After months of being told Reform was on the brink of power – always a laughable proposition – they’re now falling apart for all to see. The party is in a civil war, they’ve lost an MP, and its leader has been revealed for the Putin apologist he’s always been. Suddenly the great remorseless Reform juggernaut has juddered to a halt in the mud.
“He has made some history,” then prime minister David Cameron told Carswell at PMQs, “because as a party of one he has managed to have a backbench rebellion, which is something to be admired.”
The Metropolitan Police announced on Tuesday that they would investigate Reform MP Rupert Lowe for reported threats against party chair Zia Yusuf. This was one of several allegations made against Lowe by the party last Friday, which he denies, including workplace bullying and “evidence of derogatory and discriminatory remarks”.
Meanwhile, Farage’s usually effective political antenna seems to be malfunctioning. One of his most accomplished skills is to know how to stay just on the right side of public opinion and yet drag it remorselessly toward the right. So even in the 2010s, when he was saying how “awkward” he felt on trains when people spoke foreign languages, he was canny enough to distance himself from Theresa May’s “Go Home” anti-immigrant vans.
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Labour's unpopularity comes down to one thing
Read MoreBut Farage is so desperate for Trump’s approval, and so obviously admiring of Vladimir Putin, that he simply couldn’t help but betray his own political interests. “If I turned up at the White House,” he told LBC, “I’d make sure I was wearing a suit.” The Ukrainian leader had “overplayed his hand” and was “very unwise”.
It’s possible that none of this will make a difference. The upcoming Runcorn and Helsby byelection could still see a Reform win. The party’s polling seems largely unaffected by the Lowe-Farage split, probably because no sensible person has any idea who Lowe is. More in Common polling this morning put the party level with Labour on 25 per cent.
A victory for Farage is close to being priced-in by Westminster journalists but is actually a tremendously difficult thing to achieve. If he fails, it would be seen as a massive setback – a refutation of the sense of inevitability he has cultivated since the election.
Since his comments on Zelensky, Farage’s personal popularity has taken another battering. More in Common found he had fallen from a high of -8 to -18 over the course of March.
In fact, his party will continue to tear itself apart in a series of petty and meaningless squabbles defined more by the toxic egos of the men involved than by any kind of meaningful political principle or difference over strategy. Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly obvious what he truly is: an apologist for Russian aggression. A populist clown, who, if he ever managed to secure power, would do as much to damage Britain’s reputation and economy as his idol Donald Trump is currently doing to America.
He’s a joke, surrounded by fools. And people are increasingly seeing the punchline.
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