Boris Johnson can’t deliver Brexit without me: Nigel Farage

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage is ready to do battle if Britain fails to leave the EU on time.

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage. Picture: Getty Images

Tomorrow Britain will have a new prime minister, and almost certainly one with a self-imposed mandate to deliver Brexit by Halloween.

Yet if he is to deliver Brexit at all, the odds are shortening that Brits will be heading back to the polls in a general election, perhaps even before this deadline.

“Oh, I am confident Brexit will happen, yes. But by October 31? I’m very sceptical indeed.” Nigel Farage, head of the Brexit Party and the man labelled the most dangerous man in Britain is battle-ready.

“Boris Johnson is going to win this contest, of that I think there’s very little doubt,” says Farage.

“He’s said that we’ll leave on October 31 — in fact he’s said all the things Theresa May said about March 29 — 108 times she said we were leaving on March 29 but we didn’t. Now there is more sincerity about Brexit with Boris than there is with May, but I do not see, given the current make-up of parliament, how he’s is going to be able to deliver it.”

He’s got a point. Farage is back in London after a making his uncomfortable presence felt back in the newly elected European parliament where the Brexit Party, ironically, is now the largest single party.

Incoming European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed Europe’s red line on Brexit: no renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement.

“I don’t see Brussels changing a single dot or comma,” Farage agrees. “That isn’t going to happen.

“The only way we can leave, cleanly, so we’re actually out of their institutions, is to leave on WTO terms, that’s the reality.”

Von der Leyen is, however, open to yet another extension. Her offer was booed by the Brexit Party.

Leaving on WTO terms is the no-deal option, and one that both Boris Johnson and his leadership rival Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt refuse to rule out.

But last Thursday, the no-deal option became far harder for a new PM to deliver. The British parliament, by a sizeable majority of 41 MPs, voted to stop the Prime Minister from proroguing, or shutting down parliament in the last two weeks of October.

Among those MPs are senior cabinet ministers, mostly Remainers, outraged at what they see as the nuclear no-deal option still on the table.

If the new PM backs no-deal in the run up to October 31, these rebels could tip the balance to create a vote of no confidence in him. It is risky because many Tory backbenchers could lose their seats in a general election that would surely follow.

Politicians are playing a gigantic game of chicken, but before Boris Johnson even has his feet under the desk at Number 10, some are plotting to do him in.

“Boris faces the most enormous challenge. Either he says, well, I’ll just break my promise and we’ll kick the can down the road for a further six months — but if he does that then he risks electoral oblivion for the Conservative Party — or what he does is he goes for a big bold general election. But here’s the problem.

“Since you and I last spoke, a new party has come along. It’s called the Brexit Party, it won the European elections heavily, it’s still polling very high out there in the country and the only way Boris can win that election is he must come to some kind of accommodation with me and with the Brexit Party.”

Farage has his own problem. On the hustings Johnson has ruled out a deal with the Brexit Party on seats.

If BoJo could somehow deliver Brexit before a general election that would surely smash support for the Brexit Party.

Farage is not blinking. “I’ve said all along: if Boris wants to have a fight with me, then someone hold my jacket, I’ll have a punch-up with him any day you like. But if he does that, if he chooses to see me as a political enemy, he can’t win. So it’s up to him. If Brexit is not delivered on October 31 then I believe that Brexit would be the biggest party at the next general election. That’s how high the stakes are.”

For all the front, the fascinating question is how much power does Farage really have. From a standing start in November last year Farage, furious at the stalling of Brexit, created the Brexit Party. And it is his party. It is not structured like a political party at all, instead set up as a company in which Farage has a 60 per cent stake. “That’s why it works — decision making speed.”

Within six weeks of launching the party, Farage trounced both the Tories and Labour in the election for British MEPs in the European Parliament.

A clarity of message, brilliant marketing (right down to the Dad’s Army arrow party logo) and Farage’s use of social media was a game changer, much of it modelled on Italy’s Five Star Movement. “I watched everything that Grillo did with the Five Star Movement. I went five years ago to Milano. I watched what he was doing, I realised that is the politics of the future.”

