Nigel Farage: A politician who calls his supporters out onto the streets whenever things don’t go their way is not a politician worth listening to (©GETTY IMAGES/MATT CARDY)


It is now ten years since Nigel Farage was first elected UKIP leader. He may be the UK’s most divisive major political figure, but his decade at the top of the party cannot be described as anything other than a thumping success.

Despite the party’s ineptitude at converting votes into Members of Parliament, UKIP’s electoral record during the Farage era speaks for itself. In the 2005 general election, UKIP, led by the long-forgotten former Conservative MP Roger Knapman, won 605,000 votes (2.2 per cent). Just nine years later, they won the elections for the European Parliament. In the 2015 general election, some 3.9 million voters (12.7 per cent) plumped for Farage’s “people’s army”.

Of course, Farage can claim success in a deeper sense: the UK is on its way out of the EU. Seventeen million people voted to leave the EU on June 23 and while his role in winning a majority of voters around to the idea of leaving is moot, he is more responsible than anyone else for squeezing a referendum promise out of David Cameron in the first place. Without UKIP’s noisy ballot-box insurgency, there would not have been a referendum, and without Farage, things would have been decidedly less noisy.

Farage’s long anti-Brussels campaign was so effective because of his keen nose for the mood in parts of the country not reached by almost any other politicians. Beyond his hard-line Euroscepticism, Farage’s views are malleable and he has been able to fold various grievances into UKIP’s ideological mix. The most important ingredient he added was the anti-immigration sentiment that other parties were reluctant to capitalise on. When interviewed for Brexit Revolt, the book my Standpoint colleague Michael Mosbacher and I wrote about the referendum, he pointed out that immigration did not get a single mention in any of his campaign material before 2004. EU enlargement brought with it Eastern European immigration to Britain on a scale that the Labour government failed to anticipate. He added that he had spent the last ten years trying to make “immigration and EU membership synonymous”. It does not take much as the leader of a Eurosceptic party to make political gains from discontent at increased levels of immigration when the main direct cause of that surge is EU membership. (Farage was helped by the Cameron government, which, with the forceful encouragement of the then Home Secretary Theresa May, made and then repeated a pledge to cap net migration, something it could not have control over as long as the UK remained an EU member state.)