Bulletin from London: Nigel Farage is finally paying the political price for cosying up to Trump
False move: Nigel Farage’s support has fallen since August. Photo / Getty Images
As with sport and Newtonian mechanics, politics is all about momentum. The leader or party that possesses it is very difficult to stop. But lose it and all the drive and sense of optimism quickly begins to fade.
Last year, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party were surging in the polls. As the traditional duopoly of Labour and Conservative underwent a joint existential meltdown, Reform emerged as the party most likely to form a government at the next election. Farage, the grinning godfather of Brexit, had the highest approval ratings of any politician, despite the widespread disenchantment with the UK’s divorce from the EU. He was in the dreamy position of never being held responsible for the policy he’d spent his whole political life advocating for. He was the Teflon visionary – the grim reality just never stuck.
Until now. Such is the paralysed and pessimistic state of British politics that Reform still leads the polls, but its popularity is waning. Two self-inflicted punctures have been the cause. The first was Reform welcoming a number of leading Conservative defectors who had been part of the disastrous governments of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
The second was the war in Iran. Farage may have evaded culpability for Brexit but he has been unable to dodge the blowback from his much-trumpeted closeness to President Donald Trump. The American leader is a deeply unpopular figure in the UK, all the more so since the advent of the bombing of Iran.
As widely loathed as the Iranian regime is, few believe the Israeli and American raids will lead to its downfall, and even fewer want another Iraq-style quagmire in the Middle East. Keir Starmer has scarcely put a foot right since his election almost two years ago, but he received near universal national backing when he turned down Trump’s request for UK support in the Iranian attacks.
Under severe pressure from Trump, and reacting to missiles fired at UK bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia, Starmer has since relented a little, offering up British bases for “defensive” operations. By contrast, Farage was immediately gung-ho, demanding Starmer change his mind and “back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran”.
As it became evident that, contrary to Trump’s declarations, the war would be neither swift nor decisive, Farage threw the gears into reverse, and suddenly argued that Britain should not get involved in the war.
But the damage was done. The party’s polling average has fallen 5 percentage points since August. The dawning realisation that Trump has no clear war aims – and has been apparently blindsided by the entirely predictable closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the equally predictable spike in oil prices – leaves Farage in real danger of becoming the unpopular populist.
He has long been disdainful of Nato and international laws and treaties, preferring instead a transactional relationship with might – he respects Putin’s murderous nationalism and Trump’s capricious demonstrations of strength. But the chaos and uncertainty the Iranian adventure has unleashed on Britain’s fragile economy, has given the British public a glimpse of the unstable world that Farage would help bring about.
The crazy thing is, however, the party that’s benefited most from Reform UK’s reversal is the Greens, led by Zack Polanski, an unholy alliance of hippyish magical thinkers and Islamist sympathisers soft on the Iranian theocracy. So a different stripe of populist (also anti-Nato and soft on Putin) now has the momentum.