Farage delights in milking the bile of the Brussels bear, calling out von der Leyen’s European Project views as a new communism for Europe. He laughs off Brussels criticism that the Brexit Party is the undemocratic organisation.

“Here’s the irony. We will become the most democratic party in the country, because what we’re going to do is put the big policy decisions out to our registered supporters and they will vote and decide policy online,” he says.

Yet for all the backing of millions of Brexit supporters, Farage still needs to convert that support into actual seats in a first past the post electoral system. In this, his former party UKIP failed dismally. Farage argues that the whole landscape has now changed in his favour.

“You look at the current opinion polls, between Labour and the Conservatives, they’re in the low 40s. The Brexit Party has taken a big chunk of the vote. It’s prompted an equal and opposite reaction in the rise of the Liberal Democrats. So we’ve now effectively got in our national opinion polls four parties all within a couple of pips of each other. We’re looking at ­completely different politics.”

Economic uncertainty still plagues Brexit. Last week the independent fiscal watchdog, the Office of Budget Responsibility said that a no-deal Brexit could mean a £30 billion ($53bn) a year hit to the country’s finances, assuming it would cause a recession.

Others warn a no deal could sink the pound, already hitting a 27-month low, to parity with the US dollar.

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt both refuse to rule out a no deal, but it is quite another thing for the no-deal threat to be put on the table when the new prime minister goes to Brussels. Farage pounces on last week’s confirmation from the EU side that in three years, Britain never used the threat as leverage.

“(Michel) Barnier, their chief negotiator, made it clear that Mrs May never ever threatened a ‘no deal’. She told the British public she would. But she never actually did. And what it means is that Mrs May openly lied to the British public and betrayed the result of that referendum.”

Would Boris Johnson be any different? “I don’t know any more than you do. We know what Boris is saying in order to get elected. We know that the result of the Brexit party and the European elections guaranteed him victory. If we get Brave Boris, Brave Boris goes to the House of Commons, faces them down, loses a motion of confidence, goes to the country, reaches a sensible accommodation with me, wins a massive majority and Brexit gets delivered.”

Before or after October 31?

“It needs to be before. It’s got be October 24, the Thursday before, that’s when it has got to be. But Boris blinks — and Boris could decide he’s not prepared to risk the premiership, to risk the very thing he’s wanted for 40 years.”

On the ground, it seems almost the entire country is musing whether Boris Johnson sees his finest hour as simply becoming prime minister or delivering Brexit. “I was told on my first day in politics there are two kinds of people in this game: those who want to be something and those who want to do something. We are going to find out, within the next fortnight, which one of those Boris is,” Farage says.

The art of the deal is so far missing from the British side, but the impact of US President Donald Trump in Brexit is yet another wild card.

Farage revels in the discomfort of the recent leak of top level advice from Sir Kim Darroch who was forced to resign as British ambassador in Washington, in part because Johnson refused to criticise the Trump tweet savaging the diplomat. The idea that Farage is closer to Trump than almost anyone else in London galls the Remain-leaning establishment even further. Farage teases when asked who should replace Sir Kim. “Well it should have been me from the start, shouldn’t it? It’s obvious. How can you have somebody like Sir Kim Darroch, a globalist, a supporter of the European Project, friends with the Clintons…”

The chief Brexiteer definitely sees a role for himself in Anglo-American relations but not as the new ambassador, despite Trump quipping at one stage that he would make a great choice.

“Right now, even if I was offered it, I couldn’t accept it, because it would look like I’d been bought off, it would look like I’d run away from the battlefield when actually, this whole Brexit thing is coming to a head.”

Unhappily for the establishment, Farage is also unlikely to be bought off with a peerage. And just for the record, even if and when Brexit is delivered, Farage sees unfinished business.

“I used to think for years just getting Brexit is all we needed. Now I realise Brexit is the beginning of what is needed. We need a political revolution in this country, our institutions, our election methods, our House of Lords.”

So he wouldn’t rule out being prime minister himself? “Who’s to say what the future holds, I’ve no idea, but what I do know is for this country to be fit for the 21st century in the global economy, we need radical change in this country and I’m going to try my best to deliver it.”

Ticky Fullerton is the business editor of Sky News and host of Business Weekend, on Sundays at 11am