.png)
3 hours ago
1
“It’s our identity,” Hartle-Ryton explained. “Our identity is being slowly eroded as a British culture, and while we want to be welcoming and all the rest of it, we’ve got our own culture, and that’s slowly going. So the flag is there to say, Hey, we’re still here. You know, don’t forget about us.”
Farage was due to address the conference at around 4 P.M., but he decided to make his speech earlier, because of a crisis in the government. At around noon, the news broke that Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister and the deputy leader of the Labour Party, had resigned from Starmer’s Cabinet.
One of the eerier aspects of Reform’s current momentum is how ably it is being assisted by those who are supposed to be preventing it. Rayner had been snared in a media scandal, because she didn’t pay enough in taxes when buying an apartment earlier this year. In her defense, it was a complicated transaction. Rayner, who has a disabled son, divorced her partner two years ago and left a share of her former house in a trust, which had tax implications for her next property purchase. According to Laurie Magnus, the government’s adviser on ministerial standards, her error was not having sought advice from a tax specialist. (Plus, Rayner was the Housing Minister, so it wasn’t a good look.) A more intuitive, or bold, Prime Minister than Starmer might have protected Rayner, or moved her to another post. She was the government’s only truly charismatic working-class politician.
At the conference, Farage appeared onstage in a blaze of pyrotechnics and gladiatorial chords. For years, his default expression for the cameras was a catlike, impish grin. But in recent months he has slowed his gait and stiffened his back, in preparation for high office. “We are all ships rising on a turquoise tide,” he told the hall, “headed ever closer toward winning the next general election.”
The Rayner affair—just another mainstream politician, dodging their taxes—wrote Farage’s attack lines for him. “It screams to entitlement,” he said. “It screams to a government that, despite all the promises that this would be a new, different kind of politics, is as bad, if not worse, than the one that went before.” Farage and his allies like to refer to Labour and the Conservatives as a single “uniparty,” whose time has passed.
One of Farage’s gifts as a politician is knowing what he does not have to say. While other right-wing populists, in Europe and elsewhere, get caught up in talk of race, or religion, or replacement theory, Farage’s language is always careful, always clubbable. Unlike Trump, he doesn’t like to shock or make himself out to be exceptional. He is an everyman, who remembers when it was fine to have a few drinks with lunch. “It’s as if our leaders have forgotten who we were,” he said in Birmingham, vaguely, before praising Operation Raise the Colours as a patriotic protest against a rotten establishment. “Let’s make Britain great again. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere else before,” he quipped. “But I agree with it.”
His deputies and outriders are not quite so deft. A few hours later, in the same hall, I watched Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of DOGE (yes, DOGE), give a speech that was martial and mean. Yusuf, a former banker at Goldman Sachs, describes himself as a British Muslim patriot. He reiterated Reform’s plans for mass deportations, the sidelining of judges by the executive, and the use of military aircraft to clear the country of “illegal migrants.” In a century’s time, Yusuf promised, children would be taught the names of the Prime Ministers who had allowed Britain’s borders to be overrun. “They will learn of a political class that betrayed its own people,” Yusuf said. “They will learn of a Britain that was besieged.”
On my way out, I bumped into Michael Gove, a former Conservative Cabinet minister who is now the editor of The Spectator, Britain’s most influential right-wing magazine. Gove was a leading Brexiteer and one of the more effective Tory politicians during the Party’s long spell in power. When we spoke on the phone a few days later, Gove acknowledged that the rise of Reform was all that anyone was talking about. “But there’s a ‘but,’ ” he said. Aside from Farage, Gove observed that the Party retained an amateur feel. “And the amateurism leads to a fear that the perimeter between the populist-and-radical-right movement and something more worrying is not properly policed,” he said. The day after Farage and Yusuf spoke, Reform delegates were addressed by Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist and vaccine skeptic, who shared a claim that COVID vaccines might be responsible for recent cancer cases in the British Royal Family.
Gove is three years younger than Farage, and, like him, part of the generation of British conservatives who grew up enthralled by Margaret Thatcher, and who subsequently led the national revolt against the European Union. (“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts,” Gove said, memorably, during the Brexit campaign.) Every revolution devours its children.
Farage has been waiting for this moment for a long time. I remember chatting to him while he smoked a cigarette after a Brexit Party rally in the West Midlands, in the spring of 2019. It was almost three years after Britain had voted to leave the E.U., but the country’s political class was unable to agree on the right terms for leaving the bloc. “This is not even about Brexit,” Farage said, referring to the anger and the energy of the supporters he had just addressed. “This is now a genuine movement that wants to radically change the entire system in the U.K.”
For a few years, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was able to satisfy the cravings of the populist right. But those days are gone. It was the collapse of the Tories at last year’s election that has created the space for Farage’s march to power. Between 2019 and 2024, the Conservatives lost seven million voters, equivalent to more than twenty per cent of the vote. Labour’s numbers stood still. Starmer’s hundred-and-fifty-six-seat majority in the House of Commons is unsteady, because it rests on only thirty-four per cent of the popular vote. “This isn’t Tony Blair in 1997. There is no love for Starmer or his government,” Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said. Everyone has their own analogy to describe Labour’s illusory power. “I call it a Jenga tower,” Ford said. “It’s very tall, but it’s got extremely weak foundations.”
