How to beat Farage | Conservative Home

Nigel Farage poses an extraordinarily difficult problem for both Labour and the Conservatives. He has created, in Reform, a protest movement which has attracted the support of huge numbers of voters who for various reasons wish to punish the two main traditional parties.

Sir Keir Starmer has not worked out what to do about this. He spent his first year in office denouncing the Conservatives for wrecking everything: a message so gloomy that anyone who took him literally was bound to wonder whether he and his colleagues would be capable of reviving such a shattered country.

Since the threat from Reform emerged, Starmer and his team have cast jibes at that movement which sound unbalanced: see their claim that Farage is on the side of Jimmy Savile.

Kemi Badenoch and her colleagues have had no greater success in working out how to compete with Reform. They are in danger of being drawn into an auction in which they attempt to outbid Farage by denouncing in apocalyptic tones the failure of the Government to stop the boats.

There are quite a few columnists whose stock in trade is to shriek at frequent intervals that society is disintegrating and the end of the world is nigh.

This is not a model which Conservative politicians should imitate, for whoever falls into the habit of delivering harangue after harangue of this kind comes to sound unbalanced, neurotic and hysterical.

Farage avoids that trap by setting prudent limits to where he will go. He mocks the powers that be at Westminster, but generally refrains from endorsing foreign populists who are in the same line of business as himself.

Here is a saloon-bar orator who knows that if he is to remain popular in the saloon bar, he must be able to take a joke against himself.

Nothing, indeed, produces a greater explosion of merriment than a joke against himself. When Starmer flings a scripted jibe at Farage in response to some Labour backbencher who has been lined up by the Whips to ask a helpful question, Farage flings back his head and laughs more heartily than anyone.

Here is flattering confirmation that he is a threat to Starmer, and a fitting recipient of votes from people who want to take revenge on an Establishment which has let them down.

How can a Conservative stateswoman defeat Farage? I hesitate to offer advice, for I know I would be useless at scoring off him.

But having written about politicians from Walpole to Thatcher who did, for a time, succeed, I observe that they all communicated a certain seriousness of purpose.

They knew what the nation needed, and by a process of trial and error worked out how to provide it.

They were willing to adopt the most flexible tactics: to get any great measure through the Commons, and settle a question which has perplexed the country for generations, flexible tactics are required.

But they had also a certain constancy, and the ability to enlist the best people. Lord John Russell was put to work drawing up the Great Reform Bill. Churchill was always in the market for the most brilliant new advice. So too Thatcher.

The difficulty of doing something becomes a kind of stimulus. It must be done, and before it can be done a long time in the wilderness is required, to work out how it will be done.

The Conservatives are just now wandering in a wilderness from which they may never return. But they have also their best chance since 1975-79 to think out how they are going to achieve various properly conservative ends.

The British state is heading for bankruptcy, so must change course. Of what can it do less? Of what, in other words, can its members do more? How can it become, for anyone under the age of 60, a property-owning democracy?

How can it defend itself “against the seldom distant threat of foreign aggression and the never absent threat of social disintegration”? (words borrowed from T.E.Utley’s piece in The Daily Telegraph on 9th February 1981, reprinted in A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T.E Utley, edited by Charles Moore and Simon Heffer).

Tough questions, which have long baffled enquiry, and are far beyond Farage’s capacity. Badenoch will be judged on the quality of her answers.