Britain’s mainstream media has shifted into attack mode against Brexit advocate Nigel Farage over the last week, desperate to stop him from achieving escape velocity in Thursday’s UK election.
The crux of this article is simple, so let me get it straight at the beginning: Britain’s traditional media loves Nigel Farage because they see him as a weapon to defeat their real enemy, the Conservative Party, which they have hated for years. Sure, you may hate the Conservative Party now, and rightly so. But for veteran reporters in most of the country’s news media, this has been an ambition since before many of us were born.
They see Farage, with whom they fundamentally disagree on every point, as a hot water tap that can be turned up and down as desired to undermine traditional rights.
At the start of this election cycle, Mr Farage faced perhaps the friendliest media environment of his lifetime. The metaphorical tap of granting him media exposure was turned on full blast, pouring boiling water over the Conservative Party’s head through weeks of largely uncritical coverage and endless (really endless) opinion polls showing his Reform UK on the rise. Perhaps ironically, recall Peter Hitchen’s observation that the real purpose of opinion polls is not to measure public opinion but to influence it.
Farage is a shrewd politician, arguably one of the most effective politicians in modern British history, he knows what is going on, he manipulates the media, he is happy to be used, and he must have thought he could get on escape velocity and get out of this unjust relationship before the mainstream media reacted, which they have certainly done now.
The question is whether he can break through the media stranglehold now that the taps have been actively and urgently turned off. Like the Democrats’ grassroots movement after this week’s debate, the British left isOh shitThis is the moment when they are desperately trying to put Mr Farage back into a box of their own making.
Don’t get me wrong: for Britain’s traditional media, Farage has now served his purpose: the Conservative party has been catastrophically damaged, firstly, by its own incompetence, and secondly, the damage is done by the media telling voters that it’s okay to vote for an alternative.
Consider Nigel Farage’s appearances on the BBC so far this term. Two weeks ago he was given complete freedom to speak in a seven-man debate. There is no doubt that he won that debate by a landslide. In fact, I’d argue it was more impressive than President Trump’s performance this week. For a start, Farage’s opponent in the ring was not asleep.
And after the BBC questioned Farage on a Friday night for the second week in a row, before suddenly switching to daytime broadcasting, the view of Mr Farage everywhere shifted from someone who could help deliver policy to one who was a dangerous extremist that the broadcaster had a responsibility to destroy.
There was surprisingly little policy talk in last night’s special BBC Question Time, and Mr Farage was left out for 30 minutes. repetition He was told by both the presenter and the studio audience that he was racist and should go. The evening began with presenter Fiona Bruce explaining the format to Mr Farage and telling him she wouldn’t interrupt him. There was some hope.
Farage and the Reform camp have, realistically, wasted a week of the campaign on the defensive. The attacks now are not new information – comments made by Farage in 2014, the lack of time to select a quality candidate in a surprise general election – the networks knew all this three weeks ago when they were in “use Farage” mode, it just wasn’t right.
Reform seems to require an urgent reset. In the final five days before the election we cannot afford to be constantly on the back foot, dancing to the tune of BBC and Channel 4 News.
Farage has made a big deal about his friendship with President Trump, so now is the time to follow his lead: When intense attention is on you, as it is now, go on the attack. Go wild. Starting off five days of speeches by defending a decade-old prediction that war was looming in Ukraine accomplishes nothing except continue to be a distraction and energy-sapping rhetoric.
This matters because this election is truly a make-or-break moment: If Farage can achieve escape velocity on Thursday and garner a parliamentary bloc big enough to be reckoned with, he’ll be on track to assemble his national team and prepare for the next election in 2029. The chance to fundamentally change the British political landscape really only comes around once a century, but somehow it’s come around twice for Farage.
Thanks to the instability of the UK’s electoral system, the outcome of this vote could put Labour, the big city middle class left party, in power and hold the small city middle class left party to account. That’s the Liberal Democrats, by the way. Don’t blame you if you’ve never heard of them. They’re a small and otherwise inconsequential party, but they campaign well and the stars are aligned to fill this vacancy, so it could be in their favour.
The Conservatives have already given up any claim to being the centre-right opposition in this country. They have done it themselves with a cynical calculation that is so effective that it is hard to believe it is not deliberate. This country needs an effective right-wing opposition. Mr Farage, your crown is in the gutter. Please, God, pick it up.
