UKIP leader Nigel Farage bows out as post-Brexit divisions emerge

Nigel Farage after announcing that he was stepping down as UKIP leader.

British politics after the Brexit vote continues to rain down surprises on us. Since Boris Johnson withdrew from the Tory leadership race last week and Michael Gove entered it, Nigel Farage has resigned from the leadership of the United Kingdom Independence Party and upstart Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom has beaten Gove to challenge frontrunner (and Home Secretary) Theresa May for the jobs of Tory leader and prime minister.

Britain is therefore certain to have its second female prime minister when the Tory faithful in the country decide between Leadsom and May by September 9. That kind of thing used to be news; now we smile and move on.

So consider first the event that has actually occurred; the resignation of Farage, who at once was described as the most successful right-wing politician in Britain, or even in Europe, since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Call no man successful until he is dead, however (as the Chinese sage didn’t quite say.) Farage at 52 is a long way from being dead and the achievement of Brexit is not finally accomplished and still controversial. But he is certainly more successful than any other right-wing politician now around — in particular David Cameron, Johnson and Gove — and, whatever the future holds, his career to date has broken all rules and most records.

Farage started conventionally enough. He was privately edu­cated at Dulwich, went straight from school into the City (as a broker on the Metal Exchange), made some money, joined the Tory party and ran unsuccessfully for parliament.

But his mind, ambition and opinions were firmly Thatcherite and Eurosceptic when Margaret Thatcher had just been defenestrated and John Major’s Tory party had signed on to further EU integration. So Farage left the Tories, helped to found UKIP and in 2006 became its leader.

Not many people noticed; third parties have a dismal record in British politics. In the familiar summary, they sting and die.

But UKIP was available as a refuge for traditional Tories when Cameron embarked on a modernising program that emphasised environmentalism, foreign aid, a kind of cultural correctness and, above all, “not banging on about Europe”.

When they flocked to UKIP’s entrance, they found Farage there, glass of beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, pinstriped and welcoming, congenial, witty, apparently a typical saloon bar good fellow who stands his round.

But there was a sharp political mind behind the bonhomie. He saw what Cameron implicitly denied: that there was a very substantial bloc of British opinion that wanted to leave the EU and restore the UK as a self-governing democracy. He crafted a Eurosceptic political message to appeal to such voters.

Elected to the European parliament, he used it as a platform for this message, which promptly went viral via YouTube to all points of the compass. He thus discovered a second neglected constituency — blue-collar voters threatened by mass immi­gration and abandoned by New Labour — and crafted a message blending Europe and migration that resonated with them.

In all these activities Farage not only mounted strong, well-reasoned arguments (he is rarely worsted in debate) but he also addressed voters in simple, direct, unpatronising ways that other politicians seemingly have forgotten or never knew how to do. As a result Farage has made enemies, won elections and thrown British politics into convulsions. Socialists and conservatives hate him for the same reasons: he stole (patriotic) ideas and (tradition-minded) constituencies they had abandoned.

He then won elections with them, culminating in the Brexit referendum in which about 60 per cent of Tory voters and 40 per cent of Labourites voted for Leave against the advice of their leaderships. And the impact of that unexpected victory has thrown both parties into confusion, leaving Labour with an extreme leader few MPs will follow and forcing the Tories into a leadership election that is revealing new lines of division in their ranks.

It is at this moment of triumph, rare in politics, that Farage has returned to the comforts of private life. There is no cause to doubt the reasons he has given. He and his family have attracted venomous criticisms and occasional mob violence; he won’t miss that. He has achieved what he set out to do when he helped to found UKIP. He has a life outside politics: military history, travel, cricket, family. He can always return from the plough if Brexit runs into trouble.

And there is another possibility: will the convulsions of politics draw him back into the game?

The first such likely convulsion is that over the Tory leadership. Will it be a May-September wedding? (Sorry!) May starts out with a two-to-one favourability advantage among Tory party members over Leadsom, but the latter has momentum and freshness on her side. It is impossible to predict at this point who will emerge as the winner. Both will be compared with Thatcher; both with only some justice. It is as if each of them represents one half of Britain’s first female prime minister.

May presents herself as possessing Thatcher’s administrative stamina, getting things done with quiet, dull but reliable efficiency, a safe pair of hands at a time of economic and financial risk. That was certainly part of Thatcher’s cocktail of talents, but her caution was employed in the service of big ideas and bold ventures. It is hard to see even calculated risk-taking in May’s long record. In the recent brouhaha she first hinted Leave, then declared Remain, then went to ground.

Leadsom is harder to judge because we know less about her. She has the directness, the optimism, the fascination with big ideas and the enterprising outlook of Thatcher. She also has the greater resemblance to the young Thatcher physically.

But the bigger the decision, the more Thatcher examined it from every angle and took every sensible precaution before deciding her policy. Has Leadsom shown that same willingness to master a subject and to test her instincts against the best advice that was Thatcher’s almost daily exercise? Some rumours about her career in financial services suggest not. We shall have to use the next nine weeks to find out.

When Thatcher became leader, moreover, she did so (very guardedly) as the champion of one side in an emerging battle of ideas over economic policy between the “wets” and the “dries”.

May and Leadsom are today, however guardedly, the champions of two sides in the emerging post-Brexit division between soft and hard Brexiteers respectively. For practical purposes this division boils down to which policy has a higher priority: staying within the single market (soft) or ending free movement of labour (hard). But it is a dispute pregnant with further economic disagreements and political upheavals.

If May prevails, she probably will be disposed to accept a weak compromise on migration from Brussels designed to keep Britain Eurocentric. That would disappoint the hard Brexiteers.

More generally, however, it also would mean a damage limitation exercise, an unexciting policy with no bold ventures to develop new markets and new alliances beyond Europe — no financial deals with Singapore; no trade alliances with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others; no liberalised migration policy for students and other young people. Such an approach would win no new support for the Tories domestically. It even might draw Farage out of retirement in opposition to it and freeze divisions on the Right.

By contrast, if Leadsom prevails, she will become not only Tory leader and PM but also leader of the larger Brexiteer cause in British politics. It would be as if Farage, in resigning as leader of UKIP, had passed the baton of Brexit leadership to Leadsom rather than to whoever eventually succeeds him as leader of UKIP. (He already has tweeted his support for her in the Tory race.)

Some critics on the Left see this prospect as a drift towards a closed Little England. In fact it would imply foreign and trade policies that chose the “open seas” and the growing markets of Asia and the Americas over the narrower prospects of Little Europe. Leadsom, Johnson and Farage are all advocates of such openness. That in turn would open up avenues of change and realignment in British politics — notably the possibility of UKIP members returning to the Tory party as it abandoned the policies that drove them out (as Canadian conservatives reunited their own Right a decade ago.)

That surely would convulse UKIP and the Tories. If so, I doubt that Farage would be able to watch that struggle dispassionately from the sidelines.

John O’Sullivan is the editor of Quadrant and was a speechwriter for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.