Easy to caricature, portrayals of the Reform leader never show him with a book. But he regards himself in a tradition of mavericks of left and right, from Randolph Churchill to Peter Shore and Pierre PoujadeNigel Farage has a pint at a pub in Cornwall, while on this year’s local election trail, but those who know him say he’s as likely to be seen holding a book
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Nigel Farage spent his summer holiday with the late Roy Jenkins. Despite a mutual passion for good red wine, they make an odd couple. One devoted the best years of his adult life to the destruction of the European Union, the other was the architect of its monetary policy and an evangelist for British membership. Farage’s populist revolt against Brussels began with machine-gun invective against the well-fed servants of the European Commission; Jenkins, always a shameless patrician, was never ashamed to have been one of them. For a time the future of British politics was shaped over long lunches at East Hendred, the Jenkins country seat. The leader of Reform UK has spent his eventful career banging on the window, uninvited.
Yet last month Farage wanted Jenkins for company. Inevitably his holidays were interrupted — a fire broke out in his Clacton constituency and Reform’s campaign against asylum hotels demanded his near-constant presence — but there was still time to read. Jenkins, who bestrode the worlds of politics and letters like no British politician since, wanted to break the mould of our party system: Reform, having led in 109 consecutive opinion polls, is stealing his mantle. Farage wasn’t reading about that. Instead he studied the first work of history Jenkins ever wrote, a short, stylish book overshadowed by his doorstopping life of Churchill and much-loved memoirs: Mr Balfour’s Poodle.
Even as a young Labour MP, Jenkins saw himself as the heir to the now forgotten tradition of Liberal radicalism. Mr Balfour’s Poodle recalls its headiest period: when Conservative peers tried and eventually failed to thwart the popular will, which elected Liberal governments on the promise of a people’s budget. For Farage it was both inspiration and a bitter foretaste of what might await his own administration in 2029, or perhaps even earlier. He is preparing for a snap poll in 2027, when he expects the Labour government to have collapsed beneath the oppressive weight of its own failures on fiscal policy. That election, and with it a Reform victory that occupies the liminal space between plausible and likely, will pit Farage against the Westminster establishment like never before. The House of Lords, packed with luminaries of the old order, will be but one of countless hurdles for his novice government to overcome.
The former chancellor and home secretary Roy Jenkins, taking over as President of the European Commission in 1977. Farage recently studied the first work of history Jenkins ever wrote: Mr Balfour’s Poodle
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That was why he was reading Jenkins. Some will find this difficult to visualise. Farage has never cultivated that sort of persona. Instead we imagine him drinking, smoking, fishing, sometimes shooting. In public, he revels in the pursuits of other Englands, far from East Hendred, where intellectualism is regarded as a bourgeois indulgence or a hallmark of snobbishness. His is the politics of the heart, or maybe the gut: instinctive, unthinking, opportunist. This story has served him well, but it is only part of the truth. Farage spends as much time thinking as doing. Those who know the man and not merely the character see books in his hands as often as pints and fags. “That’s what nobody ever sees,” says one mainstay of his inner circle. “He reads constantly.”
He may not read or write like Jenkins or the other great minds of our political past — and nor would he claim to — but he has just as keen a sense of his own place in history. As Reform holds its biggest conference yet, Farage believes the left and right of British politics are polarising and realigning. By the end of this year he expects the Conservatives to have fallen to as low as 10 per cent in the polls, and, by next year, to have ceased to exist as a genuine national political force, like the Liberals in the 1930s. He has been right so far. It is probably time to start learning who he really is, or how he sees himself.
You might think I give him too much credit. Michael Howard, unsettled by the rise of Ukip in the first years of this century, once described Farage as the leader of the “cranks and gadflies” of British public life. It is easier for his opponents to write him off as a dealer in prejudice with no interest in philosophy. It’s a simple and seductive theory for those politicians who watch Reform’s rise in a state of discombobulation and denial, but the wrong one. Condemnation flows more readily than understanding. But they will never understand Reform, still less beat its leader, unless they are prepared to travel through his hinterland. All that seems confounding about Farage and the political space he occupies makes a little more sense if you try.
