Farage’s career should — repeat should — have ended in triumph. After all, he went into politics with just one aim and succeeded spectacularly
Enoch Powell said famously that all political careers end in failure. Nigel Farage should have proved him wrong.
Farage’s career should — repeat should — have ended in triumph. After all, he went into politics with just one aim and succeeded spectacularly.
Up to a point.
The magnificent Leave victory in 2016 was a vindication of Farage’s virtually single-handed campaign to get Britain out of the EU.
Yes, others can also take credit. But Farage was the figurehead, often a lone voice in the wilderness.
No one had to endure the vilification and violence directed at Farage as he took his message around the country year after year, well before Call Me Dave finally buckled and gave the people a long-overdue referendum.
Fifteen years ago, when I was presenting a nightly show on Sky News, I was about the only broadcaster who would give him a regular platform. The mainstream media treated him as a pariah — at best a circus act, at worst a neo-Nazi.
This was around the time that New Labour was almost unanimously agreed to have established a 1,000-year reich and opposition to our glorious future as a European statelet was considered futile.
Aside from a few principled players in the Conservative Party — former leader and one-time Maastricht rebel Iain Duncan Smith prominent among them — the political establishment wholeheartedly embraced the EU project.
But Farage kept banging away, making mischief in Brussels, where he’d managed to get himself elected as an MEP and used his position to ridicule the pompous panjandrums running the show.
Who can forget his wonderful denunciation of the ridiculous Herman Van Rompuy, self-styled former European ‘president’?
‘You have the charisma of a damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk . . . Who are you? I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you.
‘I would like to ask you, President, who voted for you . . . oh, I know democracy’s not popular with you lot, and what mechanism do the people of Europe have to remove you?
‘Is this European democracy? You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states — perhaps that’s because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country . . .
‘Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job at all, and I can say with confidence that I speak on behalf of the majority of British people in saying: We don’t know you, we don’t want you, and the sooner you’re put out to grass, the better.’
The Westminster bubble was horrified. How dare this upstart show such a lack of respect to our European masters? But out in the suburbs and the shires, and on the rundown council estates in the North of England, millions of decent British citizens gave a silent cheer.
Call Me Dave dismissed Farage’s Ukip as a collection of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’. It was a cruel caricature, but partly accurate. Ukip’s annual conference certainly resembles a roomful of Hyacinth Buckets and men who model themselves on the Major in Fawlty Towers.
But Ukip was on a roll — and by now Farage was a ubiquitous presence in radio and TV studios, even if he was often only there as an Aunt Sally, to be shouted at by self-righteous presenters and panellists alike.
Yet Farage stood up to the verbal slings and arrows, and to the nasty physical abuse he frequently had to endure. Cigarette in one hand, pint of best in the other, he kept on plugging away.
In the 2015 General Election, Ukip polled almost four million votes, a large chunk of them in former Labour strongholds in the North, which felt ignored and abandoned and had suffered the greatest impact from mass immigration.
Farage’s ‘fruitcakes’ didn’t make a parliamentary breakthrough but they delivered the Tories their first Commons majority since 1992, simply by denying Labour seats they had taken for granted.
Now, Cameron feared, they were coming for the Tories, so he panicked and promised a referendum on EU membership.
Say what you like about Call Me Dave, but this was his greatest gift to the people of Britain, an opportunity we seized, asserting our sovereignty and overturning the decades-old project of submerging our country into an anti-democratic United States of Europe.
To paraphrase Monty Python’s parrot sketch, Ukip is an ex-party, it has ceased to be
Cameron’s gamble backfired. He resigned immediately and is now reduced to scraping a living on the international lecture circuit, essentially a political end-of-the-pier show.
Next week, he’s playing a small town theatre in Florida, but has sold fewer seats than its current production, Million Dollar Quartet, a jukebox musical featuring hits by Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.
In the States, where they value national independence, Farage is a folk hero, a bigger draw than our former Prime Minister.
And yet.
OK, so the referendum wouldn’t have been won without Boris, Gove and the brave career politicians who dared to defy the Establishment stitch-up. But without Farage, there would have been no referendum, nor would there have been any Brexit.
What kind of Brexit, if any, remains to be seen. Which, presumably, is why Farage is now muttering about making a comeback as part of a Ukip Mark II.
The corpse of the old Ukip is still twitching, but without Farage it’s nothing. The party’s on its third post-Farage leader, no one you’ve ever heard of, and he’s on the way out over a few incendiary tweets sent by some dopey bird half his age he’s got himself hooked up with. I can’t be bothered to go into details, because it’s a waste of time.
To paraphrase Monty Python’s parrot sketch, Ukip is an ex-party, it has ceased to be.
One of the reasons Ukip imploded was because those four million voters returned to the two main parties, both of which made manifesto promises to implement Brexit in full, yet now seem hell-bent on either reneging or watering it down so far it becomes meaningless.
So I understand and share Farage’s concern. As I’ve said all along, the fix has been in since the result of the referendum was announced. The political class have stolen our biggest vote in history for anything and made it all about them — not the people they are paid to serve.
Frankly, I don’t trust any of them to deliver the Brexit we voted for. If the vast majority of MPs had their way, they’d stop the whole process in its tracks today. When Theresa May succeeded Call Me Dave, she should have established a grand cross-party coalition to negotiate our departure, including heroic Labour figures such as Gisela Stuart and Kate Hoey.
But the central player should have been Farage, a man who knows his way around Brussels and scares the EU to death.
He’d never have put up with the contemptuous treatment being meted out to Britain by Michel Barnier and his ‘damp-rag, low-grade bank clerk’ bureaucrats.
Instead, we’re stuck with Mother Theresa, who spent the referendum hiding behind the sofa and still won’t say whether she’d vote Leave if it was held today.
Her new de facto deputy, David Lidington, is a full-on federast, already speculating we could rejoin the EU at some stage. Rejoin? We haven’t even left yet — and never will, other than in name only, if the political establishment prevails.
Even David Davis seems to have gone native and Boris has been banished to the outer darkness, certainly when it comes to Brexit. In what kind of Fred Karno government is the Foreign Secretary excluded from the biggest foreign policy issue facing the country in modern history?
Never mind Boris, though. Mrs May should be making plans for Nigel, bringing him into the fold, allowing him to be an integral part of the very Brexit process for which he has campaigned so long, so hard and so selflessly.
He doesn’t need a knighthood, or a sinecure in the Lords — each of which would have been a traditional reward for his service to this country. Given the fuss over Mrs Thatcher’s memorial, I suppose a statue in Parliament Square is out of the question, too.
But what is beyond doubt is that, after Thatcher, Farage is the most influential, most significant British political figure since Churchill — much more so than the Westminster pygmies and time-servers who treat him with unwarranted disdain.
Ukip, the party he led, may be sleeping with the fishes, but if there is any justice, Farage’s career deserves to end in triumph.
Let’s hope Enoch was wrong.