What Nigel Farage learned from the American right

LONDON — “There he is. There’s my Nigel!” Donald Trump beamed as he welcomed one of the first visitors to his office after being elected U.S. president. 

That notorious Trump Tower meeting in November 2016 cemented a lasting alliance between two of the most recognizable and divisive figures in Western politics.

Trump hailed Nigel Farage — the noisy right-wing agitator of British politics — as “Mr. Brexit,” even touting him as a possible ambassador to the U.S.

The two men have long shared an affinity. Both are products of establishment elites who repositioned themselves as political outsiders. Both have upended received wisdom about the boundaries of respectable politics. And both have been staggeringly successful — despite the powerful forces massed against them.

“This is the single most resilient and brave person I have ever met!” a beaming Farage told Trump supporters at a 2020 re-election rally in Arizona, standing alongside the then-president.

Now, as an extraordinary U.K. election campaign nears its conclusion, Farage is tearing a page directly out of the Trump playbook. He aims to do nothing less than usurp the center-right Conservative Party, one of the oldest and most resilient building blocks of the British political system.

That notorious Trump Tower meeting in November 2016 cemented a lasting alliance. | Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

Farage tossed a hand grenade into the U.K. campaign last month when he announced he would stand for parliament, aiming to sap votes directly from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s beleaguered Tories.

Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system means a startup party like Farage’s Reform UK is unlikely to win more than a handful of parliamentary seats. However, surging in the polls, Farage is nevertheless positioning Reform UK as “the real opposition” to a future Labour government. (Labour is widely expected to win power on July 4.)

In this mission Farage has drawn inspiration not only from Trump, but also from a miscellany of radical right-wing forces in the United States and Canada. 

Even Farage’s party manifesto — launched last week — has an American flavor, rebranded as “a contract with the people.” The idea was lifted from former U.S. Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “contract with America.”

The admiration flows both ways. Gingrich said in a text message to POLITICO that he welcomed Farage’s appropriation — “Honored to have him use it” — and noted Reform UK is not the first overseas party to echo Gingrichian rhetoric.

“My favorite was a ‘contract with Mongolia’ in the 1990s,” Gingrich said.

Playing to the base

Farage, a Euroskeptic member of the European Parliament for 20 years prior to Brexit, was known for his rabble-rousing speeches long before Trump made his successful run for the White House. 

Farage even claims Trump “learned quite a lot from me,” and was “watching my speeches in the European Parliament for many years before he decided to run.”

Yet Farage has recently amped up aspects of his rhetoric which feel distinctively Trumpian, dismissing his opponents as doddery and tedious. Whereas Trump has mocked “Sleepy Joe,” Farage has taken to stifling a yawn whenever he refers to Labour Leader Keir Starmer. 

Raheem Kassam, a former aide to Farage who was in attendance at the Trump Tower summit of 2016 — and who now edits the right-wing news platform National Pulse — claimed the two leaders have learned much from one another. 

Farage, he said, has absorbed from Trump “the importance of production value, of scale — I think you saw that really deployed in the post-Brexit stuff, where Nigel was holding big rallies with pyrotechnics.”

In the other direction, Kassam said, “there are lots of people on the Trump campaign who looked at what Nigel was doing,” naming Trump aide Stephen Miller as one who drew on elements of Farage’s speeches.

Farage even claims Trump “learned quite a lot from me.” | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Trump’s close-knit circle views Farage as part of the former president’s outer orbit, a group of allies who are on podcasts or other public events and push Trump’s agenda and defend him in public.

In particular, Farage is a close ally of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who runs the War Room podcast and is currently facing a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.

Trump and Farage also have a shared past in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — the annual meeting of global right-wing campaigners — which Trump first addressed in 2011 and Farage in 2013. 

Farage struggled to read the room at his first outing, baffling the audience with invective about the European Union. But he has honed his message since, and by 2016 was promising “a comeback against the globalists and those who would wish to destroy everything that we have ever been.” He has since been a regular speaker, and in 2022 was seen at a private after-party at the conference in Dallas.

