Farage, the maverick who inflamed UK’s Brexit vote, returns to haunt the right

“Thus far, it is the dullest, most boring election campaign we have ever seen in our lives. And it’s funny because the more the two big party leaders tried to be different, the more they actually sound the same,” declared the British anti-immigration populist Nigel Farage as he announced on Monday his intention to stand in the UK’s general election.

The 60-year-old anti-EU party leader has failed seven times to be elected to Britain’s Westminster parliament but his entry into the fray – only a week after he insisted he would not stand so he could help campaign for Donald Trump in the US – has dominated a so far lacklustre election campaign at the start of its second full week.

It is not certain Farage will be elected this time either, but the chief interest in his decision to return to lead Reform, his political vehicle, is the impact it will have on Britain’s ruling but faltering Conservatives. Under the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, they already appear to be heading for a heavy defeat at the hands of the left-leaning Labour opposition, led by Keir Starmer, when the election takes place on 4 July.

At a 40-minute press conference at the Glaziers Hall, a prestigious London venue close to the River Thames, Farage pursued an anti-establishment argument. He claimed Britain faced an “immigration election” – though he exaggerated the numbers coming in to settle, claiming that all those who entered the UK to work or study in the past year intended to remain permanently.

A week earlier, more controversially, Farage in a television interview had declared a “growing number” of young Muslims in the UK do not subscribe to an undefined set of British values. The conclusion was based on a single poll in April commissioned by a rightwing thinktank that highlighted that a quarter of Muslims surveyed believed Hamas had committed murder and rape in its deadly attack on Israel on 7 October.

Other polls of British Muslims, taken earlier this year and not referenced by Farage, report that 86% of respondents believe Britain is a good place to live when it comes to people having the chance to thrive.

In Britain, the Conservatives have been in power since 2010, but under Sunak, they trail Labour by 20 percentage points according to an average of the opinion polls. Translating that accurately into an election result is difficult, but one analysis, released on Monday an hour after Farage’s launch event by the researchers YouGov, suggests the rightwing party would win only 140 out of 650 parliamentary seats – its worst result since 1906.

And this does not take into account Farage’s personal entry into the election campaign. Despite his past electoral failures, Farage, ironically a former member of the European parliament, remains one of the UK’s best-known and polarising politicians, who came to the fore in the early 2010s. By then he was a persistent campaigner for Britain leaving the European Union – resulting, in the now popular shorthand, in Brexit.

While Trump was able to take over the Republicans in the US, Farage’s principal achievement was to exercise pressure on the Conservative party from outside. He helped force the former prime minister David Cameron to call a referendum on the UK’s EU membership, in the belief he would win it.

The Conservatives split over the issue and Cameron misjudged the public mood. Britain narrowly voted out in the summer of 2016, Cameron resigned, and the result was hailed by Trump as “a great victory” a few months before he won the US presidency.

After the Brexit vote, Farage languished, without a guiding cause. He became a presenter on the rightwing news channel GB News in 2021, at that time a media novelty in the UK, and periodically tried to ignite public concerns about migration into the UK via “small boats” across the Channel from France. But it was clear from his remarks over the past couple of days that he sees in the current election situation an opportunity to be near the centre of attention.

“Starmer has won this election,” Farage declared on Monday, as he suggested his Reform party, now polling about 11%, could overtake Sunak’s party on 22%. “I genuinely believe we can get more votes in this election than the Conservative party. They are on the verge of total collapse,” he said, repeatedly accusing the party of failing to reduce immigration to the UK. In other interviews on Tuesday he added that he could stage a reverse takeover of the Conservatives at some unspecified point in the years ahead.

The rhetoric is calibrated to attract publicity and rightwing votes, but the reality is not helped by Britain’s electoral system, based entirely on small single-member constituencies, which favours large well-established parties.

Farage’s plan is to run in Clacton, a modest seaside town in Essex, 55 miles north-east of London, one of the few places that has previously elected a member of parliament for one of his predecessor anti-EU parties. But the Conservative majority he has to overturn is a hefty 24,702. He got off to a shaky start on Tuesday when what appeared to be a banana milkshake was thrown over him on his first day of campaigning as he left a pub in the town.

Anthony Wells, head of European political and social research at YouGov, argues Farage’s move is all about last-minute timing. “Britons already knew Farage was the leader behind the scenes – the question is what is the short-term impact from the publicity boost from his announcement.

“Most likely it will prevent the Conservatives being able to take his votes, but there is a non-zero chance that if Sunak’s party continues to do badly, there could be a tipping point and Farage gets ahead.”