Is Nigel Farage growing up?

All foreign policy is domestic politics. Even here, even for us, even now, even over Ukraine. Starmer, politically, is having a good war. It’s good for him in that he’s getting the applause of the people he wants to hear it from. And, at its most basic level, the politics of NATO standing revealed as a pretence America is no longer strong enough to bluff (your take on the last fortnight may vary, but there’s mine) means — we’re talking less about home politics. Which is just brilliant for Labour, for obvious reasons. But one leader is having an even better failed proxy war and that’s Nigel Farage. Who has shown a quality he has never displayed before: self-restraint.

The displacement of domestic politics, for a bit, and a pale imitation of what “austerity” did for George Osborne, in the shape of what ‘Ukraine’ can now do as a catch-all excuse for Rachel Reeves, is what it is. And will last as long as it does. That’s just events. What should terrify every thinking Tory is how Farage responded to the stramash in the White House. For he could have been the Putin apologist everyone accuses him of being. Very pointedly he hasn’t been.

It’s not hard to see how Reform’s line on “another failed war” might have gone. “The Ukrainyguys are …” — UKIP’s leader at Strasbourg, our having stayed in the EU and him having stayed at Kitty O’Shea’s, would have said — “much smaller than the big nasty attacking them … they cannot get back what they have lost … just like last time! But with bounteous Western help, they could go on fighting because the Russians are crap … but look” — winks down the line to a favoured GBN presenter — “the new American lot have decided it’s not in their interests to keep cheaply bleeding the Russians out, by propping up Ukraine, at relatively little cost to ourselves. Think about that!

I assume they have decided this because they want to try and detach Russia eventually from China, into whose willing arms we drove Moscow. 

Look, Ukraine can’t keep going without western support: they’ll therefore have to cut a deal they — perfectly reasonably — hate. But look, look, Russia’s ambitions are limited. Ignore the “who funds you? Putler!” hysterics. They don’t believe that. And they can’t be stupid enough to believe that Russia thinks she has fought ‘a small victorious war’. They know they haven’t, even if the guys who were wrong about all the wars they had us lose this century don’t.

Russia’s pitiful performance in this war she started against Ukraine shows how wise the Americans were to stay out. Who wants a thousand Libyas, but this time with a thousand nuclear warheads? Not one British boot should go anywhere near these bums …”

It could have gone like that even now Nigel’s at Westminster. But it didn’t. Instead we got this:

I don’t want to wildly over-read but it would have been very, very easy for Farage to go full Trump on this, and play to an anti-Ukraine gallery which just doesn’t exist in the UK. But which palpably does in the States, and on the American television networks Farage likes appearing on. 

That he hasn’t, and is being nuanced, says two things. The first is, as has been evident for some time, Reform has got proper money for polling: that polling is being done: and it says, or will say, don’t get on the wrong side of the public’s natural bellicosity, nor their strong dislike of Trump, nor their natural preference for a bullied underdog. But the second and far more important thing it says is that the polling is being listened to.

This should be a fire alarm moment for the Tories still standing with Kemi Badenoch. It’s not because of the issue at hand. It’s because of what it says about Reform’s burgeoning professionalism and capacity, which is a simple but not inevitable consequence of money. Which they now have and the Tories do not. 

Yet none of this would matter if Farage’s lifelong self-indulgence was still in play. That it is not is properly extraordinary. Its absence is precisely what you should not expect of an older man set in his ways for whom things seem to be going his way. 

Obviously one swallow does not make a summer of prudent retreat in the Donbas. But notice the mistakes Farage has not made here. It will have been so tempting for him to self-righteously gloat that another fool war two-thousand miles away has hurt the people we claimed it was being waged for, and who are now to be abandoned by their posturing champions. But instead he’s being markedly less online than Badenoch has been in terms of the issues she hares after and poses she strikes.

What happened in the Oval Office was revolting. You can say that even if you think the course correction is necessary, and quite in keeping with pretty much all such past changes in policy by stronger states towards weaker ones. Trump does tend to drive people demented because of his amazing ability to illuminate their own cant. But come back to it — Farage didn’t wallow in, by his lights, being proven right. This is not the Nigel we have known.

Deprecating the possibility of change, almost regardless of the circumstances, Michel Houellebecq wrote, we’ll “hold on because there’s no other way, and because you get used to everything. No human force, not even fear, is stronger than habit.” I am surprised, to put it mildly, that ambition is stronger than habit. Tory MPs ought to be terrified.

The entitlement and lack of hunger that had them, Badenoch signally included, let Rishi Sunak take history’s most successful party to its worst ever defeat are vices which are very much still with us. That Nigel Farage has shed one of his is simply astonishing.

He could have misfired badly here, and alienated “Rupert Lowe” middle England by making America-brained noises about Ukraine (which foreign-debate-immersed mistakes shadow cabinet idiots are naturally already making in the opposite direction). But he has not. This is properly ominous for the Tories. It’s entirely in keeping with how they have got into this mess that they haven’t realised that yet.