Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane — “rather like a tractor” Farage thought — would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. “I just hope the plane doesn’t blow up and crash,” Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. “Oh, fuck!” said Farage.
He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life he’d escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.
Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke “fluent human”.
He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a “shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best”. He was right. At times he seemed to hold England’s spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.
Anger wasn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: “Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that.’” He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.
Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEP’s in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. “His ability to get by on a few hours’ sleep,” says Aaron Banks, “even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.”
It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farage’s gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was “not actually very confident. He’s quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.”
Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the public’s mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.
Crick’s biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesn’t tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesn’t have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? “Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union.” Well, duh.
Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; he’s now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.
Of all the 2010s populists — Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry — only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe