Niggardly Nigel and the Centrist Swindle

or, A New Lowe for an Old Hack

The signs were always there, especially when Nigel Farage boasted for years about having defeated “the far-right” in Britain. But they became more obvious and cringeworthy in 2024 when his party Reform began openly - and proudly - kowtowing to ultra-establishment/leftist organisation Hope Not Hate when it demanded they drop candidates. In an act of stunning cuckservatism, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice even voiced gratitude to “various organisations and the media” for vetting candidates on the party’s behalf. This was of a piece with Farage’s previous project, the Brexit Party, which in 2019 ousted leader Catherine Blaiklock to appease HNH. In 2017, HNH had sarcastically “offered” to help his first big project, UKIP, to root out extremists. Then an acolyte of Farage revealed that, in fact, UKIP had been secretly collaborating with HNH since 2010.

The 2010s is one thing, but the 2020s is another. To my mind, HNH have never been in a weaker position, have never looked more pathetic and petty and irrelevant, than now. This is the most ridiculous time to be giving them credence. But, for a party like Reform which is ostensibly on the Right, no time is a good time to give HNH credence. They are your enemy! It is possible to learn from one’s enemy, but the idea that one should literally take his advice on battle tactics during the battle against him is absolutely ludicrous. HNH knew exactly what they were doing in identifying candidates for Reform to deselect. They were not seeking to make Reform more respectable - as its leaders pitifully interpreted their “advice” - but to castrate and demoralise the party by separating it from its radical base.

Radicalism has become a dirty word in Western politics in recent decades. In Britain this was started, not by Tony Blair in the 1990s as is commonly believed, but by Neil Kinnock in the 1980s when he disavowed Militant and “the Loony Left”. That was a strategic necessity for Kinnock in order to get the organised Left back under control and stop it haemorrhaging normie public support. But it was only a temporary measure. Actually from Tony Blair onwards, the disavowal of leftist radicalism reversed. Labour continued claiming to be centrist, but found new life by reuniting with their radical base, seeking its advice, celebrating it, funding it, professionalising it, and being inspired and energised by it.

While the Left claimed to be “reasonable” centrists, behind the scenes they were entertaining their radical base’s most extreme ideas - gay marriage, trans children, industrial mass immigration, “decolonising” education, etc. They transformed entire countries while claiming to be moderate.

New Labour was extremist politics masquerading as dull managerialism, and its result is a Britain that is febrile masquerading as stable. What is needed now, direly, is an equally radical response. Nothing less than radicalism can save White countries now. There is no “centrist” path back to sanity from where we are in 2025.

However, in line with post-1945 thinking, the Right “did the decent thing” and “took the respectable path”. They took this advice from the Left - their enemies - to heart, and were feverishly loyal to the centre ground, to the point of betraying all their principles (certainly those which pertained to culture rather than economics).

But the centre ground is not where politics finds new life, so what this shift has achieved is to make the Right rudderless and low-energy, dull, boring and bored. Its politicians are now incapable of the necessary thoughts, the necessary attitude. This explains the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016, and the AfD and Reform now: the mainstream Right has become unfit for purpose, so the public want to replace it.

This is the clarion call that Nigel Farage is ignoring. Several other politicians who have “made it”, such as Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib, heed the call. They probably fear it, but they understand that the status quo not only doesn’t work, but is destroying Britain. Farage thinks the call can be ignored, put in a box and locked away, swept under the carpet, and he can continue playing the game he has been playing for thirty years.

It is worth characterising that game. With the mainstream Right castrated, Farage has built his career on being just a tiny bit more right-wing than everyone else. This was easy, and relatively safe, because his rivals were so castrated that he never needed to be so extreme as to alienate “normies”. He was always operating within the frame of his enemies, just being a tiny bit more daring than anyone else. This made him, by default, the man the British public would flock to when they realised the state of things.

But his game required that the “hard limits” of politics remain hard. To be clear: Farage has relied on the frame imposed by his enemies for his very success. His problem today is that that frame is falling apart. The hard limits are dissolving. For him to now cling to the centre ground reveals what his game has been all along, and how disingenuous and shallow he as a man actually is.

