Nigel Farage loves a gamble. In his 2015 memoir, The Purple Revolution, a whole chapter is dedicated to the then Ukip leader’s appetite for risk, how he indulged it in the City and how that prepared him for a career in politics.
He boasts of the time he “lost a seven-figure sum of money in the course of a morning on the zinc market” before breezing off to the pub. He waxes nostalgic about the halcyon days of freewheeling finance, before “ghastly regulators” spoiled the fun; when “terrible cock-ups” could be written off because “decimal points and all those zeros can be tricky after a three-hour lunch”.
Farage the commodities trader was not a details guy. Farage the politician isn’t famously punctilious either, but the stakes are higher. He’s backing himself to be prime minister and it isn’t going to happen if voters see him as the kind of gambler who might blow the nation’s budget on a boozy bet.
Dispelling that notion was the purpose of a speech by the Reform UK leader on Monday. Farage disposed of his party’s 2024 election manifesto and its promise of tax cuts worth £90bn because it was a tissue of fiscal fantasy. He didn’t put it quite like that. He observed that Britain’s sluggish growth and high debt demand sober management of public finances. He hinted that Treasury savings could one day be made by unpicking the sacred “triple lock” that guarantees perpetual real-terms rises in the state pension.
Liz Truss was not named, but the new, parsimonious Farageonomics has been formulated to silence comparisons between Reform’s agenda and the budget misadventure of the Tory prime minister whose unfunded tax giveaway incinerated the nation’s financial credibility.
By dabbling in macroeconomics, Farage also wants to show that he has range; that the policy repertoire extends beyond complaining about migrants. He can also complain about the Bank of England (too cautious over cryptocurrencies), the Financial Conduct Authority (captured by a “diversity agenda”), public sector pensions (“a massive liability”) and net zero (a burden on energy bills).
Europe can’t be the scapegoat it once was, but the old moan can be retuned to a post-Brexit key: the opportunity of deregulation from Brussels red tape has been “squandered”. Killjoy regulators tame the animal spirits of the market. The bureaucratic state lavishes welfare on work-shy malingerers and banishes enterprising wealth-creators. The remedy is to slash disability benefits and use tax breaks to entice self-exiled non-doms back from Dubai. The fiscal details of how that might all add up – the decimal points and zeros – remain shrouded in post-prandial haze.
The trademark colour and name of Farage’s party has changed since The Purple Revolution, but the argument hasn’t evolved. The biggest difference is in his delivery, which has become less hectoring, more weary. Maybe Farage was deliberately sounding leaden to emphasise his commitment to fiscal responsibility, but he came across as a man who is boring even himself with the usual shtick.
This may be why he regularly asserts that the next general election will come in 2027. There is no reason why Keir Starmer would choose to go to the country two years before the constitutional deadline, but Farage needs the vote to come as soon as possible. To complete the transition from protest vehicle to plausible prime minister, the Reform leader needs to woo uncertain voters who think he could be dangerous. That reassurance has a cost in radicalism.
Momentum depends on the keenest supporters staying whipped up in a state of visceral outrage, while respectability means keeping a lid on Reform MPs’ and councillors’ most luridly racist, outlandish and violent opinions. Affecting mainstream seriousness and cultivating insurrection at the same time is a chore. The strain is showing.
Economic policy poses a particular challenge because the US rightwing populist model, Farage’s inspiration in most areas, resists adaptation to British financial circumstances. Not that it hasn’t been tried. Kent county council, Reform UK’s flagship local authority, promised to implement Doge-style cuts to administrative waste, inspired by Elon Musk’s maverick assault on the US federal budgets. The result was a chaotic display of unprofessional political dysfunction.
Doge was no triumph in Washington either, but the US context is very different. Normal rules of fiscal rectitude don’t apply – at least, not yet – to the country that issues the planet’s reserve currency and can always find buyers for its debt.
This “exorbitant privilege” extended to the world’s richest and most powerful state is what allowed Donald Trump earlier this year to implement tax cuts that will drive the US deficit up into the region of $3tn-$4tn by the end of the decade. The White House claims the budget will be self-repairing with money generated by newly stimulated growth. That’s also what Truss said. The bond market was not convinced.
Trump also thinks tariffs imposed on other countries will be a substitute for domestic tax revenue. He’s wrong both conceptually and arithmetically. Tariffs are an import tax paid ultimately by US consumers, not foreigners, and the Treasury income hardly dents the deficit. But for now the absurdity of it just hangs in the air, defying economic gravity.
That trick is not available to a UK prime minister. Nor is Trump’s habit of shaking down US corporate giants for equity and cash. If Reform so much as flirted with Trumponomics in an election manifesto, markets would convulse at every opinion poll putting it in the lead. Labour would correctly warn that a vote for Reform is a vote to bankrupt Britain.
Farage is a gambler, not a fool. He knows he has to moderate his tone and get across some budget details. But attention to detail has never been his thing and responsibility bores him. Maybe he can win without it. He might fancy the odds on Labour continuing to flounder, the Tories failing to get their act together and that combination being enough to put him in Downing Street. And yet it is revealing how vulnerable the Reform leader obviously feels on the economy. His old script is stale, and without the Maga playbook to crib from, he really has nothing new to say – and a long time to be exposed not saying it.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
