It is doubtful whether Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, disputing the veracity of its declared sign-ups did much good. By engaging Farage as what the armed forces would define as the “peer enemy,” Badenoch gave a movement adept at filling vacuums something to talk about over the holidays, and probably reinforced the membership drive. Beneath the bravado, neither party would relish too much lasting attention on their methodologies for counting members, so more likely, that spat will peter out, leaving a residue of personal ill-feeling between Farage and Badenoch.
It has chewed up “never-Trump” Republicans and confronted right-of-centre parties from Christian Democrats in Germany to the Gaullist Republicans in France with insurgencies on the more vociferous anti-immigration right. The effect is to trap them between adopting a semi-skimmed version of policies fronted by the harder right (watering down of asylum rights and faster tracks to deportations with fewer exemptions) and more clashes with the judiciary, over the reach and limitations of international agreements.
Powerful mavericks do not much care about these oddities, as long as their own spirit of disruption is reflected in some form. Elon Musk met Farage and the Reform treasurer, Nick Candy at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month with the subject of a potential “reasonable-sized” donation under discussion (Musk could most likely donate a hefty amount as a foreign national who has a UK-registered arm to his company).
That will sharpen the awkward question of how far unpopular parties can afford to keep being so snuffy about populists. Badenoch is fundamentally right that Reform’s policy agenda is often inchoate or opportunistic. Nonetheless, Farage is seen as part of the zeitgeist in a way the Conservatives are not: he is courted by Labour’s new incoming ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson as a conduit to the Trump presidency and attractive to Musk, knitting together an anti-establishment united front across the Atlantic and Europe, and now connected closely with the second Trump-era agenda.
Britain occupies a different stage in the cycle after a long period of Tory rule and the “black swan” event of Brexit. We are nonetheless open, via Reform UK, to an insurgency which is likely to be strengthened by an uncertain recipe for economic improvement under Labour and the obvious fragility of the Conservatives.
Keir Starmer’s House of Lords list has a strong sense of apology
Read MoreA number of people with large megaphones and increased funding are occupying space and attracting support which would once have been default Tory territory. Reform’s chair, Zia Yusuf is a former Goldman’s banker and venture capitalist. Candy, now the party’s main money man and link to the City, is a property developer. And other well-heeled figures with big ideas outside the mainstream of party politics, like Paul Marshall, who will convene a major Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in the new year of free-thinkers on the right, are shaking up traditional alignments.
Some of this has a habit of not working out electorally – the noise is often louder than the signal in the raucous new politics. What it saps from Britain’s battered Conservatives however is energy and focus, two of the most important assets of an opposition party. Meanwhile, much of its ground is being devoured by a competitor, wielding the seductive claim that absolutely everyone else has messed up.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and host of the Power Play interview show
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