But what really reveals it is his treatment of his colleagues. Being close to him, these people are more serious rivals to him than anyone in the mainstream Right. This is why he has a long history of betraying them. By venturing just a millimetre farther than him away from the centre ground, they show him up. This isn’t a danger until it is done by someone high-profile, because the gambit could put them ahead of him in popularity.

Farage has always maintained a “one-man show” with his projects - UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform. This has boosted his public profile and throttled those of his rivals. The resulting “messianic” quality has enabled him to oust people with little, if any, backlash.

But the case of Reform is different, because by that time Elon Musk had liberated Twitter, so Farage’s Reform rivals Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe were free not only to outshine him on that platform and thus come to approach him in popularity, but to raise hell when he ousted them. There was a backlash that he clearly wasn’t accustomed to. The attack on Lowe in particular was so obviously undeserved that people began asking questions. This brought renewed mention of all the previous rivals Farage has sabotaged, illuminating a very consistent pattern of behaviour.

Here is a (probably incomplete) alphabetical list of all the rivals Farage has screwed over:

• Annabelle Fuller

• Anne Marie Waters

• Ben Habib

• Catherine Blaiklock

• Craig MacKinley

• David Campbell Bannerman

• Douglas Carswell

• Gerard Batten

• Godfrey Bloom

• Henry Bolton

• Janice Atkinson

• Mark Reckless

• Marta Andreasen

• Michael Holmes

• Mike Nattrass

• Neil Hamilton

• Nick Griffin and the entire BNP

• Nikki Sinclair

• Patrick O’Flynn

• Paul Nuttall

• Richard North

• Richard Suchorzewski

• Robert Kilroy-Silk

• Rupert Lowe

• Steven Woolfe

• Suzanne Evans

• Tommy Robinson

• Trevor Colman

What all of these people have in common is that they were slightly farther to the Right than Farage. The same is true of the many Reform candidates he allowed Hope Not Hate to “deselect” in 2024:

• Andrew Raw

• Beau Dade

• Dan Tubbs

• Edward Oakenfull

• Ginny Ball

• Howard Cox

• Ian Gribbin

• Jonathan Kay

• Leslie Lilley

• Mick Greenhough

• Robert Lomas

Farage has been a master of political calculations, but in dealing with Rupert Lowe he fumbled the ball very badly indeed. Rather than simply oust him from the party, he chose to smear him as well. More incompetently still, he chose to smear him in multiple ways, which automatically looks suspicious; what are the odds that you suddenly become aware of many different problems with a colleague? Here are the allegations:

• bullying female staff

• physically threatening Reform chairman Zia Yusuf (three months earlier!)

• physically threatening a Labour politician, Mike Kane (again, three months earlier!)

• not being a team player

• possibly having dementia

• wanting to replace Farage as leader (and potential Prime Minister)

• saying he would “slit the throat of the party”

• saying he would “destroy anyone who gets in my way”

Even more incompetently, Farage chose smears which could easily be refuted and even sounded improbable. Lowe is very clearly a good, honest and devoted man and everybody likes and trusts him, so this attempt to besmirch his character was doomed to fail.

Most stupidly of all, Farage chose to launch the attack right after Lowe had publicly criticised how the Reform Party was being run. This provided an obvious motivation for Farage’s malicious attack on him the very next day.

It was not enough to oust Lowe; Farage wanted to destroy him. This was not only revenge, but pour encourager les autres by making an example out of a good man. When Lowe defended himself, the girlfriend of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice was enlisted to mock him on TV as a “naive” “amateur”.

The whole thing was as disgraceful as it was transparent. It seems amazing that a shrewd operator like Farage would be this clumsy. But perhaps he is simply accustomed to being this brazen, since in the pre-Musk era he could get away with it?

All of this shines a light on what many of us have suspected about Farage for years, but been keen not to see: the man is a sociopath, a narcissist, a liar, a conman, a grifter, a traitor and a fraud. He doesn’t really care about the saving of Britain or the success of his party. If he did, he wouldn’t have done what he has done. There is, after all, no way that Reform is stronger without Rupert Lowe, one of its most popular and talented figures; it can only be weaker.

