Faltering Farage

Watching Robert Jenrick badmouth all his mates and fall like a shot pheasant into Nigel Farage’s bulging game bag brought plenty of cheer to a dreary January afternoon.

Tory-on-Tory bloodsports are always entertaining, but today’s outbreak came with the suggestion that Farage, whose political instincts have seen off what seems like dozens of Tory leaders, might have dropped a bollock.

The current unanimous distaste for Keir Starmer seems to have wrongfooted Nige into forgetting that everyone still hates the Conservatives.

Earlier in the week, he welcomed Nadim Zahawi aboard the good ship Reform. Zahawi is ostensibly the sort of tax-averse, expenses-hungry Tory that Reform was supposedly designed to banish from national life.

Still reeking of Boris Johnson’s aftershave, he had reportedly been on a determined quest to secure a berth in the Lords. Only after that ran aground did he start swimming towards a vessel that already contains an embezzlement of former Conservatives, I believe that is the correct collective noun.

Farage has been visibly rattled by the claims made about racism and antisemitism by his former schoolmates. His usual cheery ‘does my face look bothered?’ approach to accusations of this sort has been tellingly absent.

In its place we’ve seen a brittle Farage, realising perhaps that resorting to humour wasn’t going to work. So, perhaps Zahawi is Farage’s DEI hire: a reminder that he’s the civic nationalist you can bring home to meet your mother, not Tommy Robinson’s posh uncle.

Robert Jenrick, though? Farage will surely regret this. I heard Jenrick’s hastily rewritten speech – the original had been swiped and leaked to the press by the Tories – on the radio in the car. Listening to it, I began to feel a strange, familiar chill envelop me.

The rhetoric was polished but empty, insisting that the need for change was urgent without specifying what that would mean. Tonally, ‘Honest Bob’ oscillated between faux-passionate pleading and soto voce doom mongering.

Tony Blair

Why am I feeling nauseous? I wondered. Then he went into a folksy reminiscence about how he was Wolverhampton’s only Tory teenager after the 1997 election, and all became clear. He’s a Temu Tony Blair.

Now, it doesn’t do to generalise about Reform UK supporters. Too many commentators are content to recycle tired cliches about puce-faced, thick-necked bigots whose supposed concern for the welfare of women and children is a thinly disguised cover for white supremacy and their own declining sexual potency. The reality is far, far from that. So far.

It’s reasonable to assume, however, that one thing that does unite the turquoise tie brigade is a deep loathing for Anthony Lynton Blair. So, what the defection of this shining-eyed, oleaginous negative transparency of him will do for Reform’s fortunes is a mystery to me.

Those fortunes, hereabouts, are in freefall.

This week’s polls for the Senedd election and Westminster voting intentions in Wales show Plaid Cymru streaking ahead of Reform. This, I suggest, is the delayed effect of the by election in Caerphilly.

That was the event at which south Wales was supposed to lead the way by embracing Nigelism as the answer to our ills. We were to be the bridgehead from which the Labour vote in the UK would be captured.

Inauthentic 

In the end, though, Llyr Powell’s rhetoric about immigration ran aground on the rocks of local knowledge. By trying to inflate an issue that meant little in Caerphilly, Powell exposed the Reform offer as inauthentic next to Lindsay Whittle’s local expertise and reputation.

Nationalism, especially the British variant, needs flags, martial rhetoric, and fear of an external enemy. Localism just requires you to know which roads need fixing and how many SEN places are available in the area – you know, stuff that actually exists.

The contrast between the consistent, rooted, and believable Lindsay Whittle, and whatever it is Robert Jenrick is trying to sell tells the story of Reform’s fortunes to come in Wales.

Still without a Welsh leader, or candidates announced, the party is leaking like a sieve and betraying its fragility in the process. They might fall for it over the border, but not here.