What if Nigel Farage manages to destroy the Tory Party, but cannot replace it with anything better? This nasty outcome was predicted this week by Henry Hill of the Conservative Home website, and it is all too possible.
Most of us are now sick to the teeth of the Conservative Party, patriotic and slightly sensible in opposition; unpatriotic, politically correct and jaw-droppingly useless in office.
But this crumbling, rusted, gap-toothed political Maginot Line is now all that stands between us and the terrifying forces of modern Labour – taxes to make your wallet shrivel and your eyes water, borrowing guaranteed to bring ruin, Net Zero to make that ruin worse.
And of course a complete and utter failure (can it be accidental?) to reduce legal or illegal immigration.
Not to mention a large, slimy dollop of traditional Labour incompetence on top – you know, terrible schools, lots of strikes, jammed, shuddering public transport, absent police, pressure-cooker prisons and the constant danger of the IMF being called in.
You don’t even get what you’ve paid so much for.
Nobody understands better than I do that, if the Tory Party was a person, it would deserve to be made to stand in the pillory and be pelted for many hours with bad eggs, squidgy beetroots, Brussels sprouts (lots of those), expired tomatoes and old, cold porridge. And of course voting for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is a tempting way of subjecting it to just such enjoyable humiliation.
Many people, I know, picture in their minds the next general election night, as Tory after Tory is booted out of his or her seat and sent, sniffling, off the political stage for ever. But the joy of such a spectacle would not last.
The day after, it is far too likely that the Labour Party, the Corbyn Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Nationalists will survive in enough strength to ensure that His Majesty’s Government remains in the hands of the anti-British Left.
But the Tory Party is not a person. It feels no pain, it suffers no shame or remorse. Abuse it as much as you like, and you will not, by doing so, compel it to become what you want it to be. On the other hand, it is the only feeble obstacle to the forces of the active idiot Left: already in control of the law, the civil service, the NHS, the education system and the BBC.
Unless you can be sure you have a replacement ready and to hand, it might be worth waiting till you can build something better before hurling it into the wheelie-bin of history.
There isn’t much time. We have reached the first anniversary of Mr Farage’s single most effective few days of political life, beginning on July 30, 2024, when he suggested, oh so coyly, that the public might not be getting the full truth about the Southport killings.
He remarked: ‘I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it is a fair and legitimate question.’ And he added: ‘What I do know is that something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country.’
I asked at the time in these pages: ‘Is it conceivable that the suggestion of a police cover-up, made by a man of such standing, played some part in the idiotic, shameful scenes that have erupted on our streets since then?’ I still think it is an interesting question, given Mr Farage’s continued prominence in national politics.
Not long afterwards, Mr Farage said in a radio interview with the London station LBC that he did not apologise for words which some thought had fanned violent disorder. ‘I condemn all acts of political violence,’ he said, calling for those taking part in the disorder to stop.
From what we have since learned about the Southport killer, it is plain that he is deranged, almost certainly by the marijuana use which is frighteningly common in our schools among pupils of his age. Photographs of him taken a few years apart, one at age 11 and one at 17 after his crime, show an almost diabolical decline from normality into insanity.
Hardly a week now goes by without a case in which a wild, crazy murder is committed by a person with a history of marijuana use. But our authorities are as obsessed with ‘terrorism’ as they are uninterested in the scourge of marijuana and the violent, disastrous mental illness with which it is increasingly strongly linked.
They were unable to fit the killer’s foaming gibberings into a pattern of Islamist terror. So they did nothing about him. Yet what now passes for Britain’s ‘Right-wing’ frantically want to believe that the Southport killer was an imported terrorist, and not what he actually is, another consequence of Britain’s official surrender to drugs. And when somebody really wants to believe something, an alternative explanation will infuriate him.
Mr Farage may also be personally unsympathetic to my speculation about the Southport atrocity. He has himself mused about marijuana decriminalisation. In one of the dimmest remarks he has ever made, on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on April 2, 2010, he said: ‘Let’s find out through a Royal Commission whether perhaps we should decriminalise drugs, whether we should license them, license the users, and sell them at Boots.’ Boots!
As far as I know he is still arguing that the mythical ‘war on drugs’ has been ‘lost’ and we should ‘regulate’ drugs in some way, a policy which has failed badly wherever it has been tried, as illegal gangs continue to sell their poisons, unregulated and untaxed.
Peer into Mr Farage’s depths and you find they are shallow. Dive or jump into them, hoping for a refreshing dip in original thinking, and you will break something when you hit the bottom. His thoughts on police, crime and prison are totally impractical and you can tell he really isn’t very interested.
Like other high-voltage political individuals with a strong following – Ken Livingstone comes to mind – he doesn’t know how to operate in the House of Commons.
Like his sort-of friend Donald Trump (has the President jilted Nigel in favour of his new pet Sir Keir Starmer?), Mr Farage is brilliant at surfing the crowds. He knows what slogans connect, what emotions to toy with, what brings the roars of applause and, increasingly, what brings in the votes. And until he played with fire after Southport a year ago, he knew where to stop.
He was very careful to keep clear of the violent, bigoted louts and hooligans who hang around the political edges of modern Britain. But then he stepped into the risky Badlands, presumably reckoning he would gain more than he lost.
So far, he has, but superstar leaders tend to have weak parties behind them. What sort of people will crowd around his banner?
He may well be able to wipe out much of what is left of the Tory Party, but in any voting system, he will struggle to secure a majority, and if he does, he will struggle even more to make a government out of it.