And here we get to something I have longed wanted to talk about, which is the phenomenon of a leader who doesn’t want his own project to succeed, because he is more rewarded by the social side of the project than by its actual purpose. I first saw this in an episode of Survivors, “Lights of London”, and it fascinated me because it was so “counter-intuitive”. But it makes sense. In real life, any social project very quickly becomes a hive of interactions, promises, dependencies, rivalries, alliances, deals, betrayals… in a word, dramas. It is a soap opera, whether it be a corporate boardroom, a factory canteen, a theatrical company, a driving school, a college staffroom, an army barracks, a film production, a cruise ship, or a political party. The people who fare best in “social” projects are often not the ones who are most talented or devoted to the project’s goal, but the ones who are most socially adept or ruthless.

We have now seen, in full public view, just how ruthless Nigel Farage is. It illuminates what he has really been “about” all along. I don’t doubt that he wanted Brexit, but I think he wanted even more to be “the man who achieved Brexit”. He didn’t want to toe the line in a political party, he wanted to be an enfant terrible - but not too terrible. He wanted, above all, to be “the main man”.

With Brexit achieved, we see that he will not entertain any ideas that would lead him farther away from the much-vaunted “centre ground”. He has bought the Left’s lie that here, and only here, is where success can be found, and he wants it more than he wants anything else. This is why, after years of posing as the great hope for patriots and nationalists, he is gravitating towards the milquetoast centre, making Reform indistinguishable from the Conservative Party. Having defeated the mainstream at his game, he now wants to defeat them at their game, by being even more centrist than them. He will have “success” even if it means betraying every principle he has espoused for the last thirty years. As for Britain, it can burn.

That sounds extreme, but if Farage really wanted to save Britain, he wouldn’t be denuding the party - his very own party - of the men most able to save Britain. What we are seeing, in painful real-time, is a leader sabotaging his own project. He would rather be the king of a failure than the co-leader of a success.

And here we get to another thing I have long wanted to talk about: the phenomenon of a leader who deliberately surrounds himself with lessers so that his position cannot be threatened. It’s something I have seen in real life. The lessers invariably give the bad advice one would expect from them, and the leader feels obligated to follow it or at least pay lip service to it, otherwise they might walk out… so he ends up wrecking his own project, all because he couldn’t bring himself to trust men who were his equals. It’s the pathetic self-chosen failure of the man consumed by arrogance and insecurity.

The situation with Farage is not quite like that, though. With him, the lackeys he chooses are not lesser than him in ability (although they often are) but rather, equal to him in dishonesty. He wants to be surrounded by men who are as shallow as him, not by men who actually care about the project’s “purpose”. Men of conviction get in the way, because they want to do things which might drag the party away from the centre ground, and in Farage’s mind that is fatal. He might stay where he is, he might drift leftward, but he will never drift any further rightward.

Farage, while masquerading for decades as a right-wing radical, has in fact been utterly trapped in the Left’s frame, and he will now preserve that frame at all costs, since otherwise everyone will see that the frame is an illusion and he is useless, and then his career will be over. But that frame completely disallows the things that are necessary to save Britain. Men with more conviction than him realise this and want to shatter the frame. That is why he cannot allow such men to succeed, and that is why the sooner this fraud is ejected from Britain’s political landscape, the better.

The truth is that even a genius leader needs competent deputies, and a sensible one wants the best he can possibly find. And the truth is that in a collective project, a high tide raises all ships. When facing tremendous opposition as any party will that is seeking to rescue Britain, there is no time for backstabbing and sabotaging one’s colleagues. Any man who does that while knowing that his country is crumbling deserves all the contempt you can muster.

The centre ground was “viable” when everything was okay, but even then, it was an illusion used by the Left to destroy. Today, it is nobody’s home. It offers nothing but continued failure. If someone is intent on dwelling in that dead space, they must dwell there alone.

And in the end, Nigel Farage, like every sociopath, will be alone. Good riddance.