Trump's Best British Pal Is Reshaping the Conservative Party

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When looked at in terms of current polling or political history, Nigel Farage's British election ultimatum to Boris Johnson looks a bit like a cocky Little League baseball team challenging the World Series-winning Nationals. The Brexit Party leader told the British prime minister on Friday that unless he repudiates his hard-won Brexit deal, he will face Farage candidates in all 650 constituencies around the U.K.

Farage might be Donald Trump's Best British Friend (the U.S. president called into his radio show for a 28-minute chinwag on Thursday), but who does he think he is? He has failed seven times to win a seat in Parliament; Johnson is the leader of the most electorally successful U.K. party in modern times. Farage's recently formed party has seen its poll ratings plummet since May's European election; Johnson's Conservatives enjoy a double-digit lead over their closest rivals, Labour. Farage says he wants Brexit; Johnson has actually negotiated a deal and is going to voters with it in hand.

Yet to dismiss Farage is to miss the enormous influence he has had on Brexit and indeed the Conservative Party, whether or not he manages to spoil Johnson's election chances on Dec. 12. Trump isn't wrong to see in Farage a kindred spirit who mobilized a force that transformed British politics.

It was Farage, then leader of the U.K. Independence Party, whose poll ratings pushed Johnson's predecessor David Cameron into calling the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. Cameron worried that his party would hemorrhage euroskeptic voters to UKIP and wanted to kill the threat. The gamble backfired and Britain's politics, its constitution and the United Kingdom itself, have been turned upside down.

Breaking what was an unusual few weeks of silence (unless you count his Fox News interviews), Farage laid out his strategy in central London on Friday. Johnson's deal was “not Brexit” and should be dropped immediately, he said. Instead the prime minister should prepare to leave the EU without a deal and pursue a trade agreement by July 1, 2020 or else adopt World Trade Organization tariff rules. In exchange he suggested a non-aggression pact between the two parties, in which the Brexit Party would restrict itself to contesting about 150 Brexit-voting Labour seats and to not diluting the Tory vote.

If Johnson refuses, Farage says his party is “fully funded” and would field candidates everywhere, stepping aside only where a local Conservative publicly denounces Johnson's “appalling surrender treaty.” He gave the Tories two weeks to take up the offer.

The threat won't exactly have Downing Street's officials quaking in their brogues, but it's not entirely idle either. There are enough three-way constituency races in the U.K. that a Brexit Party candidate could be a spoiler for Johnson by splitting the right-wing vote, as happened in a couple of recent by-elections.

Farage's judgment of Johnson's deal might not wash with Leave voters who are tired of Brexit and eager to move on. In a recent YouGov poll, two-thirds of Leave voters thought Parliament should accept Johnson's deal. Only 10% thought lawmakers should reject it. Moreover, Leave voters prefer Johnson's deal to Farage's no deal by 48% to 33%.

Still, six weeks is a long time in British politics. If Johnson refuses the pact, as surely he must, Farage says he'll spend the campaign peppering voters with all the reasons why the deal is a betrayal of Brexit. He'll be entitled to airtime under election broadcasting rules, so his campaign could sour opinion on the deal.

More important are the fine electoral calculations Johnson needs to make to secure a majority. Because of the almost certain loss of former Tory seats in remain-voting London, Scotland and the southwest of England, he needs to pick up at least 60 seats elsewhere to win a comfortable majority.

He is mining for those victories largely in the north of England, the former industrial heartlands of the Labour Party that have swung increasingly toward the kind of hard-right message peddled by Farage. This voter group is comprised largely of “traditional white working class Labour voters who will have much more conservative views on immigration, much more conservative views on law and order, probably much more conservative views on globalization and a multi-ethnic state,” noted former Conservative lawmaker Rory Stewart this week on the Talking Politics podcast.

This is why Johnson and the Tory party have been forced ever rightward, always aware of the danger of being outflanked by Farage and the need to make up for the loss of moderate remainers. In other words, Johnson's party is having to look a lot like Trump's Republicans, which explains why Conservative “one-nation” heavyweights like former Chancellors of the Exchequer Ken Clarke and Phillip Hammond are no longer welcome.

Farage is surely the most important British politician never to have been elected to the national parliament. Even if Johnson sees him off in December, his politics now shape the Conservative Party.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.