From 5d ago
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Is Farage
right to claim there is 20/25% chance he could become PM while Trump still
president?
Nigel
Farage, the Reform UK leader, thinks that his chances of becoming PM before
Donald Trump leaves the White House in January could be as high as 25%. He made
the comment in an interview with Dan Walker for 5 News being broadcast tonight.
Farage told Walker he did genuinely believe he could be the next PM. And this
is what he said when he was asked if that could happen during Trump’s
presidency.
Look, Labour
have got a whopping great big majority. The only thing that really brings an
early election is if we get an economic meltdown.
Now, that is
not impossible for two reasons. One, the level of indebtedness is worse than it
was in 2008 when we had the big meltdowns. And I think we’ve lived through
rocketing stock markets for years. That can’t go on.
But we have
a peculiar set of circumstances. In the UK, growth is dead, confidence has
disappeared. Here [in the US, where the interview was recorded] everyone’s
talking really bullishly about what’s going to happen. Somehow Rachel Reeves
and Keir Starmer have just killed any economic optimism of any kind at all.
So, you
could see a situation – we saw it with Liz Truss, actually, we saw what a run
on the markets can do to governments, we saw it back at Suez. In the end, it
was the markets that really brought Eden down more than anything else.
So, yeah,
it’s possible. I wouldn’t put it at more than 20%, 25%, but it’s possible.
(In the
transcript from 5 News it says “distrust”, not Liz Truss, but from the context
it is obvious that Farage said Liz Truss. Maybe she will send another lawyer’s
letter.)
Farage may
be rating his chances of becoming PM within the next four years a bit high, but
it would be foolish to think that it could not happen. Two leading political
commentators have recently written long Substack articles explaining how it
might. Peter Kellner, the former YouGov president, wrote a post before
Christmas headlined: Memo to Nigel – how you can become PM. After setting out a
strategy for Farage, Kellner said it had “an outside chance of working – no
more”. And Sam Freedman more recently wrote a post headlined: Will Reform kill
the Tory party? Here is an extract from his conclusion.
For Reform
to replace the Tories three things would need to happen. First they would need
to sustain their current momentum well into 2025, then there would need to be a
tipping point moment when donors, right-wing media and a number of Tory MPs
decided to shift support en masse, and then they would have to win more seats
in the 2028/2029 election.
The first of
these seems fairly likely. The enthusiasm of Reform’s voter base, the weakness
of the Tory party, and the media need for narrative all point the same way. The
biggest barrier is probably Farage’s ability to manage the negative
associations caused by Musk (who is not at all popular in the UK).
The second
is much less likely and a prerequisite for the third. My guess is it would
require another botched Tory leadership election that led to a major split in
the parliamentary party and other supporters to collectively give up. We’re
much closer to this scenario than at any point in history but it’s still hard
to trigger, given historic and emotional attachments to the Conservative party.
But Freedman
also argued that, under first past the post, two big parties with similar views
could not survive alongside each other forever because “a ‘winner takes all’
system … will always end with one party being crushed or a merger”. He went on:
It may take
a long time but if - and it is a big if - Reform remain a major player in
British politics, under the voting system we have, it will ultimately lead to
the end of the Tory party as we know it.
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