Revolutionary who could split the Conservatives

SINGAPORE - HE started public life as an ordinary member of the Conservatives, the party which has ruled Britain for 120 out of the last 200 years. But Mr Nigel Farage could go down in history as the man who broke the Conservatives' historic hold on power.

For the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the movement he established two decades ago, hit the Conservatives hard at last week's British local elections and is also expected to have done well at the European Parliament ballots, which concluded yesterday. Few politicians have risen from the outer fringes of British politics to national stardom so quickly.

Like many revolutionaries, there was nothing in Mr Farage's beginning to mark him out as exceptional. Born into a stockbroker's family who lived in the green-leafed commuter belt around the British capital, Mr Farage went to a good fee-paying school but then decided that making money by following in his father's profession was preferable to getting a university degree.

Yet his life turned out to be spectacularly different. As a young man, he survived a horrible car crash. Later on, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer but defied the gloomy prognosis. And last year he underwent a major spine surgery to deal with the aftermath of a plane crash that nearly killed him in 2010.

None of this has ever daunted the 50-year-old who established UKIP in 1993 with the avowed objective of "restoring British sovereignty" by getting his country out of the European Union. To start with, he looked no different from the armies of aspiring politicians trying to exploit Britain's strong anti-European sentiments.

But unlike other eurosceptics who advocate complicated constitutional solutions to Britain's EU membership, Mr Farage's message is blunt: "Out of this nightmare." Mr Farage understood that such slogans are his best protection: they allow him to ignore tricky debates on how much the British economy may suffer as a result of leaving Europe.

He has also shrewdly avoided another trap into which other anti-Europeans fell: racism. While his key argument for leaving the EU is that it would allow Britain to reimpose immigration controls, he justifies this in social rather than nationalistic terms. The people who have borne the brunt of immigration, he said on the hustings last week, "are not the rich who get cheaper nannies and chauffeurs, but the working people, the poor".

The fact that Mr Farage himself is married to an immigrant from Germany is, apparently, no contradiction: he recently argued that, while newcomers from western Europe may just be acceptable, those from the eastern part of the continent are not.

He gets away with this stuff as he comes across as an amiable fellow, a bumbling middle-age man uninterested in great ideas. He eschews long speeches or standing on rally platforms because he knows that media photographers are invariably going to portray him as a rabble-rouser.

"A party of clowns and fruitcakes" is how British Prime Minister David Cameron once dismissed UKIP. Perhaps, but Mr Farage has encouraged a quarter of the British electorate to wave two fingers in the air at a British political system that was unresponsive, and which treated both the questions of immigration and of Europe as taboo topics.

Mr Farage claims to attract voters from all parties. "We reach the parts others don't," he jokes, echoing a famous local advertising slogan. Not true: a recent survey by YouGov, one of the Britain's leading pollsters, reveals that about two-thirds of UKIP's voters are previous Conservative supporters, a majority are male, 70 per cent are aged over 50, most are poorer than average Britons, and only 13 per cent of them have university degrees, half the average total for Britain's electorate.

In short, UKIP's profile is as narrowly defined as that of all other fringe parties.

Mr Farage plans to capitalise on his success by targeting winnable constituencies at next year's general elections. He knows he is unlikely to get many seats; the British electoral system is cruel to challengers. But he hopes that, if he deprives the Conservatives of a chance at retaining power, he will create a split in the Conservative Party.

And there are early indications that UKIP is also beginning to eat into the Labour Party's base in northern England, so the same tactic could be applied to Britain's centre-left as well.

Mr Farage acknowledges that his country's political system is well established, drawing on centuries of organisation and loyalty. Still, the man who has devoted his entire life trying to preserve a long-vanished "sovereign" Britain also remains a revolutionary: "A realignment of British politics is pending," he predicts.

This article was first published on May 26, 2014.
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