What’s the biggest mistake a political leader can make? It’s not adopting a bad policy – or even changing your mind about that policy later, damaging as that is. It’s not inadvertently revealing personal foibles, or messing up one broadcast interview. No, all those things don’t help party leaders, but what really holes them below the waterline is when they give the impression that they will dispense with even their most loyal allies in order to save their own skin.
Nigel Farage has lots of things to worry about following the announcement that the Metropolitan Police has launched a criminal inquiry into allegations that two of his aides discussed how to get around electoral law and receive donations from a US businessman. The outcome of the investigation is just one of those worries, but it’s probably not the biggest.
The Reform UK leader won’t enjoy the impact that the cops poring over the case will have on his party’s standing. Polling this week suggested that 70 per cent of voters are aware of these allegations already. Of those who’d heard about them, 62 per cent felt the story showed there was a real problem with how the party was run. Even the finding that 41 per cent thought Reform had no worse a problem with standards and money than other parties (49 per cent saying it had a bigger problem) is troubling for Farage, as it suggests that voters are now starting to see Reform as being just like all the other parties. But that still isn’t the biggest long-term problem for Farage.
He has already dispensed with the services of Dan Jukes and James Orr, who were both filmed in the sting, and who both deny any wrongdoing. He will feel he is paying the price for surrounding himself with amateurs who ended up saying things on camera that no seasoned Westminster operator would. But both men were highly loyal to Farage. Jukes had been with him since the Ukip days, having met Farage when he came to talk at his school. None of that made any difference when the allegations surfaced. That both had to step back from their roles immediately showed how rattled the party was by the claims. That Farage called them “contractors” underlined that. That his party chair Lee Anderson suggested they would not be coming back either way must have hurt still more. And Farage himself was also captured by the undercover footage, thanking the potential foreign donor, rather than asking any questions about the propriety of what was being proposed. He insists that this was because he was told everything was above board, and had no reason to doubt that.
Farage should know that from now on those closest to him will have a different attitude to the leader. It may not manifest itself particularly obviously, but in their own minds, they will know that he could be prepared to throw them under a bus, too. It means they will feel less loyal to a leader who they know will not be loyal to them.
That almost imperceptible shift in mindset means that aides won’t be prepared to stick their necks out for the leader in the way that Jukes did. They won’t think it’s worth it in the same way that he did. We see this in all political parties: it was something Sir Keir Starmer did regularly enough to lose the confidence of those closest to him: he enticed Sue Gray to come to work for him, then dropped her when she became inconvenient. He did the same with Morgan McSweeney, too. The message to others considering working for the then-prime minister was clear: don’t expect him to have your back. It might not have stopped them working for him, but it certainly stopped some of them going all out for Starmer, and it will do the same for Farage.
Farage has long had a reputation of finding other talented politicians in his party threatening: just look at the tensions between him and Zia Yusuf, who seems to be in a particularly buoyant mood currently. But, it is now the case that the people behind the scenes, the loyal aides who make it all happen, and who fight in the trenches with their boss, are now also fair game to be dropped. And that tends to lead to the unwinding of a leader in the end, rather than the salvation that they’d initially imagined.
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