First, Farage is too clever by half:|
It is a grim reflection that no contemporary British politician better understands the networks, dynamics and ever-changing rules of modern politics than Nigel Farage....He is as effective as he is awful....Farage, since becoming leader in 2006, had transformed his party [then UKIP] from a marginal club of cranks obsessed by national sovereignty and the minutiae of EU directives into a cultural movement united in its fixation with, and opposition to, immigration...In so doing, he wrote the horrible script for the 2016 referendum [In his secret Brexit-cave,no doubt], in which his Leave.EU campaign acted as the provisional wing of the pro-leave cause.
We see with the last sentences the real sting. He is clever but also poisonous,even worse than the former hate figures. They were misguided [no doubt led astray by fiendish Brexit planners] but still basically good chaps
While Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promised bounteous trade deals, an NHS spending bonanza and a fresh start for the liberated UK, Farage poured poison into political discourse – most notably with his vile poster showing a long queue of Syrian refugees under the slogan “breaking point”. It was seriously nasty, and it worked.
Let's get really personal now:
Who is this man? A talkshow host, a spiv, [a real generational insult, straight from the 1950s family breakfast table] a political groupie, a hanger-on – as likely to visit Julian Assange as Donald Trump. Watch his toe-curling performance talking to Steve Bannon in the recent documentary The Brink for a study in fidgeting awkwardness (Farage knows this is not a good look) mixed with irrepressible adulation (he hangs on Bannon’s every word).
Despite his old-fashioned spivvery, he is also somehow acquainted with more modern dark arts:
There are many facets to Farage’s success – he and many others of the populist right have been conspicuous beneficiaries of the 2008 financial crash. But his talent, I believe, lies in a deep, mostly instinctive grasp of political narrative and its operations in the digital era. Farage knows that simple stories, driven home relentlessly, can be spectacularly successful if they answer a collective yearning. Hence, his claim to have to “come out of semi-retirement”, answering a great historic calling, with a measure of reluctance but unfailing patriotism....This is, of course, ridiculous. Far from being “semi-retired”, Farage has been almost impossible to avoid since he stepped down as Ukip leader... the myth of the old soldier, returning from private life to perform one last service for England, is a good one – and he mobilises it well.
No less resonant (and pernicious) is the great Brexit betrayal myth that Farage, more than any other politician, has cultivated – and since before the referendum itself. ...it was always baked into Farage’s rhetoric that if the public voted to leave, the elite would seek to thwart their wishes. The truth, again, is quite otherwise. The political class has strained every tendon to find a way of delivering the undeliverable [incrediblethat anyone could think that]: of extracting the UK from a 46-year relationship without wrecking its prosperity, security and access to the wider world [Heroes!]
Inevitably, D'Ancona has encountered a book that must be popular in his circles:
As Mark Lilla argues in his book, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction: “Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes.” Such a figure is animated by “the militancy of his nostalgia”, which, Lilla suggests, makes him “distinctly modern”.
Mark Lilla is a liberal professor who has criticised identity politics (must make him an uncomfortable bedfellow) but has seemingly swerved from academic study for controversialism -- see the Graun piece about him.
Warming to his[?] theme, and perhaps echoing the popularity of apocalyptic warnings, D'Ancona prophesies a dark future:
Brexit has failed because the square-circling task is impossible. We must stay, or accept a grievous cost: that is the choice now. But Farage appeals to a primal social instinct: the sensation that the few are, yet again, cheating the many of their unsullied dream. It is not the dream that is at fault, you understand, but those who sabotage it. Just as Marxists insist true communism has never been tried, so Brexiteers declare that their simple plan has been wrecked by weaklings, quislings and fools.[More than a hint of popular accounts of the rise ofNazism too, of course]
It's been a conspiracy all along:
Brexit was designed by its most passionate supporters to fail: its purpose was to be betrayed, to enable a new movement to rise up, animated by fury and fear. Such a movement has now been born. It is already tearing the Conservative party to pieces. That, sad to say, is only the beginning of its plan.
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