“THERE is something happening out there,” declared Nigel Farage this week as he finally gave in to either the angel or the devil on his shoulder telling him his country needed him.
If the hundreds-deep crowd he pulled on a cloudy Clacton seafront the next day is anything to go by, Nige could well be on to something.
The last time I heard someone say that exact phrase, Boris Johnson was swept back into Downing Street with an 80-seat majority a few weeks later — riding forth from the smouldering ruins of Labour’s electoral Red Wall.
The time before that, it was a week or so before the 2016 Brexit referendum when I ran into a pale-looking Labour MP who had just returned from their Northern seat, adamant that whatever the polls said, Leave were on course for victory.
Both were right, and both subsequent earthquakes had the blond bombshell as their protagonist.
But with Johnson turfed out, and choosing a sun lounger and the lucrative business circuit over riding to Rishi Sunak’s rescue, Farage is the closest thing voters have to a BoJo on the ballot paper this time round.
Despite being on the same side in 2016, they are very different politically.
But both have that ballot box gold-dust: Authenticity.
And both make connections with people you would not necessarily expect public school boys to connect with.
They both have an attraction that makes lots of people want to cross the road to shake their hand or have a selfie — and a vocal minority want to chuck things at their head. And they both share a ferret-like sense for shifts in the public mood — and an ability to sniff out ripe opportunities for personal advancement.
So when Nigel turns his back on suitcases full of dollars on the Trump bandwagon and benches himself from his well-paid TV gig for seven weeks, it’s worth asking . . . what does he know?
Is there really something happening out there?
The polls, so far, would suggest so.
Within 96 hours of the return of the king, four polls were showing a reinvigorated Reform surge, and a couple even suggesting they were within an ace of pushing the Tories into third place.
And the self-proclaimed general of the People’s Army could not be asking for better ground to fight on.
Sunak in lethal pincer
Someone described the 2024 election as like 1997 but with a crap Tony Blair and a better John Major — and it is fair to say neither Starmer nor Sunak is setting the world alight.
As this week’s first TV debate showed, the choice is between two slightly awkward technocrats, both better suited to managing things than firing up a crowd.
Neither is naturally relaxed in front of an audience, especially in the bear-pit debate format that a Johnson or a Blair or a Farage would thrive in.
What is clear from speaking to pretty much everyone, bar the most diehard Tories, is that after 14 years the country is crying out for change. Farage also tapped into the most potent manifestation of that frustration: The feeling that nothing in this country is working at the moment.
From the NHS, to the pothole-strewn roads, the crumbling schools and the streets run by thugs and muggers. Get something nicked or have your front door kicked in? Good luck seeing a rozzer for love nor money .
Claim on the insurance ? That’s quadrupled in price in just 12 months.
Want to talk to the taxman about a wages raid so eye-watering that it must surely be a computer glitch? Call back in six weeks . . .
Need a pint to calm down while you wait for your two hour-delayed train? That’ll be £6.20 mate. You what!?
Need to see a doctor for your black eye? That will be six weeks.
It’s very tricky for the Tories to ask for five more years when swathes of the public see them as having spent the last decade and a half letting the country slip into such an expensive state of disrepair.
But Farage knows that for many, Sir Keir is not really the answer.
And many of those p**sed off with the Tories, on borders and boats, are deeply distrusting of a man who just four years ago was still campaigning for free movement and spent the four years before that trying to unpick Brexit and force us all into a second referendum.
That protest vote now has somewhere else to go, and its a lethal pincer that Sunak is in.
So while the natural pendulum of British politics looks set to swing back to Labour, Farage entering the fray means it could well swing very, very far away from the Tories, for a very long time.
But is the answer to fixing one side having 14 years of carte blanche to cock things up, barely unchecked by credible opposition, simply to give the other side a whacking great majority and two terms in Downing Street to do the same?
I’m not sure it is.
Sophie phone plea is good call
ARE both major parties failing to tap into a cohort of militant voters who could turn up at polling stations in their droves? Actress-turned-campaigner Sophie Winkleman certainly thinks so.
The Peep Show star reckons both Starmer and Sunak are missing a trick by not going harder on banning smartphones for younger teenagers.
Appearing on Never Mind The Ballots this week, she reckons an army of school-gate mums could swing the election for whichever party wakes up to the damage the devices inflict on kids.
Sophie told me: “I think they’re quite ignored and they’re much more powerful than politicians realise and they’re going to have a big say in this. It could be a big vote winner.”
And the reaction to her appearance on my show would suggest this is a seriously hot-button issue. My own phone has been pinging with pretty much every parent of teenage – or soon to be teenage – kids I know backing her plea.
In WhatsApp groups and Facebook chats up and down Britain there are fed-up parents sick to the back teeth – and without a voice. Only Reform have pledged an under-16 smartphone ban so far.
Populist? Perhaps.
Popular? I suspect so.
SOME folk say the next contest to lead whatever is left of the Tory party is Kemi Badenoch’s to lose . . . so what on earth was she doing in Toulouse, France, last week?
After the PM called his surprise election – with the Conservatives battling for survival – the Business Secretary, left, was conspicuously absent from the airwaves.
It led to a flurry of breathless articles questioning if Rishi had benched his Cabinet rival. But no, she was bunking off in the South of France.
Unfortunately for her, she was on the same flight as politically savvy comedian Al Murray, who clocked her and spread the word. Her spokesman explained: “Kemi was briefly away on a short pre-planned break that she had promised her three young children for their school half-term.”
Not exactly all hands to the pump . . .
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