Farage will fall into the same trap as Boris Johnson

Farage’s populist insurgency will unravel, and it will bear the hallmarks of Johnson’s demise.

There are plenty of similarities between Nigel Farage, self-appointed “leader of the opposition”, and our venerable former prime minister Boris Johnson.

For starters, they are both smug, self-important, and immensely privileged.

We all know their backgrounds. Johnson studied at Eton before entering his natural habitat: the hedonism and debauchery of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.

Farage for his part didn’t go to university, but his education took place in the grand halls and on the long laws of Dulwich College in south London, while his debauchery manifested in the form of long boozy lunches in the City of London when he became a metals trader.

They are also both deeply unserious politicians, in many ways perfectly adapted to our fact-free age. Westminster hacks treat politics as a personality contest. The right to govern has been turned into a sport based on news value rather than competence. In this context, Johnson and Farage are both primed to succeed.

And, despite being drawn from the belly of the elite, they have both somehow managed to convince journalists, and a decent chunk of the electorate, that they are outsiders taking on ‘the establishment’.

I discuss this phenomenon at greater length in Bullingdon Club Britain, but essentially I think Johnson and Farage believe they have an inherent right to rule, or at least to be heard. Their privilege has bestowed them with the arrogance to believe they will always be listened to, regardless of how offensive or wrong they are.

A working class person, or someone from an equally disadvantaged background, knows they have a small margin of error in any profession, and especially in Westminster. If they put a foot wrong, their chances of success could evaporate. This creates politicians in the mould of Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and Gordon Brown: stiff, fearful, and careful. They can never be renegades when they are the bureaucracy in human form.

By contrast, Johnson and Farage can career wildly across the highway of British politics – causing endless pile-ups while the media gleefully records the wreckage. Liberated from the consequences of their own actions, they can speak honestly without fear of repercussion. They have a free-wheeling, maverick spirit that matches the public’s desire for a wrecking ball to bulldoze the political status quo.

However, from where I’m sitting, it seems inevitable that Farage will suffer the same fate as Johnson. They are beneficiaries of false advertising, who eventually become its victim.

That is because they eventually have to deliver on their populist promises. And while they’re willing to turn on their chameleon charm prior to entering office – happy to play the role of anti-establishment antagonist – their natural instincts take over in the corridors of power.

Johnson’s man-of-the-people mirage vanished quickly during the pandemic. As I and others exposed, his ministers handed out billions in public contracts to their friends and donors – deploying the old school tie elitism that characterised Johnson’s formative years.

“One rule for them, another for us” came to be the trademark of the Johnson years, as the former prime minister stubbornly refused to accept that he had done anything wrong in failing to police rolling COVID parties on Downing Street premises.

Johnson’s actions finally caught up with him.

The same will be true of Farage. As I wrote yesterday, he has little-to-no regard for probity or transparency. He is proudly funded by oligarchs, tax dodgers, and oil executives – and god knows what he’s promised them in return for their patronage.

There’s a good chance that a Farage-led administration – whether on a national, regional or local level – will be even more embroiled by corruption and scandal than Johnson’s rotten tenure.

And while Johnson tried (to the best of his limited ability) to enact some popular economic policies, Farage seems determined to pursue his extreme libertarian agenda to the bitter end.

For all of its flaws, Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ mission at least put the idea of regional inequality on the political agenda. We may end up craving the return of even this meagre political offering, when Farage takes his chainsaw to already-depleted local council budgets.

Johnson and Farage are cut from the same cloth. And, if Farage eventually wins meaningful political power, he will likely suffer the same fate.

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