Brexit has failed Britain, right? So why is Nigel Farage off the hook?

Reform Party leader Nigel Farage speaks to an audience at Clacton-on-Sea, a seat twice won by his former UKIP party. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

“Am I mad, in a coma or back in time? Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet.” So spoke Sam Tyler in the BBC series Life on Mars when, somehow, he was transported back to 1973. This week, the rest of us may have felt we had been shunted back to 2016, as David Cameron bickered with Nigel Farage.

“Inflammatory language and hopeless policy!” says Cameron. “Abusive!” says Farage. As Theresa May might have put it, “Nothing has changed.”

On Monday Farage held the manifesto launch for the latest party that exists to function as a sedan chair for his ego and ambition, Reform UK. On stage in Wales, he said – oh, never mind. You know what he said. You knew what he was going to say before he said it. Aloof establishment, bloated civil service, ordinary people of Britain neglected, time to sweep away the corrupt, complacent yadda yadda. He has said it before and he’ll say it again, and it’s incredibly hard to counter, mainly because it rests on unknowable, untestable claims about how different this country would be if only Farage and his chums had their way and – hang on.

It’s not untestable, is it? It literally happened. It’s still happening right now. In 2016 Farage wanted a thing and got it. He gave us Brexit. Remember Brexit? I’m sure it used to be important. “Mr Brexit!” says Donald Trump when he sees him, and it can’t be only because he struggles to remember his name.

So what I’m wondering is, why does nobody ask him about it? Why don’t they say, “Is this what you wanted, and if not, then why isn’t that your fault?” Because they don’t. When Farage was interviewed this week on BBC Today, he wasn’t asked about Brexit at all. He almost never is. And it drives me up the wall.

“Aha!” you might say, “but it’s not his version of Brexit, is it? And that’s the whole problem!” BZZZZT! WRONG!

The Brexit we have, the one eventually pushed through by Boris Johnson in 2020, came with Farage’s explicit endorsement. “The war is over,” he wrote. “We won.” Which, given it was also a war he arguably started, you might think ought to make him responsible for the subsequent peace.

It’s not, after all, as if the shape of this peace is still hard to discern. On latest figures, the Office for Budget Responsibility reckons that Brexit will diminish long-term productivity by 4 per cent and long-term imports and exports by 15 per cent. Another study earlier this year, by Cambridge Econometrics, suggested an overall cost so far of $267bn, rising to more than more than $572bn by 2035.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Farage, of course, would be bored by these numbers – bloody experts with their bloody numbers – but a further prediction is that Brexit is also expected to widen the gap between London and everywhere else. Bloomberg, which keeps track of these things, calculates it already has. I wonder how voters in, say, Clacton-on-Sea would feel if this were mentioned more? Cheery?

It is true, despite this, that British exports have gone up since Brexit, rather than down. The detail here, though, shouldn’t help him. By the end of last year, physical exports – stuff, goods, manufacturing – had fallen, really quite a lot, more than in any other G7 country, and remained at 2015 levels. The rise has been in services, such as finance, accounting, law, public relations and sundry consultancies. If this were better understood, Clacton’s many, many bankers, management consultants and corporate tax barristers would doubtless be delighted. Although voters outside those fields – and I don’t know the place well but God knows there must be some – perhaps not so much.

Then there’s the National Health Service, where the think tank Nuffield Trust blames Brexit for shortfalls not just among nurses but also among specialist doctors and even dentists.

Or there’s immigration generally, which is now comfortably three times higher than in 2016.

For Farage, this is obviously the big one, and he’s more strident about it than ever, speaking of “young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values” whenever he can. He’s also, though, the guy who stood there next to a huge poster of largely non-white migrants that said “Breaking Point” on it, and who insisted that Brexit was a sure-fire way to stop them coming in. Turns out not, eh?

Reform Party leader Nigel Farage. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Farage, of course, takes no responsibility for this.

“Brexit has failed,” he said last year, doing his special disappointed face at other people’s inability to make good on his promises, whether on immigration or exports or anything else. Is he responsible for nothing? Fundamentally, the guy offered Britain a particular future and was laugh­ably incorrect about how that future would pan out. In a sane world he’d be asked about nothing else.

That is not, though, the world we live in. A month ago, right before this election was called, my colleague on The Times, Daniel Finkelstein, wrote that there would be no meaningful debate about Brexit in a forthcoming vote because it simply didn’t suit either major party to talk about it. Dead right. Keir Starmer’s Labour seems to be operating under a philosophy of “this is all somebody else’s problem”, and no wonder, because it largely is.

For the Conservatives, meanwhile, Farage’s many failures have become their failures, too. From dog whistles they cannot disavow to unworkable policies that indeed haven’t worked, they flounder now in a mess of his making.

How strange, though, that Farage is still not deemed accountable for any of it. How can it be that, even after all we’ve been through, this most cynical of populists still gets to run almost unchecked on a platform that hurls expertise and systems entirely out of the window, in exchange for the thin, third-pint moans of a wrecker?

We’ve done this before. We’ve lived it for years and we know exactly where it goes. Which is nowhere. Why will nobody say so?

THE TIMES