Farage: Politicians Are ‘All Wankers, The Lot of Them’

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage gets unusually sympathetic treatment in UK newspaper profile in which he expressed empathy for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer while broadly calling the legacy political class “wankers”.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is doing well because it brings positive, optimistic energy and answers to problems that the legacy parties won’t even consider. In any case, of what is sometimes called the ‘Westminster blob’, Mr Farage told London’s Evening Standard: “Politicians? Let’s face it, they’re all wankers, the lot of them.”

The comments come in an unusually sympathetic profile from the former freesheet paper, including acknowledgements Farage is moving beyond the decades on the “margins” of British politics to cementing a position in the middle of it. The profile states, complimentarily: “Farage is political kryptonite, a man who is learning how to neutralise foes both old (the Tories) and new (Sir Keir Starmer’s beleaguered Labour Party)”.

While Farage’s headline remarks on the wankers of the political establishment could be called unkind, in the attached interview the British sovereigntist is full of sympathy for the present Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who he characterises as a nice man struggling with unhappiness after finding himself in a job to which he is not well suited. Farage questions whether Starmer can possibly remain in office for long, implying the more obviously capable leftist Wes Streeting could move against him.

A mark of a great leader is the ability to enjoy politics even when times are bad, Farage explains, noting Thatcher and Blair “clearly enjoyed it” even in tough times — “both were great leaders with vision”. Starmer and Reeves clearly not happy, he said.

Quite apart from the threat Reform UK itself poses to the left — and that is something Labour has been waking up to of late, it seems — Farage also pointed to the fracturing of the left in Britain, with factions including the polished mainstream of Labour, the old hard left of Jeremy Corbyn that Starmer purged from his party ranks, the now clearly established green party, and the emergence of the Muslim-bloc vote.

Mr Farage said: “the Gaza vote — putting it politely — isn’t going away. And with the demographic changes, and the number of young Muslim men between 15 and 18, and you fast forward to the next election, 25 per cent of that cohort have quite strong, radical views. They could win 20-30 seats at the next election. Wes Streeting only won his seat by 500 votes.”

As for Reform UK’s offering, Mr Farage bats away the accusation but to him by the interviewer that they are a one-trick-pony, talking only about immigration. Inverting the idea, many of the problems facing ordinary people are the downstream effects of decades of functionally open borders, Farage says: “If you can’t get a GP appointment, ask yourself why. If your kids can’t get a house, ask yourself why… The population explosion is the biggest single problem we’ve got. Do you wonder why GDP is falling? We are getting poorer as a nation. And Reform is the frankest about the problems the country faces.”

Polling shows Reform UK is posing a growing threat to the Labour Party. As stated:

The demographic breakdown of the YouGov figures published Monday evening also appeared to buttress trends already identified elsewhere, namely that Reform’s onward march in the polls is due to a combination of retaining an impressive level of loyalty among its own voters while also recruiting a good number of defectors from elsewhere.

A solid nine in ten Britons who voted for Reform in the 2024 general election said they would do so again next time. Yet 24 per cent of 2024 Conservative voters said they would now back Reform, equivalent to 1.6 million Tories defecting to Reform out of an active electorate of 29 million.

Despite that Reform are doggedly portrayed as right-wing extremists in much of the UK press, an impressive eight per cent of 2024 Labour voters now say they would back Farage’s faction, something like three-quarters of a million Labour defectors to the Reform camp. This may vindicate Farage’s plan to go after Labour’s historic working-class voter base, who may have backed the party tribally in the past but are poorly represented by its modern metropolitan-liberal leadership.