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Could it be that, like most narcissists, Nigel Farage is actually a bit thin-skinned? Surely not! Not our fearless Nige! The man who is never happier than when he can cast himself as the outsider – a lone voice speaking truth to power. When he can control the narrative. A saviour rising from these streets. The politician who only knows he’s alive when the cameras are rolling. That’s the character Farage wants you to believe in.
So you’d have thought that Nige would have been thrilled by Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference on Tuesday. A whole hour pretty much devoted to him. The recognition that he was now the real leader of the opposition. The hostility only underlining his sense of importance. That he was now living rent-free in Starmer’s head. That he had the government precisely where he wanted it. Let the campaign for the next general election start now.
Only it didn’t quite play out like that. Instead, Nige looked rattled. Angry even. Trying to look prime ministerial in front of a couple of flags as he gave his response on social media, but merely looking slightly unhinged. Confused that Starmer had somehow deviated from Nige’s own script. That Keir had drawn a line in the sand between what was and what wasn’t racist, between decency and division, and had found Farage to be on the wrong side of it.
It turns out that Nige can dish it out but he can’t take it. I’ve heard more Farage speeches than is good for my health and I can’t remember Nige once saying something nice about Starmer. He’s called him a liar, he’s called him unfit to be prime minister and all sorts in between. Including danger to the country. But he’s never once said that deep down he’s an OK bloke. If Nige now thinks that our politics has become seriously toxic he might care to think about where the decline set in.
You would have thought that with a night to sleep on it, Reform would have had a more measured response to Starmer’s speech on the Wednesday morning media round. A chance to make their case. To say that Nige might have been a little hasty. Not a bit of it. If anything, Zia Yusuf was more deranged than his boss. The 15-minute interview on Sky News was a collector’s item. Wilfred Frost, the unfortunate TV host, looked as if he needed a lie down once it was over.
Yusuf started with a bold assertion. That if someone supported a racist policy then they were de facto racists. Given that most people seem to believe that Reform’s plan to deport some people with indefinite leave to remain is racist, then Zia is presumably quite happy to accept that some of his party’s supporters are racist. Quite the admission. Not how I’d have wanted to frame the argument if I was him.
But this was just for openers. Then we got to the heart of the matter. Yusuf was appalled by Starmer’s speech. It had been vicious, vindictive and inflammatory. An attempt to demonise Nige. As such it had been an incitement to violence. Here was the crux of it. Starmer knew that he couldn’t beat Farage at the ballot box so he was trying to have him assassinated.
“There’s a term known as ‘stochastic terrorism’,” Zia went on. It meant to whip up so much hatred that one supporter takes it on themselves to kill the target. And that was what Starmer had been doing. It was almost certainly the first time the prime minister has been called a terrorist on live news. Time and again, Frost invited Yusuf to back down. To qualify his language. But Zia wasn’t having any of it. Starmer was a terrorist. The one aim of his speech had been to incite someone to kill Farage. Everything else was a smokescreen. Yusuf alone knew the truth. You wonder what he makes of Nige’s speeches.
Now Zia went deeper into the Reform conspiracy theories. Just two weeks ago the parliamentary authorities had reduced Farage’s security detail. This wasn’t because the level of protection had been deemed unnecessary and excessive. It was because Starmer – the orders had very definitely come right from the top of government – was deliberately trying to make it easier for someone to kill Farage.
By now Frost was beginning to look a bit desperate. He tried to change the subject by exploring the racism in Reform’s policies. But Zia wasn’t bothered about a bit of recreational racism. Who cared if hundreds of thousands of brown people working in the NHS got deported? That was nothing compared with the bigger story. The whole of the media and the rest of the country had been duped by the conference speech. It wasn’t a state-of-the-nation epic. It was a licence to kill. “HE’S A TERRORIST. HE’S A TERRORIST,” shouted Yusuf.
All of which rather overshadowed the final day of the Labour conference. Which was presumably just fine by the Labour party. After all, having had your leader’s speech on the penultimate day is a sure sign that you want everyone to bugger off home on the Tuesday night. A quick thought. If you want a three-day conference next year, just book it. There’s no need to include the Wednesday. You’d save the party a lot of money.
Predictably then, the conference area was a bit of a ghost town on the last day. Ed Miliband did his best to rally the troops but next year he will be begging not to be given the graveyard slot. He’s one of the few ministers who knows how to give a speech.
Shabana Mahmood wrapped things up. We lucky few. “We’re here for the panels not the parties,” she said to a depleted hall. She didn’t sound as if she meant it. More that she had drawn the short straw and would rather have been on a train home.
