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A former Conservative cabinet minister told me this week: “I think Reform will peak too early.” How prescient he seemed when, a few hours later, Rupert Lowe, one of the party’s five MPs, launched an attack on Nigel Farage, his leader – an attack that quickly escalated into Lowe being reported to the police and suspended from the party.
Other people saw the Reform implosion coming. Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer and columnist, wrote during the election campaign last year: “Nigel Farage should hope that he is the only Reform MP elected. Because if there are two or more of them, the Reform parliamentary party will split at some point during the next parliament. That is a firm prediction.”
It was a prediction based on a record of success limited by ego. Farage has often shone brightly but briefly, and broken everything he touches. He used Ukip to mobilise anti-EU sentiment, but the Leave campaign itself was run by others who feared his divisiveness.
He set up the Brexit Party as a private company, in order to avoid the infighting that destroyed Ukip – but it wasn’t the structure of the party that was the problem. The tensions were suppressed as long as Reform, the relabelled Brexit Party, was a success.
As a vehicle for humiliating the Conservative government, Reform succeeded. Farage gave voice to millions of voters who felt that Brexit had been betrayed, particularly by the quadrupling of immigration.
As Reform took a small lead in the opinion polls over both Labour and the Conservatives, Farage could ride over the cracks beneath his feet. The party was performing poorly in local council by-elections, despite the appointment of Zia Yusuf as chair, a business person charged with professionalising the party. But it seemed to be carrying all before it.
Keir Starmer paid Farage the compliment of treating him as the real leader of the opposition. The prime minister’s letter to cabinet ministers last month set out a restrictive approach to immigration that reflected the view of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, that Farage was the main threat to Labour at the next election.
Then Donald Trump turned on Volodymyr Zelensky. Reform’s advance was checked on two fronts. Farage’s admiration for Trump, who plumbed new depths of unpopularity in British opinion, became more of a liability – even though Farage’s instincts were good enough for him to avoid being painted as pro-Putin. Meanwhile, Starmer’s ratings were lifted by his calm and principled handling of the crisis, and Labour support rose in the opinion polls as a result.
This was the moment for the feud between Farage and Rupert Lowe to break out into the open. It had been simmering since the election. Lowe made an immediate impression in the House of Commons. He is a better parliamentary orator than Farage and a brilliant self-publicist. These qualities were noticed, including by Farage and his close circle.
As Lowe revealed yesterday, he felt he had been “frozen out of meetings [and] policy discussions” for many months, and had gone public on Thursday with his criticism of Farage as a “messiah” who is bad at delegating, only after “exhausting all other options, repeatedly”. He thinks that it is no coincidence that the allegations against him of bullying, which he denies, were made the next day.
He has continued to defend himself today, saying on Twitter: “I have been betrayed more times than I care to remember, but never by people I would have called friends.” And he invited Farage to dinner, so that they could “resolve this in a manner that our members, and the country, would expect.”
I doubt if that dinner is ever going to happen. I suspect that Lowe will fight Great Yarmouth as an independent at the next election, if he doesn’t stand down. Reform will continue to be the Great Nigel Farage Show. It has ceased to be a private company, but its members, who now hold the power, were drawn to the party by him and will continue to support him.
As such, it will always be subject to the limitations of a one-man band. Dreams of displacing the Tories as the largest opposition party at the next election depend on a level of organisation of which Farage and his loyalists have never been capable. Kemi Badenoch must be a little more cheerful today than she was at the start of the week.
However, the real beneficiaries of the Reform split are Starmer and McSweeney. Of course, the small boats are still coming, and the Ukraine war may turn out badly. Higher defence spending may impose burdens on the taxpayer that Farage, with his Trumpian isolationism, may be best placed to exploit.
Even so, Farage has shown that, for all his undoubted skills, his limitations are just as important. He will never be as effective a politician as he could be because he is not a team player. The chances of a two-term Labour government have increased, slightly but perceptibly.
