On Sunday night, Nigel Farage was buried alive with a writhing tangle of snakes, before losing an election. Or to put it another way, he now has a reasonable idea of what leading the modern Conservative party would be like. He took it all rather more calmly than Rishi Sunak does, so his stint in the I’m a Celebrity reality TV jungle probably did him no harm among the kind of Tory backbenchers feverish enough to be lobbying even at this 11th hour to replace Sunak either with Farage or a “dream ticket” [sic] pairing him with Boris Johnson. Admittedly, neither man is in parliament and only one is even a Tory, which says something about the talent currently on offer. But as one anonymous backbencher breezily told the Mail on Sunday, “there’s actually no rule that says the prime minister has to be an MP”.
To which the rest of the country can only pray: please, please, please let them try. Just see this wretched thing through to its natural conclusion, which is for the Conservative party to go full tonto and bury once and for all any question of it still being some kind of serious political operation. Farage has been effectively dictating Tory policy for years, so why not just cut out the middle man? Fold him into the sweaty embrace of the establishment he so brilliantly defined himself against, and see how being held actively responsible for everything that goes wrong works out for him. Those who remain of the old centre right Conservatives could finally summon the energy to leave and start something new. Meanwhile, the Labour party could quietly get on with running the country, possibly for more than one term depending on how long the resulting civil war lasts. Anything that stops the Conservatives focusing on why they’re actually losing, while allowing Labour to talk sympathetically about how you can’t get a GP appointment any more, works for Keir Starmer right now.
That Farage came third in the end has prompted much snarking about how he’s really no more popular than disgraced former health secretary Matt Hancock, who also took the I’m a Celebrity bronze. This is unfair, as Hancock was up against big names such as Boy George and royal in-law Mike Tindall, whereas Farage’s rivals were largely nonentities and even then he still only managed runner-up to the runner-up to some bloke off Made in Chelsea. But more importantly, in Westminster terms, it’s irrelevant.
The TikTok generation has gleefully discovered Farage via the show and found the very idea of him being on it funny enough to keep him in, which doesn’t mean in a million years they’d vote for him in a general election (or even in the final). But Farage has come out of it £1.5m better off and crucially having reminded non-GB News viewers that he exists, which for him is a win. (Getting media coverage is the existential challenge for smaller parties, and his ability to get himself talked about was always Farage’s greatest political asset; when he was still running Ukip, the party’s polling peaks and troughs closely tracked its leader’s ability to insert himself in the headlines). He got what he wanted from the deal, leaving ITV with serious questions to answer about obliging him. But his problem now is that the space in British politics he used to occupy has been filled by Richard Tice’s Reform party, busily mopping up votes from disillusioned 2019 Conservative voters. This could have been the moment Farage was squeezed out for good, but for the willingness of a few useful idiots to help him board a sinking Conservative ship – which would, at the rate they’re currently chewing through leaders, buy him all of about a year.
It’s unclear how many times exactly this party will have to depose a leader before reluctantly accepting that the leader may not actually be the problem. But three times in four years clearly isn’t enough for some on the Eurosceptic right who blame everyone but themselves for the mess they’ve made of the country. And since economic reality would not bend itself to accommodate their fantasies under a new leader any more than under his predecessors, it would be brave to bet against them eventually turning on Farage too. So far, Westminster speculation has focused on whether Sunak would be rash enough to let Farage join the Conservative party, given the likely consequences. Maybe the bigger question is whether Farage would be rash enough to accept.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
