Farage and Corbyn have more in common than either will admit
The leaders of Labour and the Brexit Party prefer the purity of campaigning to the messy realities of office
When I was foreign secretary I had many dealings with Jeremy Corbyn, then a backbencher, who would ask me questions in the Commons at every opportunity and sometimes ask to visit me for a discussion. The great majority of these questions and meetings were about something known as the MENWFZ – Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.
The ideal of such a zone is, of course, a laudable one, endorsed by the UN General Assembly. In practice, it is for the time being unachievable, since Israel has nuclear weapons and is not going to relinquish them while her very existence is threatened. For Corbyn this was a perfect issue, since it combined calling for nuclear disarmament with hostility to Israel, plus the added bonus of being able to attack all of us who failed to bring it about.
Indeed, for someone like Corbyn, for whom the whole purpose of life is campaigning with permanent outrage and views fixed in place for a lifetime, the marvellous thing about this issue was that there was no way I or anyone else could satisfy him. The rallies, petitions, passionate speeches, and the certainty that the world is a vast conspiracy of Tories and Israelis making as many nukes as possible, need never end.
For Corbyn loves campaigning. You can see him in the last few days relax and start to enjoy himself, as five weeks of electioneering begins. He can denounce the rich capitalist system and promise spending in vast abundance. Stuck in the House of Commons, he had to face genuine choices that he can’t cope with – hence a policy on Brexit that is tortuous and almost incomprehensible. But out there on the stump he feels free of the delicate decisions about reality. Bismark might have said that “politics is the art of the possible” but for Corbyn it is an endless demand for the impossible. He lives to campaign, not to govern.
And now, it seems, among party leaders, that he is not alone. After the events of recent days we have to ask ourselves whether Nigel Farage falls into the same category. This is not to suggest that he is the same sort of person in most other respects. He does believe in free enterprise and is patriotic about his own country, which could not be said of the leader of the Labour Party. I’m sure that he would be a lot more fun to choose as company for an evening in the pub.
Nevertheless, there are important similarities in the approach to politics of these two men. Both visibly thrive on plunging into electoral battle on the streets. They love to rail against elites and establishments, albeit different elements of them. They have both been major influences on the course of British politics, without ever holding ministerial office.
Indeed, Farage has been particularly influential in setting the trajectory of Britain in the years to come. He has spearheaded not one but two successful protest parties, and exerted great pressure on the Conservatives and even Labour. He triumphed in the referendum and can lay claim to being a father figure of Brexit, for good or ill. If he wished, he could now use that accumulated influence and ability to persuade people to make virtually certain that his dream of leaving the EU gets over the line.
Yet he doesn’t want to do that. His instinct is to keep calling for his perfect vision, and not at any stage become involved in the messy practical questions of how exactly to bring it about. For how can an inveterate campaigner keep his purity if he supports an actual solution? How can it be true, if the world is an establishment fix, that such arch representatives of that establishment as a Conservative Prime Minister and the EU Commission have agreed on an acceptable outcome? How dare they? This could put permanent campaigners out of business.
This is why Corbyn and Farage are surprisingly similar. Corbyn genuinely believes in nuclear disarmament, but for him it is even more important to believe that British foreign secretaries and Israeli leaders are always the villains. He can sleep soundly, knowing there is no solution they will come up with that can ever satisfy him.
Similarly, Farage is truly passionate about Brexit, but the cause is now inseparable in his mind from his view that it will always be betrayed by Tory leaders and EU officials. To him, it cannot possibly be true that Boris Johnson and Jean-claude Juncker can have agreed on implementing Brexit. It must be a “gigantic con”. He has defined himself as being against these people, so he must oppose them – even if they are doing what he wanted.
Therefore he has announced he will campaign up and down the country but not be a candidate himself – heaven forbid that he ends up having to vote on the details in the Commons. And he has to argue that what Boris has negotiated “is not Brexit”, even though it certainly is. The fact is that if a Tory majority is secured on December 12, the UK will leave the EU pretty soon afterwards.
Certainly, important choices will have to be made after that on what kind of trade deals we will have with the EU, the US and anyone else. But to get to those choices we first have to leave, and no result other than an outright Conservative victory will make that happen.
That a deal has been done for leaving the EU is a credit to Boris Johnson, who also enjoys being out and about with the voters, but is additionally prepared to get involved in the decisions and compromises of governing. If all leaders approached politics in the manner of Corbyn and Farage, elections would just be a mass of jostling pressure groups, not a choice of how to be governed.
Voters can be sure that Boris is serious about Brexit. Thankfully, he also has other policies to win the support of some who don’t like Brexit but like the prospect of a Labour government even less. Those voters can be certain that our first past the post electoral system means that a split in their votes will bring both Corbyn in Downing Street and a whole new referendum on the EU.
For the Brexit Party to campaign against Conservatives therefore makes no logical sense. You can only understand it when you realise that Nigel Farage is more like Jeremy Corbyn than you ever imagined.