Nigel Farage’s political career has always contained an amusing contradiction. He has presented himself as the great insurgent against Britain’s political establishment, yet the more seriously he is taken, the more conspicuously he seems to return to his natural habitat: political theatre, populist slogans and the increasingly uncomfortable role of national laughing stock.
The irony is that Mr Farage does not appear to understand the distinction between winning attention and winning authority. He has mastered the first. The second remains elusive.
For years, his great political gift was to make complicated frustrations sound wonderfully simple. Immigration became a number. Brussels became a villain. Britain’s economic difficulties became evidence of betrayal. The establishment, whatever it happened to mean on the particular afternoon, became the enemy. It was politics reduced to pub argument, television soundbite and flag-waving certainty.
There was something effective about it. Britain’s political class underestimated the appetite for such rhetoric. Mr Farage exploited that complacency brilliantly. He helped transform grievances that had once been treated as marginal into central questions of British politics.
But insurgents face an awkward problem when they begin approaching power: the jokes become responsibilities. A protest movement can promise everything. A government must decide what it can actually deliver.
That is where Mr Farage’s political persona begins to look rather less impressive. His greatest asset, his ability to turn political frustration into performance, is also his greatest weakness. Governing requires tedious things, budgets, trade-offs, institutions, negotiations, competence and the patience to explain why yesterday’s promise cannot survive contact with tomorrow’s arithmetic.
Populism dislikes arithmetic. It prefers moral certainty. Mr Farage has built much of his career on the idea that Britain’s problems are caused by politicians who are either incompetent, dishonest or insufficiently patriotic. There is a certain convenience in such a worldview. It eliminates the need to admit that some problems are genuinely difficult, that governments face constraints and that voters themselves sometimes demand contradictory things.
The trouble begins when the populist becomes the establishment he once mocked. A prime minister cannot forever campaign against the system. Eventually he becomes the system. The angry outsider becomes the man signing the papers. The television provocateur becomes responsible for the consequences of his own slogans.
That transition could be Mr Farage’s political Waterloo. His supporters may regard criticism as confirmation that the establishment fears him. But ridicule is more dangerous than hostility. A politician can survive being hated. It is harder to survive being regarded as unserious.
Britain has historically had a peculiar relationship with political absurdity. It can tolerate eccentricity, theatricality and even spectacular incompetence for surprisingly long periods. But British voters eventually ask the oldest political question of all: does this person actually know what he is doing?
Mr Farage’s challenge is therefore not simply to become prime minister. It is to convince a country accustomed to seeing him as the professional protester that he can become a professional statesman.
That requires more than changing the suit, the podium or the language. It requires changing the political product. The danger for Mr Farage is that he has spent so long perfecting the character of Nigel Farage that the character may now be more politically valuable than the man. He can fill a rally. He can dominate a television studio. He can produce an excellent headline.
But Downing Street is not a television studio. And Britain, after the applause has stopped, will still be waiting for the bills to be paid.
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