Farage has also grown close to another CPAC darling — former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. Farage has interviewed Ramaswamy on the British right-leaning outlet GB News and praised his ideas on X.

In Farage’s first major speech in Clacton, the seaside town in south-east England where he’s standing for parliament, he rehearsed several favorite touchstones of U.S. rhetoric which have been Ramaswamy’s stock-in-trade. 

He asked people to “commit” to the cause, and warned of British schools “poisoning young minds” and erasing British history. Ramaswamy has urged people to “pledge to the cause” and “revive civic education to teach kids about their own history — who we really are.”

Takeover tactics

In the past, Farage’s various right-wing political vehicles — first the UK Independence Party (UKIP), then the Brexit Party and now Reform UK — have succeeded in pulling the Tories into uncomfortable positions. But he has never threatened to overwhelm them until now. 

If Farage wins his first parliamentary seat on July 4, and Reform wins a sizeable portion of the popular vote, it could pave the way for a serious incursion into the Conservative Party.

Many observers believe the next Tory leader will have no choice but to try to unite the fractured British right, either by bringing the two parties together in coalition or by inviting Farage into the Tory party itself. Either way, Farage would suddenly have genuine clout within mainstream conservatism — and a chance to start permanently reshaping the British right.

Richard Johnson, senior lecturer in U.S. politics at Queen Mary University London, drew a clear parallel with Trump’s rapid cannibalization of the Republican Party. Reviled by many in the party when he first entered the race, Trump’s eventual emergence as the Republican candidate and victor have transformed the GOP into something entirely new.

“Farage can look at Trump and see someone who was sort of outside the center-right establishment, but then comes in, becomes the leader of a traditional center-right party, and then, in effect, reorient[s] that party in a very different direction,” Johnson said.

Johnson also noted a similar dynamic at work in both parties, where existing elected officials were largely skeptical of Trump and Farage —“but the grassroots and membership are much more open to these figures.”

Trump and Farage also have a shared past in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Indeed, so popular is Farage with grassroots Tory members that political insiders have predicted he would triumph if his name appeared on the ballot of a Conservative leadership contest, which is decided by the membership of the party from a shortlist of two.

Douglas Carswell, a former Tory MP for Clacton who defected to UKIP in 2014, now leads the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

He told POLITICO that Farage could take over the conservative movement in the U.K., but only due to “the failure of the Tory party” which, he said, had become “a vehicle for so many mediocrities.”

O, Canada

Farage’s takeover ambitions have another precedent in Canada’s Reform party, the upstart right-wing force that challenged and eventually eclipsed the country’s Conservatives 30 years ago.

Formed in the late 1980s, Reform won over many Conservative voters with a platform of tax cuts, more direct democracy in the form of referendums, and opposition to multiculturalism. 

Its zenith was the jaw-dropping 1993 election, in which Reform won 52 seats while Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservatives were reduced to a rump of just two. The defeat was the worst ever experienced by a major Western political party, and eventually forced the Conservatives to merge with their conquerors. 

Farage recently described the Canadian party’s influence on him as “huge, huge, huge,” and confirmed that its “reverse takeover” was exactly what he has in mind for the U.K.’s Conservatives, who according to polls are facing the worst rout in their 200-year history next week.

Carswell added that Sunak was becoming “the Kim Campbell of British politics.”

Ironically, Farage had initially decided to turn his back on U.K. politics this year and to take a job in American politics with a conservative grassroots organization. His grander ambition was a post in a possible second Trump administration next year.

But the rapid collapse of the U.K. Tories convinced him to change his mind.

“I’ve made a choice,” Farage told POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast earlier this month. “I believe I’m going to win. I’m not being complacent about it or arrogant about it — but if I do, I’ll obviously do far less in America.”

As Kassam put it: “His heart is still here, and he hates it when he’s not involved here. This is the perfect time to stick into the Tories.”

For Farage, the July 4 U.K. election is just the start.

Alex Burns and Alex Isenstadt in Washington, and Dan Bloom in London, provided additional reporting.