As the Reform leader surges in popularity, Fleet Street Fox says his infantile thinking and creepy menace make him a terrible candidate for Prime Minister
Imagine, if you will, a petite-but-strangely-charming thing whose only purpose appears to be taking your money.
It seems harmless, even endearing in a bug-eyed sort of a way, and has lots of fans. But they are rather unhinged, obsessed, perhaps even a tiny bit ill in the brain. If this thing is hard to find, they only want it more.
But underneath the folksiness is an air of menace. There are unsettling teeth, suggestions of being demonic, even evil. It’s a cross between Chucky and a Care Bear, and it’s creepy enough to give a fit of the vapours to anyone of a sensitive disposition.
There is little in the above description that has not been applied to both Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and the weirdo K-Pop key ring toy Labubu. They both come with a whole gang of Monsters. If you had one in sequins you could call it Andrea Jenkyns, and Santa Claus would have to start making clones.
As Labour bumps along the bottom of the political pork barrel, Reform is doing deals in return for votes. It’s doing deals with Tories, failed MPs, former Brexit MEPs, party grass roots and disaffected Labour voters. It’s burning up the airwaves with GB News, it’s cutting a rug with Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency nerdnazis, it’s releasing a new scandal almost every week.
In the absence of a functioning Opposition, a party with just 5 MPs – or it could be down to 4 again by the end of this column – is walking and talking like it believes it’s the next party of government, and its leader definitely isn’t a hard-to-define fad who quite whenever things get difficult.
Here’s one tip for voters of all parties to remember: government is a rolling crisis. Politics isn’t experiencing a recent period of turmoil, due to Brexit, Trump, war and plague. It was ever thus, and the only difference is that now someone is live blogging it and there are populists in every nation happy to exploit any trending topic they can latch on to.
These crisis leeches are the ones who rush to provide comment, or video, or memes; they poke, enrage, divide. They swell from all the attention, and then people vote for them because they’re all anyone can see or hear. Then their countries collapse into permacrisis, because a) that’s all these segmented worms can create and b) they couldn’t run a tap. See Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in the US, Erdogan in Turkey: they appear because of crisis, they create more of it, and if they could actually fix any they would cease to exist.
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You wouldn’t leave Nigel Farage alone in the house, any more than you’d let Chucky mind the baby. The chances of the Gremlin from the Kremlin being invited over to play with the kitchen blender is simply too high. Just like a Labubu, Nigel’s hair seems standard-issue, the eyes a little too shiny, but there’s something really odd about the mouth. It’s too wide, like he eats hamsters sideways.
If a Labubu dared use its real voice, the gravelly tones would also sound like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. If it had any power, it would persuade children to put their fingers in pencil sharpeners in the same way Nigel persuaded a good chunk of the country to vote to amputate its own economy. If Labubus were political, you just know they’d appeal to latent racism, and that under their rule they would just make everything less sensible.
Take Nigel’s attitude to women. He is FOR mums protesting outside migrant hotels about the safety of their children, even when they contain mums who have come to Britain so their children are safe. He is FOR freedom of speech so long as it’s his, even as his security physically assault a female Mirror reporter and woman of colour for daring to ask a question about why he didn’t buy his own constituency house.
He and his chums think terrorists, barbarism, and a lack of human rights in other parts of the world are so awful that no-one suffering under them should come HERE; and in fact, everyone who is suffering them should stay THERE. Presumably, he thinks brown and Muslim people deserve to have what he insists no-one in Britain should have to experience. He certainly hasn’t suggested, when he says he’ll send Afghan women back to the Taliban, that they’ll be helped to overturn the murderous regime and rebuild their country. As he’d have to restore diplomatic relations and recognise their government in order to effect the returns, he’d only make it worse. Which, in 2025 Afghanistan, is going it some.
Both Nigel and Labubu have the same business model: a pyramid scheme with no actual ideas, no narrative, beyond their continued and increasing desirability. His political dominance – which we must now accept has been a clear decade of damaging populism that has produced massive constitutional changes without him ever setting foot in Downing Street – likewise relies on the worsening insanity of fans, the ability to infect others, and the inevitable circling of sharks who can see there’s a buck to be made from selling counterfeit Nigels in pubs.
Like a Labubu, Nigel has no particular constituency, except the one someone else has. He has other people to buy his houses, and thinks the business of being an MP is all about speaking in the Commons. Because he doesn’t get to do it much, he thinks he might as well not be there. For a man who bangs on so much about British values, he seems remarkably keen on abandoning local democracy and outsourcing human rights to the nearest group of brutal misogynists.
To his obsessive fans, he’s a badge of social acceptance. To everyone else, he looks like he’s about to start chewing the furniture. Keir Starmer isn’t as exciting, it’s true, but at least you know he’s not going to bite anyone or feed Vladimir Putin after midnight. You wouldn’t put a Labubu in charge of a spoon; please don’t give Nigel a country. You can’t say you weren’t warned.
