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You’ll note Keir Starmer is in full bunker mode – and we’ll get to him – but after this Makerfield result, why isn’t Nigel Farage? Why isn’t Nigel ranting madly at his generals and refusing to admit that actually, everything that went wrong for Reform here flowed directly from his personal character, and is going to keep happening in one way or another because people don’t change. Nigel’s gonna Nigel.
Nobody fetishises plain speaking like Farage, so we owe it to him to honour that and observe that Reform really shat the bed. Makerfield is among the party’s top 10 target seats for a general election, and Reform strategists’ decision to field yet another inadequate liability, whose past social media activity they simply couldn’t be arsed checking, seems to have proved something of a turn-off – for example for women, who strangely didn’t feel minded to vote for someone who had said: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am.” Rob Kenyon will no doubt be back on his plumbing rounds next week. So, Makerfield ladies, make sure your husband’s home to be consulted as to whether you really want your sink unblocked. It’ll honestly be cheaper to replace it.
Meanwhile it would take a heart of stone not to cackle at the fact that Reform is now losing votes to an insurgent party to its right. The thing to remember about Restore is that it is a party that genuinely only exists because Nigel couldn’t handle some light strategic criticism from Rupert Lowe. Why? Because Nigel is, and always has been, a diva who has huge fallouts with colleagues and allies. Just can’t help himself. When Reform removed the whip from Lowe last year, some party mook too wet to put their name to the comment gibbered: “This is what happens when you mess with Nigel.” Counterpoint: the Makerfield result is what happens when you mess with Nigel. Try to think of it as a flow chart, where taking the “yes” fork on the box that reads “did you fail to bend the knee?” always, always leads to Nigel having a meltdown.
Furthermore, the vanishingly small combined tally for the Conservatives, Greens and Lib Dems suggests the Makerfield byelection was a truly great night for Anyone-But-Reform. Just as Own Goal inevitably became England’s top scorer, so Tactical Voting could become the leading political preference in the UK. God knows we don’t have a perfect electoral system, but it’s our electoral system. And despite masses of insultingly mendacious campaign leaflets from a number of the Makerfield players, voters who don’t love anyone are perfectly capable of working out who to vote for to keep out the ones they really hate. Who, rather often, are marching under Farage’s Reform banner. In some ways it’s poignant that Nigel sneers at people who lament polarisation, because as these results show, he’s getting really screwed by it. He’s unfortunately very polarising.
The other increasingly noticeable thing about Farage is that he is incredibly thin-skinned and can’t help showing it. Remember, he spent the first part of this campaign in sulky seclusion after people found out about him taking a totally normal personal gift of £5m from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire. When he finally emerged to talk about it, he couldn’t keep his nuclear irritation and affront under wraps. This is very Nigel. The commentator Dominic Lawson recently recalled Farage’s reaction to a mild joke at some Spectator awards last winter, describing his face turning white before he shouted: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Why do you keep fucking yourself, feels like the more salient question for Farage.
Anyway, let’s leave him there for now, and consider that the atmosphere in Starmer’s Downing Street bunker feels faintly delulu. A few days ago, Starmer graciously indicated that he was minded to give Andy Burnham a cabinet job. This felt a bit like Lord Cardigan saying he’d be happy to bestow the rank of half-colonel on the Russian commander 10 minutes before the charge of the light brigade. A very flattering offer, your lordship – but we have decided, on balance, to wait and see how your interesting military gambit plays out.
The sheer strength of Burnham’s victory suggests that options have evolved, as it were, and this morning you could hear several Burnham outriders breaking the glass on the fateful phrase “orderly and managed transition”. Oh God – PLEASE not “orderly transition”. How many times in the past decade have we heard the phrase “orderly transition”? I do not think these words mean what they think they mean. There’s absolutely nothing orderly about being on the brink of our seventh prime minister in 10 years. Let’s not kid ourselves – the mad bastards of our political class are at it again, and we are once more being assured that we will get not just a different prime minister, but a different kind of prime minister.
A word on that dream. Well, more of a roll call, really. Back in 2019, Boris Johnson promised to be “a different sort of prime minister”. A few years on, Rishi Sunak was explaining that he, too, would be a different kind of prime minister: “It doesn’t have to be this way. I won’t be this way.” Next up was Starmer’s regular declarations that he was “doing government differently”. So yes – we’ve been hurt before. But chalk up another one, because this morning allies of Burnham are explaining that he, too, will be a very different kind of prime minister. One that people don’t blame for the problems in their lives that are not being solved by politics? Good luck, as they say, with that.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
