17 November 2016
Nigel Farage
Fascist, racist, self-publicist or voice of the people?
by Lynda Goetz
In an interview with Henry Mance, political correspondent of the FT, back in April, in the different world we inhabited before Brexit, Nigel Farage, leader of the populist party UKIP, apart from being true to form in consuming vast quantities of alcohol, provided some interesting insights into the sort of person he is. Now, I’ve never met the man; nor am I a member of or any sort of flag-bearer for UKIP, although I will confess to voting for the late James Goldsmith’s Referendum party in the 1997 election and to voting Leave on 23rd June – to the horror of most of my friends and two of my three children. Many of those friends remain horrified and still persist in referring to people who voted Leave as ‘politically naïve’, ‘ill-informed’, or more insultingly, ‘racist’; I, and many, many others who considered our vote very seriously, are none of those things and I am also of the distinctly-unfashionable view that Nigel Farage is not either. However, any mention of the man’s name and the vitriol seems to start flowing, particularly online, where endless irrational, sterile and circular arguments are traded along with irrelevant and often childish insults.
One quote from the Mance interview stood out for me; “I don’t want to be Enoch Powell, do I? I don’t want to be right, but get the politics of it badly wrong”. Looking at where this politician stands today, whatever one’s view of him, he surely cannot be said to have got the politics wrong. Leaving aside for now the question of his on/off leadership of UKIP and the fact that he has never been elected as an MP at Westminster, Nigel Farage has been an MEP since 1999 and in 2016 achieved what he set out to achieve some 20 years ago, namely a referendum on Europe, which, to the astonishment of many, gave the result he had campaigned for. He has, furthermore, had the political nous not to alienate a man who, against all the odds, the belief of the pundits and the establishment, is to become the forty-fifth president of the United States in the New Year; which is more than can be said for many of his detractors.
Reading his piece in The Telegraph on Monday, describing his meeting with Donald Trump, his boyish enthusiasm and disbelief at the situation in which he found himself shone through. He appeared thrilled in a very bouncy, ‘Tiggerish’ sort of way, to be invited up to The Donald’s opulent quarters; delighted at the anglophile nature of Trump’s team; impressed by his energy and at the same time, sadly ‘Eyoreish’ about ‘why the apparatchiks in No.10 continue to say negative things about me’ and ‘many senior figures in UKIP appeared to disown me’. He concludes that he would be ‘very happy to provide introductions and to start the necessary process of mending fences’.
This may sound egotistical and indeed arrogant, but he does have a point, surely? He has in an extraordinary way become very close to Trump since he joined forces with him at the rally in Mississippi and was referred to as ‘Mr Brexit’. Whilst Theresa May was only the ninth head of state to be called by Trump, Nigel Farage became the first foreign politician to talk to the president-elect in person, so he truly does appear to be in a position to be useful as some sort of emissary at the very least. Is he really so ‘poisonous’ that any contact with him is to be shrunk from and avoided? From the comments by various EU ministers and our own politicians, one would certainly get that impression. Perhaps those in power should take another, closer look at what has happened this year.
Iain Duncan-Smith called Nigel Farage’s trip to New York ‘an ego-trip – not a diplomatic one’ and claimed he was just trying ‘to get attention’. Well, that’s as may be, but he certainly gained that attention and maybe some of those ‘apparatchiks’ to whom Farage refers should perhaps pay some attention themselves to a politician who has, in 2016, outmanoeuvred them all.
