Nigel Farage: the last gasp of a desperate, discredited leader

Nigel Farage, who famously resigned and unresigned within days as party leader, is a born showman, but even his speech to the UKIP conference in Doncaster sounded like a broken record that’s seen better days.




There was the regaling of accomplishments past, the reference to his performance in long-forgotten debates with Nick Clegg (Who?), and then a fresh rehearsal of UKIP’s complaint that it was stitched up by the electoral system. Indeed, just to prove its point, UKIP invited the Electoral Reform Society’s Katie Ghose, a self-appointed rent-a-gob for anyone annoyed over anything to do with voting, to make a speech. Ghose thrilled the party with dreams that might have been, if only the public hadn’t thrown a referendum-shaped spanner in to the electoral works, and tried to prove her point with an eye-wateringly dreary demonstration of their preferred voting system, Single Transferrable Vote (STV). Faced with a sea of faces that were equally confused and bored, Ghose dismissed the fact that no-one understands the system even where it’s used by telling the conference that ‘voters vote and counters count.’ Well, that settles that then.

So anyway, back to Farage. Having complained about the electoral system and insisted that everything was out of UKIP's own control in that election, he ploughed on, oblivious to the irony of advocating deviation from a position agreed via referendum on one issue, and choosing to tell UKIP’s candidates that he isn’t bothered about them because there is another all-important referendum to worry about. That, of course, led to a barrage of abuse at Europhiles and UKIP detractors. But once Farage had finished slamming his opponents and recalling his past glories, we got to the substance of the speech. His message: UKIP is here to piggyback on anyone else’s efforts if they’re up for that. Their offer in return? Nigel Farage. Now who could resist? It seems that, in a show of unity that holds up if you exclude UKIP’s sole MP, UKIP will be backing Leave.eu. The time was that us Europhiles feared that UKIP itself would lead the calls for Britain to vote to leave the EU. Nigel Farage would be out in front leading the charge and, as a rising star of British politics, that was something to fear. But this rising star rose, fell and got up again ungraciously as damaged political goods. His desperate speech was, I’m afraid, the last gasp of a desperate, discredited leader – a man who, having failed himself, is now pimping himself out to anyone who wants to be his friend in the Eurosceptic arena. He will, of course, say all the right things: a “positive” campaign is needed, “We are good enough,” and so-on. But this disunited umbrella of Eurosceptics will remember that this is a man whose ugly rhetoric on immigration during the election campaign was too hard to stomach. They will remember that he resigned, rescinded that resignation and came back with so little credibility that even his senior team were openly talking him down. They will also remember that he allowed the referendum to dominate his party conference, and that hard-working UKIP candidates in all manner of elections were told, without apology, that they are so low in the pecking order that not only do their endeavours fall so far behind the referendum that they barely get a mention, but that they don’t even deserve to get highlighted more than a perpetual whinge about the electoral system. Poor them! Perhaps they are loyal foot soldiers, or perhaps they will come to show the big chief the same open contempt as Douglas Carswell, but as men and women with real-world experience who have committed themselves to a political cause, they certainly deserved better than to be openly dismissed as second fiddle to a campaign that UKIP isn’t even going to lead and where, at best, they can expect lukewarm enthusiasm if they jump on board.