The Labour MP Peter Shore, secretary of State for economic affairs, with his wife Elizabeth in 1967. The Eurosceptic Labour minister’s vision of state control of strategic industry inspires Farage today
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Farage believes he has as strong a claim to the radical tradition of English politics as any visionary of the centre left. Jenkins, and fellow travellers such as David Marquand and Tony Blair, liked to claim direct descendance from the great Liberal reformers, and before them the Whigs. The other day I told a cabinet minister that Farage had once described himself as a Whig at heart. They scoffed. “Well, he’s not.” That, though, is where we should start. The earliest inspiration for what we should now call Faragism is Lord Durham, the wayward nobleman known as Radical Jack, who campaigned to extend the franchise and drafted the Great Reform Act in 1832. In Fighting Bull, Farage’s now forgotten 2011 memoir — an at times breathtakingly candid book — he quotes Durham at length.
“I wish to rally as large a portion of the British people as possible around the existing institutions of the country,” Durham said. “I do not wish new institutions but to preserve and strengthen the old. Some would confine the advantages of these institutions to as small a class as possible. I would throw them open to all who have the ability to comprehend them and vigour to protect them.” For Farage, established authority is almost always arbitrary. Their cloistered conversations should be thrown open to those the powerful would rather ignore.
In the 19th century, Farage wrote, technological change — the railways and dark, satanic mills rather than TikTok — transformed the relationship between the government and the governed. “Respect for rulers who had hitherto been seen only in grand portraits dwindled. This became instead the golden age of caricature. And what was the ruling class’s response? To assert their God-given right to govern, to take government further away from the people.” Like his friends in the Italian Five Star Movement and its experiments in direct democracy, he speaks of bringing it closer to them.
As Reform holds its biggest conference yet, Farage believes the left and right of British politics are polarising and realigning
THE TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
The great democratic struggles of that era — for the right to vote, for land ownership and freedom of conscience and belief — loom large, if implicitly, in his recollections of his own childhood a century later. Take his description of the Kentish countryside in which he grew up, as well as the England beyond it. “Mountains, hills, moors, pastures, deserts, coastlines, fishing-grounds — all levelled … so that orderly men in cities can play a silly game according to man-made rules.” Here we see the long shadow of the Enclosure Acts which put the law, and property rights, between the English people and the land that had been theirs for centuries.
Farage always felt an umbilical attachment to that same soil. As a boy he would scour the fields around Downe, the village whose place in history is assured by both his birth and that of Charles Darwin, with a trowel. “I just wanted to feel the connection between me and the land,” he has written, “and the people who had come before me.” He uses a surprising word to describe the communities that spring up from that earth: ecology. This is not meant in the Caroline Lucas sense of the word. Instead he speaks of “the necessity for local will and local requirements to shape specific evolution rather than imposing from without a uniform ideology, or, still worse, an ideal, on communities, families and nations”.
And so the adolescent Farage emerges in the late 1970s like Swampy in a double-breasted jacket, standing athwart the bulldozers of what the left called progress, yelling stop. In this permissive age he sided not with the liberals, like Jenkins, but all they were attempting to destroy. When Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, Farage walked into school singing The Sun Has Got His Hat On. The new aristocracy’s power was cultural, not economic. As much as he resented the sexual prowess of the “smelly socks brigade” of free-loving, long-haired hippies, what rankled more was how the governments of Wilson and Edward Heath presumed to interfere in the ecology of his England. Motorways defiled his beloved countryside. Ancient county lines were redrawn. All that was dynamic about the British economy seemed to grind to a halt. The radicals had become the establishment. And nobody seemed able, or even allowed, to challenge their received wisdom.
