the Conservatives will need to gain support in these areas. Enter Boris Johnson, the only Conservative politician with potency in the critical Red Wall seats.
On the surface, Johnson is easy to dismiss. His premiership ended in outrage and scandal, and many blame him for the Conservative wipeout at the 2024 General Election. But the last opinion poll taken before Johnson resigned as Prime Minister had the Conservatives on 35 per cent, just 6 per cent behind Labour, a level of support Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak or Kemi Badenoch can only dream of.
Even now, despite all the scandals, Johnson maintains an impressively high popularity rating for a politician. If anybody has the potential to prevent a coalition of Culturally Conservative voters from coalescing around the magnet that is Nigel Farage, it is arguably Boris Johnson.
The Lesser of Two Evils?
Johnson and Farage both represent different flavours of the recent wave of populism that has gripped European politics.
Johnson chose to embrace populism as a means to power, pairing it with his own unfiltered ambition, chameleon-like relationship to ideology, and the weight of his gravitational pull, to rise through his party and take the premiership. When at the helm, he showed a certain disregard for precedent and a flippancy for Parliament and the media — eventually learning that his party was willing to hold his feet to the fire and pluck him from the seat of power.
When it comes to Farage, this is no longer the political amateur we saw in the 2000s. He has become a seasoned, disciplined, highly effective political operator with a rigid commitment to a cultural and political vision for Britain. His populism is not just a means, but also an end that he wishes to achieve. This is a politician who is at the helm of a rigidly loyal and disciplined political party over which he has total control. Unlike Johnson, Farage does not need to worry about his party pulling him from power.
Given this sober assessment, the only way Nigel Farage can be stopped on his seemingly irresistible rise to Number 10 is if a figure of equal gravity, of equal pull and of equal communicative skills can emerge within the Culturally Conservative Leave bloc of the Conservative Party. That figure is not going to come from the present Conservative frontbench, which is populated by inexperienced, unknown politicians. The only Conservative politician who has shown an equally magnetic ability to connect with the public is a man who, along with Farage, was the key architect of the Leave vote that shattered the paradigm of wealth and class-informed voting behaviour, creating the cultural fault lines we see today.
Boris Johnson is undoubtedly a problematic politician with a checkered past of lies and scandal. But in this new age of populist thinking that’s sweeping the democratic world, perhaps the only antidote is a lighter form of populism. Arguably, it’s better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
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