The Reform leader cynically pushes the boundaries of how far he can go without alienating too many of the voters he needs – but it’s a perilous calibration
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hat counts as beyond the pale these days? Having successfully pushed back the cordon sanitaire that surrounds British politics, Nigel Farage is struggling to work out where, precisely, it now lies. Some decisions are simple. Attacks on Grenfell victims are, and have always been, beyond the bounds of decency. Farage promptly sacked Simon Dudley last week after the housing spokesperson mused of the victims that “everyone dies in the end”.
But on other choices Farage dithers. Not wishing to sound prudish to his more hard-boiled supporters, he previously dismissed accusations he was racist at school as “banter in the playground”. It was only in January that he did what any other mainstream politician would do with likely unprovable claims of racism and denied them completely.
When the Guardian found he had sold a number of questionable personalised messages to fans on the Cameo website – Farage recorded a message giving a “pep talk” to what turned out to be a Canadian neo-Nazi group, and spoke positively about one of its events – his first instincts were to defend them as a sort of disinterested response to the free market. If a shop unwittingly sells shoes to a murderer, he said in an ITN interview, “is that the fault of the person selling shoes?” Now he has “paused” his account.
