Nigel Farage is angry. We know this, because yesterday he went to great lengths to tell us so. ‘So yes, you can ask: am I angry? Well, I’ve never been angrier in my life’, he raged in a recorded address to the nation from his Reform bunker.
The reason for his anger? A national newspaper had published a photo of a house he owns which is lived in by a family member.
A house, incidentally, that Farage himself had happily posed in front of for photographs previously. And a broadcast journalist had knocked on the door of a family member whilst apparently trying to inquire about his whereabouts.
He is also furious at the fact that he was being asked questions about his personal finances. ‘Making money is not a crime,’ he insisted furiously. ‘The really big question that I want to pose is: Do we want leaders that know how to make money? Do we want leaders who have run businesses, employed people and understand how the world works?’
To which the answer from most reasonable people would be ‘yes’. But that’s not the issue Reform’s leader keeps dodging. He isn’t currently under investigation by parliament’s sleaze watchdog for making an honest living.
He’s under investigation for accepting a staggering £5million gift from a mysterious British-Thai sugar daddy, not declaring it, then telling the voters legitimate questions about what he himself boasted was ‘a lottery win’, were ‘none of their business’. He’s also facing separate questions over accepting staff, security and a flat near Buckingham Palace from an acquaintance called George Cottrell (aka ‘Posh George’), who is a convicted fraudster, and recently published a book titled How To Launder Money. ‘I have not broken the law in any way at all’, Farage furiously declared. No, but some of his closest allies have.
We know too that Nigel Farage is scared. Scared for his own safety. ‘I am the most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician of modern times’, he claimed. This was why he needed millions of pounds for his personal security. He used the example of an occasion when his car was surrounded and ‘written off’ by a hostile mob.
Though in the midst of his justifiable anger at this appalling incident, he seems to have forgotten that two of his parliamentary colleagues – Jo Cox and David Amess – were murdered during the course of their public duties.
Nigel Farage’s statement was about one thing: Nigel Farage, writes Dan Hodges
And that, in a nutshell, was the problem with yesterday’s piece of political street theatre.
Nigel Farage claimed his decision to give up his Clacton seat and call a by-election, in which he will stand, was all about David fronting up to the establishment Goliath. A fresh mandate would leave him free to finish his populist revolution, he insisted.
But it wasn’t really about any of those things.
Nigel Farage’s statement was about one thing. Nigel Farage.
Or, to be more accurate, someone who currently calls himself Nigel Farage. Because the self-pitying, evasive and frankly boorish figure we saw yesterday was a pale shadow of the engaging, irreverent swashbuckler who has spent the past decade cutting a swathe through the British political elite.
His speech could have very simply been boiled down to two words. ‘Poor me.’ Everyone was out to get him. The parliamentary standards commissioner. Left-wing thugs. The editor of The Times. In Farage’s eyes, just about everyone in British politics is to blame for his political woes, other than him.
Yes, his tightly controlled and choreographed media appearance will inevitably garner rave reviews amongst his social media cheerleaders.
He will inevitably be re-elected in what is effectively the safest Reform seat in the entire country, especially given the major parties will not be standing and his only ‘serious’ competition will be from the intergalactic space warrior, Count Binface.
But his victory will be a meaningless one. Because it will not address any of his or Reform’s basic structural problems.
Through his infatuation with wealthy ex-lags and shadowy foreign crypto-billionaires, Farage now appears to be in politics primarily for himself, rather than any of the causes he used to so boldly champion.
His regurgitation of cliched anti-Press tropes to try to deflect from legitimate scrutiny simply reinforces the impression he has something to hide. And his increasingly tired rhetoric and demeanour is rapidly propelling Kemi Badenoch into pole position as the standard-bearer of the insurgent Right.
Which is why Farage’s attempt to deflect from all of this by using the voters of Clacton as his human shield is doomed to fail. The British people will look at the man taking his ego for a spin along the east coast, compare it to the one who fought so tirelessly and tenaciously to free his country from the tentacles of Brussels, and ask each other: ‘Who is this imposter?’
Nigel Farage is meant to be a populist warrior. The embittered, cry-baby who hid behind his podium and his advisers yesterday and raged at the world is anything but. To use a phrase he and his supporters are very keen on, he has turned into British politics’ biggest ‘snowflake’. And the heat generated by his sleazy dealings and relationships is seeing him melt under the pressure.
There was one way Reform’s leader could have sought to transform his political fortunes yesterday: Come clean. Is the £5million gift for security, as initially claimed? Or something else, as he and his allies implied in a series of car crash interviews last week? What is the true nature of his relationship with ‘Posh’ George Cottrell? What other undisclosed gifts from mystery benefactors are floating around?
But he didn’t come clean.
Instead, he’s running away. Running away from the scrutiny. Running away from parliament’s sleaze watchdog. And hoping that amidst the circus of the upcoming by-election he’ll be able to slip away into the crowd.
He won’t. Because the British people will be able to spot him a mile off. They know what the real Nigel Farage looks like.
They can easily see through the doppelganger that stood before them yesterday. And they won’t accept any cheap imitations.
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