As Boris Johnson moves away from conservativism, Nigel Farage contemplates a return to politics

On Friday, January 7, 2022, Nigel Farage wrote an editorial for The Telegraph: ‘A revolt on the Right is brewing — and I’m ready to be part of it’.

Boris Johnson should be afraid, very afraid.

Nigel Farage’s hour-long shows on GB News, broadcast every Monday through Thursday have examined every failing from Boris’s Government. His audience ratings are excellent and I know people who will schedule their time in order to be able to watch it.

Farage is currently president of the Reform Party, which used to be the Brexit Party and, prior to that, UKIP. Businessman Richard Tice is the public face of the Reform Party.

This constant renaming is all a bit tiring, yet necessary.

In his editorial, Farage describes past general election campaigns and says that former Labour supporters have been voting either for his party or, most recently in 2019, for the Conservatives, therefore:

Once the generational link with the Labour Party was broken, switching became easy.

He then goes into a litany of Boris’s failings, which, despite what No. 10 thinks, are important to a sizeable number of people who voted Conservative in 2019, especially those in Red Wall constituencies that Labour lost that year (emphases mine):

People lent their vote to Johnson in 2019 to break the Brexit logjam and to take back control of our borders because the immigration issue still matters to them. Yet just two years on, the volume of illegal Channel crossings has enraged these voters. The North East now houses 17 times as many asylum seekers as the South East, according to the Migration Observatory. The impact of this is plain for all to see. As the council house waiting list lengthens, there is a growing feeling that Johnson told voters what they wanted to hear about “taking back control” without really meaning it.

Such perceptions are electorally disastrous for any prime minister. Yet there is potentially an even bigger problem on the horizon. This year’s massively increased gas and electricity bills are going to cause an enormous shock. Worse still, these large bills will coincide with tax rises. If Richard Tice can get the message through that 25 per cent of people’s electricity bills is spent on green subsidies – and that the 5 per cent VAT energy rate has, despite promises, not been removed – then Reform UK will have its big chance.

The revolt on the Right ended the premierships of David Cameron and Theresa May. I founded Reform UK out of the Brexit Party, which had done its job successfully. For now, I am the party’s president in a non-executive role, but I intend to increase the help that I’m giving to Richard Tice. Brexit has not been completed properly. The net zero strategy is placing our nation at a significant disadvantage. And the Channel crossings are humiliating Britain. 

I understand the disillusionment of Red Wall voters who thought Brexit would usher in a new politics. This has not happened. It’s just more of the same – a metropolitan Tory chumocracy totally detached from the rest of the country. If Johnson wakes up to this, he can still save himself. I suspect, however, that the revolt on the right will cause another prime ministerial casualty.

Despite the old-style Conservative ‘chumocracy’, many of the Red Wall Conservative MPs are cut from different cloth. Most of them grew up in humbler circumstances and feel conservative to the depths of their being. They are actively interested in their constituencies and their constituents.

That is something Conservative-voting defectors to Reform should consider.

I enjoy watching Nigel Farage. He always brings up some new fact of which I was unaware.

However, the Reform Party is a spoiler party. I will be furious if, when the next election comes, Reform start sapping votes from the Conservatives, thereby returning Red Wall seats to Labour.

I do wonder on what side of the fence Reform actually sits. They make legitimate points but they have no chance at all in winning a seat in Parliament.

The most we can hope for is that Farage gets under Boris’s skin so much that he will actually start acting like the Conservative Prime Minister most of England elected.