To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed that Nigel Farage was planning to campaign for Trump in the US, so I didn’t care that he abruptly decided to leave my country and campaign for himself.
Nigel Farage on Monday announced that he would return to frontline British politics as leader of the Reform party and run for a seat in the election next month, scrapping his previously stated position of skipping the race in order to focus on supporting Donald Trump.
“I’ve changed my mind, it is allowed, you know!” Farage told a hastily arranged press conference. He said he will remain leader for the next five years in order to hold the expected Labour government to account.
Goodbye. Don’t care, you wanker. Fuck off already.
Understandably, though, his prospective constituents in Essex did have strong opinions about his reentry into their business.
Nigel Farage’s surprise campaign for the upcoming British general election got off to a sticky start Tuesday when someone chucked a milkshake in his face.
From this we get the only portrait of Nigel Farage I ever want to see.
Perfection.
Reform Party? Ross Perot must be spinning in his grave.
Say what you want about Ross but he helped make Bush Sr a one termer. He also sat on the board of NeXT which is one of those arcane fun facts that I cannot unread and will haunt me for the rest of my life.
NeXT played a circumstantial role in the emergence of the Web (not to be confused with the Internet). Some guy went from NeXT back to Apple and helped crater the popularity of the Blackberry.
I have to say this is a step above what we get from U.S. conservatives. They must for some unknown reason never admit that they were wrong or changed, no matter what absurd depths of cognitive dissonance this takes them to. For example, Trump’s current insistence that he never said “Lock her up.”
It should have been whitewash for the clown…
I dunno, I feel like a pie in the face would also make a good portrait of Farage. Sadly I couldn’t find an example.
Hey, if they can have an official portrait of their King in a red haze, why not one of Farage in pale-lime-green splatter?
He seems to have decided to do this very shortly after the 34 felony convictions.
My current working interpretation is that he hitched his wagon to Trump because he hoped to be well rewarded once Trump was Dictator for Life. The guilty verdicts persuaded him that Trump was unlikely to succeed, and therefore he could grift more effectively in the UK.
I await further information.
I wouldn’t be too sure he’s not going to go back to the US. He’s stood for election as an MP seven times thus far, and failed every single time.
sheila @ #6 — Perhaps Nigel realized that he couldn’t trust Trump. Trump has proven to be a very unreliable ally.
It’s perhaps flying under the radar for us here in the US, but it’s looking like the Labour party is poised to oust the Conservative party after 14 years. Per my partner, who is a serious Anglophile, Rishi is out. The NHS is in a shambles which actually affects people’s lives.
The gammon voters love him.
Pretty much everyone else finds him utterly repellent.
Like far too many people in politics, Farage will do whatever is best for Farage.
robro @ #8 The Conservatives are toast and the only real question is how badly they’ll lose.
After 14 years in power they can’t blame Gordon Brown anymore and everything going wrong, from the Brexit shambles to the state of the NHS, happened as a result of deliberate Tory policy (killing the NHS is a Tory priority so they can introduce a fully privatised health system like the one that works so well in the USA).
78 Tory MP’s are standing down and they have real problems finding people to stand such that it’s a running joke.
sheila @ #6 — Perhaps Nigel realized that he couldn’t trust Trump. Trump has proven to be a very unreliable ally.
I think that rather than this it is the question of what he can do. I don’t think that most potential American Trump voters would be swayed by an Englishman, particularly one that most of them have not heard of (not American, so correct me if I am wrong).
In the U.K. however the Tory party is falling apart, Farage knows how to speak to the electorate there. Everyone knows who he is and if many hate him, many revere him. He made Brexit happen but was not in power so can blame the resulting ill effects on the Tories. He was immediatley given the job of the head of the new Reform party when he said he would return.
In short the choice between being a very small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond.
Farage losing his seat as MEP is still the best consequence of Brexit in my book.
It also seems to me that Dirty Don’s star is fading. Plus he has a habit of throwing people who’ve worked for him under the bus.
Given the dire prospects for the Tories in next month’s election, I suspect Farage believes this is the best opportunity he’s ever going to get to becoming a major player in British right-wing politics, aiming to supplant the Conservative Party with his own brand of far right populism as leader of the Reform Party.
It’s a long shot, and I’m not sure he will have the patience he would need to complete what would likely be a multiyear project, but when you have a big ego yourself, I can imagine pandering to other right-wing leader’s massive ego gets old quickly enough.
@houseplant #11:
He wasn’t given it; he took it. He owns the Reform Party. The Reform UK Party is a private limited company whose majority shareholder is Nigel Farage, with its primary backer being the charisma-free multi-millionaire Richard Tice. Farage took over from Tice as leader just a few days ago: you can see the updated Companies House record for yourself (https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11694875).
It seems Tice only had a few more hours’ warning of the change of plan than did the rest of us, and was thus faced with the choice of either being humiliated by a self-centred gobshite or pulling out of the party (undermining his own election run for the strongly pro-Brexit seat of Boston with Skegness) by refusing to bankroll it any further.
All told, they’re such lovely people…
Maybe the world will get lucky and he will take a submarine trip to the titanic on his way back to the UK.
It’s the same old story, every time Brexit is secure he scuttles off to America to avoid any backlash. When there’s rumblings of reversing Brexit, he rushes back to take advantage of populist flag waving morons.
I hope he recruits Carl of Swindon to his new party. He did wonders for UKIP.
Yes, came to say what #14 said: the ‘Reform party’ is a properly incorporated grift owned and led by Farage.
No-one in the UK actually elects the blowhard. But if he takes the votes of deplorables from the Tories he may actually do something helpful.
Just remember that in a TV interview when he was asked “how do you pronounce your name” he answered “you pronounce like the place you park your car”.
As a (UK) Northerner, than means he just told me to pronounce it “Faridge”.
(Unless, of course, you can’t actually afford covered car storage, in which case you might be reduced to parking on your “Frive”. Or worse, on the “Freet”, “Foad” or if space is particularly tight, the “Favement”.)
I’m so tempted to change his Wikipedia entry – which makes fun reading – to “Nigel Farpark”.
Farage’s decision came very soon after Trump’s 34 convictions, which may have been a factor if he thinks (as I do) that it’s bad for Trump’s prospects in November. But it may also have been simply that he was averse to losing for the eighth time in a Westminster election, so didn’t risk becoming a candidate before, but now thinks he is likely to win – as is confirmed by polling in the constituency. Or he may have always intended to stand, relying on the UK media to make his “change of mind” a big story – as they did. But if he does win, and is not invited to join and head the remaining Tories (as some people have suggested, but I think is nonsense, no candidates for the leadership will want him interfering with their own ambitions), he’s likely to get bored within a couple of months, and ooze back to the USA; it’s impossible to imagine himdoing the daily work of a backbench MP, helping his constituents with their everyday problems.