This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
A year ago I wrote here that what mattered for the Right was who got blamed for the pending Tory defeat. I admit that predicting this looming election loss was foresight on the level of people who are smug about having foretold that a party led by Nigel Farage would split if it had two or more members. But how has the narrative-framing gone?
“The Tory party is going nowhere: it won’t be killed and it won’t be replaced” I wrote. Yet all this year personality after personality has slouched towards Tufton Street and said to me, “it’s done. They’re going to beat us at the next election”.
Cabinet members who had lost their seats, aspirant Tory MPs, think tankers, hacks, fellow-travellers, academics, sitting Tory MPs, employees of other magazines and websites, even some leadership contenders: all were sure that the Conservative party was already eclipsed, whatever it did, whoever led it.
Is it? Is the Tory Party doomed? Is an old song sung and (almost) over? Of course not. What does Toryism stand for? In a word, sin. By the lights of its believers, there is a recognition and revulsion that the fallen state of man exists, whilst by the habits of its leaders and foremost practitioners, there’s a steady and expert enjoyment of sin and its rewards.
There is no point in being dainty about this: the Tory party has won despite disappointing most of its most ardent followers. Some people will imply that it has won so often precisely because it has done this so much. But this arch cynicism lacks explanatory power since it can’t account for defeat.
Indeed, it’s the absurdity that led what we used to call Tory modernisers such as David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove, into claiming that defeats happened because leaders didn’t disappoint their followers enough. Which brings us to the forgotten man: Rishi Sunak.
Farage didn’t achieve Reform’s breakthrough in 2024. The Tories did
The greatest disappointment in the West was petted into the leadership, from that forging house of Tory failure, Policy Exchange, through to his disastrous and peevish premiership, all the way up to the moment where he “ragequit” office, petulantly incapable of continuing it a month longer.
Sunak took the most successful party in world history to its worst-ever general election defeat. Amazingly this has disappeared from view. So relieved was the Tory Party not to have ended up with fewer than a hundred seats, a great complacent sigh instantly went up. Coupled to this was the absolute certainty, deep down in its Tory hive mind that Nigel will take care of himself.
But to see Sunak’s epochal defeat in proper perspective is not just to thank all the people who took him there or cheered him on as he did it (Forsyth, Payne, Finkelstein, Gove, the list is endless even before you escape the pages of The Times), it’s to see the true scale of Farage’s supposed success too. Which is much less impressive than he thinks it is.
For Farage didn’t achieve Reform’s breakthrough in 2024. The Tories did. And they worked hard at that from pretty much the moment David Cameron became leader. Modernisation to suit the mores of Notting Hill, Boriswaves, Durhamgate, and, above all the other tawdry failure, a standard of living for many people in this country now more pitiful than that of former Soviet satellites, has left the Tory party ruined. Not beyond redemption, but absolutely and shatteringly ruined for now.
The idea that Reform’s general election result in 2024 was therefore due to the strategic genius of a man packing his bags to run off to American TV is absurd.
Farage is the beneficiary of just being there. He’s the Chauncey Gardiner of the British Right, endlessly saying vatic things which sound sulphurous to hysterical ears, but surprisingly often fade away to nothing when rough hands reach out to examine them.
Yet stay there dear Nigel does. He does so by the cunning device of endlessly lying. Rupert Lowe can hardly be pitied for not having noticed this before. He can have had no excuse. He’ll have seen it often enough for as long as he has known Farage. Lying is what he does. “Nigel always wins”, the UKIP saw went. “Nigel always lies” is closer to the truth.
Farage didn’t put rockets under UKIP in the first place, that was the happy accident of Robert Kilroy-Silk’s ejection from the BBC. All Farage does is impose a lead ceiling: thus far and no further.
Imagine for a moment you were Liz Truss. Betrayed and done in as Tory leader. Your seat lost more by Sunak even than by you. Might you, a former PM no less, be unhappy? But are you defecting to Reform, had such a thought ever crossed your mind? The chances are lower than they were. And from ex-PMs down, so the quality flees Farage.
The scorpion king is happy to rule a desert and frightened of real responsibility. Nigel Farage remains the main impediment to radical right-wing politics in this country.
