From Brexit to Coutts – has Nigel Farage become
Britain’s most influential politician?
Andrew
Anthony
For all his beer and blazers, his unerring talent is
for tapping into popular grievances
Sat 29 Jul
2023 18.01 BST
Who is the
most consequential British politician of the 21st century? Tony Blair? David
Cameron? Liz Truss? OK, the last one was a joke, but someone else who is also
widely regarded as a punchline has a strong claim to the title.
Whatever
one thinks of Nigel Farage, back in the news for bringing about the resignation
of NatWest’s chief executive Alison Rose and Coutts boss Peter Flavel, he has
been instrumental in changing Britain. Few observers would argue that his
campaign to remove the UK from the European Union has led to a beneficial
change, but almost everyone would agree that it’s been a profound one.
In Britain,
where the first-past-the-post voting system neuters small parties, single-issue
politics tends to be the preserve of eccentrics and obsessives, carrying about
the same parliamentary influence as David Icke or the Monster Raving Loony
party. The glaring exceptions are Farage’s Ukip and the Brexit party, which
between them helped deliver the harshest of Brexits.
An almost
anachronistically English figure with his beer and blazers, his Carry On
laughter and golf-club rhetoric, Farage is an easy man to underestimate. But,
as his biographer Michael Crick says, he is “one of the great communicators of
our age”.
A virtuoso
on the dog whistle, he is also a master of the tai chi strategy of using his
opponent’s strength to his own advantage. He rose by encouraging dissident
Tories to drag the party down to his level. Ukip was a crank outfit before he
took over in 2006 and reverted to one again the moment he left, following the
EU referendum, in 2016. But in between it was a crank outfit that got the
Tories to dance to Farage’s Little Englander tune, eventually securing the
referendum that his side won.
He is a gifted blamer of others: bureaucrats, the
establishment, immigrants, Tories, Labour, anyone and everyone
In the
aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, confidence in globalism and political
elites plummeted. Plenty of politicians on the left sought to capitalise on the
discontent, but it was Farage and wealthy backers like Arron Banks who saw the
opportunity for rightwing anti-elites populism.
Untainted
by political office – the only election Farage has ever managed to win,
ironically, is to the European parliament – he was free to play the
professional rabble-rouser or, as it’s also known, “man of the people”. He
excelled in the role because he is a gifted blamer of others: Europeans,
bureaucrats, the establishment, immigrants, Tories, Labour, anyone and
everyone.
As a serial
loser in British politics (he stood in seven constituency elections and lost
them all), what he’s never had to worry about is outcomes. His power has always
been at one remove, where responsibility rests with some fool who will sooner
or later be subject to Farage’s I’m-just-telling-it-like-it-is brand of scorn.
He even expressed disappointment with Brexit, as if its grey reality was not of
his making.
In this
respect, if no other, Farage is resolutely modern: a born disrupter, a habitual
fomenter of grievance with zero obligation to produce results. He is the
loudmouth curmudgeon, the carefree voice of old fogeyism, the bar-room bore who
thrives on the national stage.
But after
the grim spectacle of Brexit, and his proclaimed retirement from politics,
where could he go? Not to the House of Lords, because Boris Johnson, in jealous
protection of his own saviour myth, had no desire to honour his progenitor. So
the obvious answer was GB News, where rightwingers move to moan about the state
of the nation after so many years of rightwing government.
Condemned
to live among the undead with Dan Wootton and Eamonn Holmes, he was rescued
last month by Coutts. You don’t have to be a semiotician to see that the bank,
with a background in offshore tax avoidance, was guilty of virtue-signalling
when it closed his account because of his political beliefs. That error was
compounded by Rose briefing a BBC journalist with false information about
Farage.
He is not really a politician but a consummate
complainer, because his animating passion is to be against things
As a
consequence, the BBC was forced to apologise, Rose lost her job and Farage
found new purpose in his. He’s calling for the rest of the NatWest (of which
Coutts is a subsidiary) board to resign and wants to guarantee the right to
have a bank account. Some commentators wonder if this is the opening skirmish
in a battle to rein in the ESG (environmental, social and governance) movement
aimed at building sustainability and progressive values in corporations. For
the moment, Farage is maintaining his focus on matters of individual rights,
although he’s already calling it a “war on woke banks” – this weekend it emerged
that Britain’s newest “consumer champion” was launching a tool to help
consumers who believe they have been “debanked”.
What’s not
in doubt is that he is back in the headlines, and once more able to present
himself as the little guy taking on the establishment – Coutts, renowned for
its royal clients, is nothing if not a conspicuous emblem of elitism and
entitlement. It doesn’t matter that there is little the ex-public schoolboy,
one-time commodities trader and former Coutts client has in common with the
average person in the street. Nor is it much of hindrance to him that his
populist opinions are not that popular with the British public. The point is he
makes himself a kind of lightning rod for public disaffection. There remains a
huge reservoir of anger towards the banks, and he will know how to draw on it,
although the libertarian friend of hedge-fund owners is unlikely to push for
meaningful regulation in that regard.
In the end,
he is not really a politician but a consummate complainer, because his
animating passion is to be against things. It led to the event by which history
will remember him, Britain’s inglorious exit from the EU. But it’s essentially
a destructive talent. What replaces the targets he so vociferously attacks will
always be somebody else’s concern.
Andrew Anthony is an Observer columnist
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