Nigel Farage: There is no turning back

Nigel Farage is the most consequential British politician of the last 25 years. Despite his many flaws, he remains the most fluent and effective communicator at Westminster and has a remarkable ability to read and then respond to the mood in those parts of the country far from London where people feel ignored and humiliated. Through relentless campaigning and indomitable self-confidence, he did more than any other politician to create the conditions for the 2016 Brexit referendum. He inspires loathing and adulation in equal measure. Labour and Conservative leaders come and go but Farage, as first leader of Ukip, then the Brexit Party and now Reform UK, keeps coming back for more.

As an investigative reporter, at various media outlets, John Sweeney has been pursuing his prey through the years with a kind of fanatical determination. He claims to have caused Farage “more misery than anyone else in 25 years in politics”, and his new book is part-biography and part-indictment. He considers Farage to be one of the three “Great Horsemen of the Twenty-First Century Apocalypse” alongside Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, but he also recognises his gifts, likening him to a “political Obi-Wan Kenobi, almost telepathically able to read the ideological force field around him”.

Sweeney is motivated by moral disgust and political animus. He stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate at the 2024 general election (well, someone had to) and is an ardent Remainer. He believes Brexit has been a catastrophe and, overall, blames Farage for it and for the wider degradation of our political discourse. He is horrified that he could be prime minister and wants to do something to stop him, hence this book. He has spoken to many of Farage’s fellow pupils at Dulwich College in the late 1970s, former political colleagues – Neil Hamilton, Godfrey Bloom, Alan Sked, Rupert Lowe - who uniformly loathe Farage having been slighted or marginalised by him, and even ex-lovers.

What emerges is a portrait of a man who is charismatic (Sweeney calls him a “natural”), capricious, careless, sometimes cruel, narcissistic and, in his younger years, racist. At school, according to numerous Dulwich old boys, Farage was an antisemite who had a dark fascination with fascism. His schoolboy racism has been widely discussed and yet reading here about what he is reported to have said and done – goose-steeping, hissing to imitate the sound of gas being released - is still shocking. “What made Farage different, was precisely this, that it wasn’t banter, it was something he’d thought about, something that stirred deep within himself, that informed his view of history and politics,” says Peter Ettedgui, a Dulwich old boy, who is Jewish.

The challenge for Sweeney and for Nick Tyrone, whose new book charts the rise of Reform, is that Farage, as Sweeney concedes, is such a protean, “fast-moving target”. To translate: stuff keeps happening.

Having won the Clacton by-election and returned to the Commons, Farage is under investigation from the parliamentary standards commissioner for receiving an undeclared gift of £5 million from Christopher Harbone, a crypto billionaire resident in Thailand. Farage's key aides, Dan Jukes and James Orr, have recently resigned over alleged illegal overseas funding after an undercover sting broadcast by Channel 4.

The investigative adage about following the money is the gift that keeps on giving as the Reform high command, one after another, are being exposed as a bunch of incompetent grifters. This is perhaps less surprising than it seems when one considers how rapidly the party, which is in effect a cult of personality centred on Farage, has grown since 2024. Farage is a “genius communicator”, Neil Hamilton, the former Conservative MP and Ukip insider, tells Sweeney, but has “no interest in organisational matters”. And it shows. Reform increasingly resembles less a government-in-waiting, as Tyrone and Sweeney would have it, than a shambolic outfit intent on self-destruction.

Self-referentiality is part of Sweeney’s energetic, gonzo style and the author is a central character in his own narrative as he recalls past investigations and references his drinking, lunching and other misadventures, as well as his “gammy leg”. It makes for an entertaining and disturbing read.

Like Sweeney, Tyrone is a self-described liberal centrist but, unlike him, he is on a political journey and is moving closer to Reform, and his book is an admirable attempt to understand the party and what motivates its supporters. But missing from his account – and from Sweeney’s as well – is a wider frame of political reference and deeper contextual analysis.

Reform UK is not a uniquely British aberration; it shares a family resemblance with many other anti-immigration nationalist populist parties and movements that have risen across Europe in response to the complacency and failures of the centre-right and centre-left. The important question, then, is why have so many voters become so distrustful of mainstream politics that they are prepared to support populist insurgents such as Reform, the Sweden Democrats, Rassemblement National, the Alternative for Germany, and the Brothers of Italy? Why has liberalism, as Patrick Deenan asked in his 2018 bestselling book, failed?

One way of answering these questions is to speak to voters, which is what Tyrone has done in his travels around the country over the last two years. He is at his most interesting when he is led by his reporting and listens without prejudice to Reform supporters’ stories of neglect and their frustrations about mass immigration, crumbling health services, punitive taxation and loss of community.

As a political commentator, however, Tyrone can be too absolutist and hyperbolic. He believes that both the Tory and Labour parties “have imploded, unable to manage the modern world”, and that, “unless something monumental happens between now and then, Reform will be victorious at the next election”. As for Kemi Badenoch, whose personal ratings are rising, she “still looks too nondescript in terms of personality and ideology, not to mention prone to huge gaffes, to be an effective leader”.

Both Tyrone and Sweeney are seeking to reveal something unknown: the “real” Farage, “the inside story” of the rise of Reform. But neither author has spoken to Farage himself for their books, and I am not convinced that either of them fully understands or succeeds in explaining what Farage has achieved.

For Sweeney, Farage sells “not snake oil but dark nostalgia. He trades futures in reversing time.” I don’t think that is quite right. Farage is not a throwback to the 1970s or indeed the Blackshirts of the 1930s, but a peculiarly modern phenomenon: a creation of the social media age who can simultaneously channel and contain the impulses of the radical and far right. He has become a tribune of disaffected working class and lower middle-class voters. Even if Farage resigned tomorrow, the anti-liberal forces he has unlocked will continue to shape British politics, in profound and unexpected ways, at a time of extraordinary volatility. There is no turning back.

The Real Nigel Farage – John Sweeney (Headline)

The Rise of Reform – Nick Tyrone (Forum)