Nigel Farage's decision not to stand in Newark is a crushing disappointment
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Version 0 of 1. It's about choosing the right battles, Nigel Farage told the BBC, as he explained why he was not personally going to contest the Newark byelection. At about the same time John Prescott, retired Labour bruiser,was tweeting, "Nigel Farage Ale. Bottling it since Eastleigh". Bad call. There's nothing wrong with being frightened when it's a rational response to the facts. What people make of his decision not to go for the byelection provoked by Patrick Mercer's drive-by shooting of his old Tory chums will depend on what they reckon is the best way to diminish his appeal – the full-on attack, which risks consolidating his support or the recognition that he is a canny and effective operator tapping into a rich vein of political alienation. The headline appeal of Newark, a safe Tory seat on the borders of Nottinghamshire and the Ukip heartland of Lincolnshire, looks like a peach of a contest for the Ukip leader. An imminent byelection, likely to follow a triumphant showing in the Euro-elections, that could carry him to Westminster to challenge David Cameron, the man who refuses to debate with him at the general election, every single week. That it came the day that one polling organisation, TNS-BMRB, sent Ukip into a dazzling nine-point lead over Labour in the European elections made his decision, announced half an hour before the poll came out, look peculiarly ill-judged. But you don't make a mint in the City without being a shrewd calculator of the odds. Among those has to be included the way TNS counts voting intentions – only including those certain to vote – which tends to flatter Ukip. Newark would have become Farage's to lose (although a man who has been challenged on his own Euro expenses might not have been an ideal candidate to replace a tainted predecessor). Defeat would not have been catastrophic, but it would certainly have made the forward march of Ukip seem a little less inexorable. It remains possible that a strong local candidate could still win but, as polling analyst John Curtice explained to the BBC, it would be a colossal achievement against such an entrenched Tory majority. More likely – and most damagingly for Farage – Labour, which won the seat on its old boundaries, and has a strong base, could come through the middle of a vote split between Ukip and the Tories. That might give Ukip's more flirtatious supporters pause for thought. Really, the only odd thing about Farage's decision is that it took so long. After the cash-for-questions row, Mercer's future had been in the balance for more than a year. A more professional outfit would have had the answer to a snap byelection ready, and not let the head of excited steam build behind the prospect of a Farage candidacy even overnight. Byelections, though, remain rocket fuel for outsider political campaigns. Fortunately for Ukip, the European elections work in roughly the same way, a kind of fantasy world where voters can somehow indulge in their dreams of beating up on the establishment, where a Westminster election demands that they imagine a world without it. Challenger politics is about finding a way of becoming safe at Westminster without losing the appeal of the outsider. It would be a mistake – not one the Labour leadership looks like making – to dismiss Farage as a straw man on the back of his rapid retreat from the cliff edge of a Newark byelection. All the same, it is a crushing disappointment. It would have been brilliant, not just for anyone on the left, to show that it was possible to beat him. But he knew that too. Of course, Ukip is responding to real fears, as well as exacerbating them. But there is also a fine judgment to make about how far to go to meet the sensitivities inflamed by Ukip. Political campaigning may be part magic, part myth, but at some point, as the Tories are finding out, some facts are inalienable. It does the political process no good to pretend anything else. |