The Maga model, based on the US’s exorbitant market privileges, can’t be imported to Britain. That’s going to be a problem for Reform UK
N
igel Farage loves a gamble. In his 2015 memoir, The Purple Revolution, a whole chapter is dedicated to the then Ukip leader’s appetite for risk, how he indulged it in the City and how that prepared him for a career in politics.
He boasts of the time he “lost a seven-figure sum of money in the course of a morning on the zinc market” before breezing off to the pub. He waxes nostalgic about the halcyon days of freewheeling finance, before “ghastly regulators” spoiled the fun; when “terrible cock-ups” could be written off because “decimal points and all those zeros can be tricky after a three-hour lunch”.
Farage the commodities trader was not a details guy. Farage the politician isn’t famously punctilious either, but the stakes are higher. He’s backing himself to be prime minister and it isn’t going to happen if voters see him as the kind of gambler who might blow the nation’s budget on a boozy bet.
