The future of Farageism

It is Thursday 28 June 2029. Big Ben strikes 10pm and the election exit poll is emblazoned on the nation’s screens. Nigel Farage leaps up in excitement and hugs his director of communications, knocking over half-empty glasses of red wine on the carpet of his Chelsea apartment. Reform is the largest party. Sir Keir Starmer’s (unnamed) successor has delayed the moment of reckoning almost to the last possible legal date, but it is now clear he has failed to revive Labour and leftish and centrist voters are scattered among the Greens, Lib Dems and Nationalists. Conservative hopes of a revival have been dashed. Farage is heading to No 10 as Britain’s 60th prime minister with a working parliamentary majority of 27. “BRITAIN TRUMP!” reads a congratulatory post on Truth Social from US president JD Vance.

Thus begins Peter Chappell’s often chilling, frequently hilarious and always compelling feat of informed imagination in which he envisages what it might be like to be governed by the Farage mob. The cabinet secretary, historically one of the chief guardians of our unwritten constitution, is swiftly sacked and replaced with a Farage sympathiser. The Speaker’s chair is filled by a Farage creep. John Major, Gordon Brown and David Cameron join forces to warn that democracy is in danger. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change offers to advise the Reform government on how to make Britain an “AI superpower”, one of the many sly jokes which pepper the text.

The self-described “pirates” turn out to be catastrophically incompetent helms of the ship of state. Lee Anderson is forced to resign as home secretary after reckless closures of migrant accommodation spark rioting at the Manston immigration centre. The Great Repeal Act – removing the UK’s signature from the European convention on human rights, disapplying the refugee convention and repealing the Human Rights Act – provokes the EU to threaten termination of the post-Brexit trade deal, spooking the markets. Savage cuts to the budget of the Environment Agency exacerbate the devastation wreaked on Bristol when it is inundated by a tidal surge. Farage makes a visit to the stricken city and is doused with a bucket of flood water by an enraged publican. “WHERE ARE THE ARMY?” demand the placards of protesters. The armed forces are preoccupied preparing for war with Argentina, which has been enraged by Reform’s plan to drill, baby, drill around the Falkland islands.

It is a pacy read with a plausible ring. Chappell, a journalist, has spun his scenarios by drawing on Reform policy documents and statements along with interviews with party insiders, decision makers and experts. In some cases, the author is extrapolating from events that have already happened. The Farage government forces out the director general of the BBC, the licence fee is halved and the board purged. Chappell quotes George Osborne, who made debilitating financial demands on the national broadcaster when he was in government, saying “the chancellor can basically boss the BBC around on its finances”.

While successfully amusing us, the author has a deadly serious intent to illustrate that the guardrails of British democracy are fragile. Being largely based on conventions and precedents rather than legal codes, Britain’s constitution and the institutions underpinning freedom and the rule of law are highly vulnerable to what he calls “a hostile takeover”.

For a much more sympathetic treatment of the life, impact and intents of Reform’s leader, enter Michael Ashcroft, a former deputy chairman of the Tory party. It would be a little unfair to say that his book should be entitled The Farage Fawn, but only a tad. Several chapters lean heavily on Farage’s autobiography, Fighting Bull, hardly a disinterested source. The great majority of those interviewed are Farage-friendly when not unabashed cheerleaders.

The account of his years at Dulwich College cannot swerve the many allegations that he was a schoolboy racist. One contemporary at Dulwich in the late 1970s has said that he can remember Farage singing “gas them all, gas ‘em all, gas them all”. Another has said he remembers Farage “regularly” performing a Nazi salute in their classroom. Another, who is Jewish, has said that Farage would “sidle up to me and growl ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Gas them’”. The Guardian says it has spoken to 34 former pupils who maintained they had seen Farage “behaving in a racist or antisemitic manner”. He has admitted to “aggressive banter”, but denies being a schoolboy racist. A study of his life with claims to be definitive ought to come to a conclusion about this, but the author offers us the limp non-verdict: “Ultimately, it is impossible, without evidence, to convert these claims into facts.”

There’s a similar tendency to put an exculpatory gloss on misadventures and misjudgments in his political career. Ashcroft includes some discussion of Farage’s lauding of Vladimir Putin as the world leader to be most admired as “an operator” and his claim that Nato and the EU provoked the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rather than interrogate what this says about Farage’s instincts and judgment, the author declares it to be “a straightforward lesson in how easily his words could be used against him to suit his opponents’ agenda”. There’s mention of the outrage provoked by Farage’s incendiary response to the Southport murders. The author prefers to condemn not Farage but his opponents for casting him as “the troublemaker-in-chief”.

The book is more useful when it outlines the ego-fuelled clashes between Farage and figures on the even wilder shores of the right. He has had pyrotechnical bust-ups with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Rupert Lowe, the leader and sole MP of Restore Britain. The US tech mogul has sneered that Farage is a “weak sauce who will do nothing”; Lowe has called the Reform leader a “viper” who leads “a cult”. There are intense levels of animosity on the extremes of the right. Their considerable capacity for hating other people peaks when they talk about each other. Yet these vicious struggles are tepidly labelled “tussles”. 

The central problem with this book is that it never challenges Farage’s self-projection as “the great disruptor” who has fought a brave and often lonely battle in the name of the common man against the status quo. The author doesn’t probe whether he can be considered an authentic “anti-establishment” crusader when his various political outfits have been highly dependent on the largesse of extremely well-loaded individuals. One was Paul Sykes, a wealthy businessman who bankrolled Ukip to the tune of £8m over three years. Other donors to that vehicle included Stuart Wheeler, a spread-betting baron, and Richard Desmond, the owner of the Daily Express. 

The daddy of all sugar daddies is Christopher Harborne, the Thailand-based aviation and crypto tycoon, who doled out £10m to the Brexit party during 2019 alone and has given at least £22m to Reform. He has also gifted a cool £5m to Farage personally. Since the exposure of his failure to declare that in the member of registers’ interests, Farage has given ratty and inconsistent explanations of what the money was for and how he’s been spending it. He is now under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner. 

You might expect a book that claims to have benefited from “unparalleled access to those who know him best” to make a deep dive and reveal all about the mysterious Harborne: how he made his money, why he takes so much interest in our politics from the other side of the world, and what he hopes to achieve by splurging so much moolah on Reform and its leader. Yet there’s little more than a restatement of what we already know, accompanied by the sigh that “Harborne did not respond to requests to co-operate with this book”.

Only towards the end of The Farage Factor does the author voice some scepticism about his subject with an acknowledgment that even Reform-curious voters often regard its leader as “a fame-hungry loose cannon who enjoys causing chaos”.

Reform’s rating hit 31 points in the poll of polls last summer and has drifted down since. There’s also evidence that anti-Reform voters are increasingly willing to coalesce behind whoever is best placed to beat them. Makerfield was the third parliamentary byelection in a row where Reform lost.

But if Peter Chappell’s imagined scenario were to come to pass, what then? A Liz Truss-on-steroids budget blows up the economy and forces Richard Tice to resign as chancellor. Farage can’t keep his fissiparous parliamentary party together and loses a confidence vote only to refuse to leave Downing Street. The Commons has to petition the King to sack him as prime minister. Farage ultimately departs only under threat of arrest by the Downing Street police detail. It will make you laugh. It will make you shiver. 

What If Reform Wins: A Scenario by Peter Chappell is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99)

The Farage Factor: Reform UK and The Remaking of British Politics by Michael Ashcroft is published by Biteback (£22)

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Photograph by Carl Court/Getty Images