Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Nigel Farage looks like the future of right-wing politics

And that should terrify the Tories

Nigel Farage (Photo: Getty)

Nigel Farage ought to terrify the Tories. He has terrified them many times over the past decades. But until now, he hasn’t had the force of the US president, the richest man in the world, and the global online right behind him.

As the struggle to become the dominant voice on the British right intensifies, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative party look like yesterday’s news by comparison. 

Who is to say Farage cannot supplant the Tories as Trump supplanted the old Republican elite or Marine Le Pen supplanted the Gaullists?

The latest example of how rapidly the political weather is changing was Elon Musk’s rant that the ‘people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state’. Along with a portion of his 205 million followers on X, Musk backed pub landlord Michael Westwood’s petition which stated that, because Keir Starmer has ‘gone back on his promises,’ Parliament must be dissolved.

Even by Musk’s standards, the campaign is absurd.

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