When parliament returns from its summer recess on Monday, Keir Starmer should not be surprised to find Nigel Farage camped out at the dispatch box. While Starmer has taken the traditional time off, the Reform UK leader has been in overdrive, from holding seven (increasingly chaotic) press conferences to featuring in glossy profiles in the broadsheets and adorning a further 22 front pages. Throughout it all, Farage has had the air of a conman seeing how long he can get away with playing at prime minister before anyone notices.
That this hasn’t needed to involve any actual governing has suited the I’m a Celeb alumnus perfectly. Rightwing populism breeds on complaints rather than cabinet meetings, with Reform enjoying the media coverage of a major player and the lack of scrutiny of a nonentity. The impact of this has been staggering: concern over immigration – already seen by the public as the most important issue facing Britain – has shot up eight percentage points since July, according to Ipsos. And that’s before any bounce from Reform’s party conference this week.
It is not as if Farage’s PM cosplay has been made difficult for him. He was given free rein to set the agenda this summer by a bored and willing press, with the same editors keen to oversaturate him at any time of year grateful for content to cover the “silly season” (protests by the far right are not the typical definition of silly). Farage has utilised being permitted to spread the myth that migrants are a threat to British women largely unchecked, testing out an ever-more divisive and adversarial racial line (as he recently put it in the Times: “Whose side are you on?”)
Few have made it easier for Reform to fill the void than Starmer, who could have hardly done more if he had subletted Downing Street out to Farage and washed the towels. It is not that the prime minister hasn’t been working – last month, he disrupted his family holiday in Scotland to fly to Washington DC – or that he should not have had a break, of course, but that after pushing through the disastrous welfare bill, the entire government has seemingly disappeared from public view. The most pressing issues – immigration misinformation, far-right mobilisation, starvation in Gaza – have come and stayed in recent weeks with next to no input from our elected leaders.
Ministers have been noticeably missing in action from media rounds, with Rachel Reeves – the most recognisable figure on the frontbench after Starmer – out of sight working on the autumn budget. The government in effect put its out-of-office on for August (“Taking time away until September. See you in Liverpool!”) and left the inbox to max out.
This has only been compounded by the fact that, on the few occasions Labour has spoken out this summer, it has done so on Reform’s terms. When Farage announced his plan to detain and deport undocumented migrants last week, the Labour party chair, Ellie Reeves, lamented that he “can’t say where his detention centres will be”, as if the problem with interning human beings en masse is the challenge of finding a big enough car park.
The bar has felt so low through the hot restless weeks that you could almost find yourself willing Labour to act, if not as the government, then at least as the opposition. Or to put it another way: it isn’t just that Farage has been allowed to set the agenda for the summer, but that he hasn’t even had to worry about Starmer’s team trying to challenge it. Add Kemi Badenoch’s complicity (her critique of Reform’s mass deportation policy was that the party had actually stolen it from the Conservatives), and the result is a political class that has given up its defences to the hard right, or even any pretence of one. We are seeing in real time where this takes a society. On Saturday, a group of masked men attempted to break into a hotel for asylum seekers in west London.
The danger is never simply that the “bad guys” bleed fringe ideas into the mainstream – it is that the “good guys” (whatever that means any more) either do nothing, or worse, embrace them. Capitulation sometimes looks like politicians adopting ever-more hardline immigration policies; sometimes it looks like saying nothing when the other side pitches one. Often, it’s both.
Labour’s summer has been defined by this indifference and inaction, as a government elected on a landslide only a year ago acts as if it were a tired spectator helpless to the political winds (or whichever way Farage and the media choose to blow them). There is a mix of defeatism and despair to it, both about the electorate and the country at large: the notion that Britain – increasingly characterised by the right as lawless, broken and invaded – is already lost.
The Labour right has a default get-out clause to this: the only thing that matters is being electable. But that is hardly going well. A YouGov poll last week showed Labour has sunk to its lowest approval rating in six years, with only 20% of the public saying they would vote for the party at the next election. As he returns to work, Starmer is reportedly reshuffling his aides at No 10 to regain ground. But the real issue is not personnel – it is the project. What is the purpose of a Starmer government? And what courage can he find to deliver it?
There is an alternative timeline in which Starmer acted decisively this summer. In this Sliding Doors scenario, the Labour leader stood firm against Israel, pulled the welfare cuts bill and challenged anti-migrant sentiment. It would be easy to be wistful for such an era of humane and fair governance until you remember this is meant to have really happened: the Conservatives were ousted, the “good guys” were elected, the human rights barrister was put in charge. As the weeks pass and the days darken, Starmer will try to regain the space that he left wide open. Whether Farage is willing to vacate it is another matter.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