That changed in 1978. Keith Joseph, the intellectual godfather of Thatcherism, came to speak at Dulwich College. Farage watched in awe. He thought Joseph’s vision of free trade and enterprise was “limpid and beautiful” because it assumed the British people could be trusted to deal with each other and the world as they wished. Nobody had married Farage’s twin passions of freedom and nation so lucidly before. Exhilarated, he joined the Conservative Party the next morning. Like most men who went to the City over the next decade, he loved Margaret Thatcher too. He still speaks of that government as the most transformative of his lifetime, though these days he adds a caveat. Transformation had a rather different meaning in the pit villages of South Yorkshire from that which made him rich at the very edge of south London.
Farage imbibed the spirit of the age with abandon. By the end of the 1980s came the hangover. Thatcher might have freed Englishmen like him but their country was anything but. Inspired by Enoch Powell, another maverick Tory who had bewitched him at Dulwich, he came to see Europe as the ultimate obstacle to the freedom of personal and political expression similarly denied to generations before him. It eventually drove him out of armchair membership of the Conservatives and into activism with the nascent Ukip.
Michael Heseltine once likened Farage to Pierre Poujade, above, the French populist who briefly electrified the unstable France of the 1950s
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Reform, though, can sometimes appear to bear little resemblance to the old Nigel. His friend Lord Glasman, the iconoclastic Labour peer, delighted in telling fellow guests at Donald Trump’s inauguration that Farage was merely a “saloon-bar Thatcherite” whose gestures to the traditional left, like state ownership of steel, were the political equivalent of costume jewellery. Farage would see it differently. His greatest private passion is British military history: when not fishing or watching Test cricket, he tours the battlefields of the Western Front. His home is a makeshift museum to the First World War. “I had lunch with Nigel recently,” one of his staff told me, “and he spent an hour showing me all of the books and medals in his collection.”
Farage finds the ordinary men and women of provincial pubs, the sort of drinkers many politicians would be baffled and horrified by, easy company. Some struggle to understand how a pinstriped public schoolboy could show such effortless facility with working-class people whose lives could not be more different from his own. But the memoirs of war Farage has been so profoundly affected by — last year he read the poet Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War; Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is another favourite — are all at their heart testaments to the solidarity between the high-born officers and their troops. He feels that same sense of fellow feeling for working men whose lives are anything but free.
Only now those ideas — his own definitions of nation, community and freedom — lead him in a markedly different direction. Thatcherism didn’t free the pitmen. Their communities disappeared. The franchise they were given in the great reforms of the 19th century has delivered them nothing. These days the Eurosceptic Labour minister Peter Shore’s vision of state control of strategic industry inspires him as much as Powell. Michael Heseltine, the grand old europhile of the Conservative Party, once likened Farage to Pierre Poujade, the populist who briefly electrified the unstable France of the 1950s. Poujade, a shopkeeper, gave voice to the grievances of La France profonde and embodied the frustrations of the lower middle classes. He called for lower taxes and deregulation and railed against cultural change. He so viciously attacked Pierre Mendès-France, the Jewish prime minister of the day, that many thought him an antisemite.
In another lifetime, Farage might have been a Tory Democrat like Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, who treated the concerns of the emerging lower middle classes as legitimate
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Farage did not take the comparison as an insult. Poujade was but one in a long line of mavericks who gave voice to something long repressed in the soul of a nation, and a people who had been ignored. In another lifetime, Farage might have been a Tory Democrat like Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, one of a generation of late 19th-century Conservatives who treated the concerns of the emerging lower middle classes as legitimate. Churchill thought that insight would make him prime minister: “A statesman who fears not to meet and who knows how to sway immense masses of the working classes … can move the hearts of households.”
This is the tradition the leader of Reform now claims as his own. Can it really translate into a programme for government? And will the Tory defectors and household names from business and cultural life he hopes will make up a Reform government agree with this idiosyncratic, patriotic, economically omnivorous brand of free-speech populism? He admires most of those politicians who have set out not just to challenge received wisdom on behalf of the people — his people — but break it and remake it. “There are some people in politics who want to be someone, and other people that want to do something,” he often says to friends and advisers. “I want to do something.” His heroes never quite managed to reach the top. Most were hamstrung by their own eccentricities. His opponents hope we will follow. Having studied the history, Farage will now have to prove his own has a different kind of ending.
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