Mainstream parties confront a world they struggle to understand. Labour is unprepared for governing in a disintegrating global order, while the Conservatives are squabbling over ideologies inherited from a time long gone. Sensing the disorientation of their rulers, voters are oscillating uncertainly between apathetic resignation and mutinous discontent. It is hard to imagine a more advantageous moment for Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip and the Brexit Party, now honorary president of Reform UK and a GB News presenter, to launch an assault on the Westminster political class.
By any objective standard, Farage is one of the two most consequential actors in British politics in the last half-century after Thatcher and Blair (the other, it should be unnecessary to say, is Dominic Cummings). It was Farage who goaded David Cameron into calling a referendum that would bring about an historic shift in Britain’s place in the world. It was Farage who, by standing down his troops in 2019, enabled Boris Johnson to win the general election with the overwhelming majority he was destined to squander. And it will be Farage, more than anyone else, who decides the size of any Labour majority after the coming election, and whether the Conservatives survive as a viable enterprise.
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