Nigel Farage and I have one thing in common: we both had to unresign
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Version 0 of 1. I feel Nigel Farage’s pain. A decade ago, I attempted to resign from a teaching post in South Korea. Upon hearing my decision, my boss burst into tears and I reluctantly agreed to stay. It was a mistake. I resented the job. I cursed my lack of resolve. And, now she knew I wanted out, I fell out with my boss. This is exactly the position that Farage has found himself in. He no longer wants to be Ukip leader (or so, at least, he claims), but his resignation has been unanimously rejected. Where once his future promised to be a wonderland of warm bitter and all-night fishing trips, it is now doomed to entail the usual gauntlet of dodging protests and apologising for all the massively racist things his members say. This is, of course, to naively assume that Farage ever sincerely meant to resign in the first place. After all, when he talked of resigning to the press, he coyly left open the option of being elected leader again at the party’s AGM after his summer off. He also attended the meeting to decide his fate in person, possibly so that he could stare down anyone who genuinely wanted him to leave – Stalin tried a similar trick in the 50s, daring the Soviet Central Committee to leave his resignation unchallenged. What we both needed to know was that there is an art to unresigning. Not everyone goes into these things as bluntly as Nigel and I. You can risk everything and win nothing. Just look at Jay Leno. When he returned to NBC’s Tonight Show in 2010, having originally left nine months earlier, he instantly became a lame duck. Everyone believed his principles had been compromised and, as a result, his audience figures fell and his salary was slashed. When he left for good last year, barely anybody cared because he had become such a diminished figure. Or Sir Alex Ferguson. His biggest mistake came in 2001, when he announced he would be stepping down from his role as manager of Manchester United a year ahead of his preferred date. The club’s form immediately dipped, and only improved when he unresigned a few months later. Effectively, this error trapped him at the club until he managed to scarper with a week’s notice more than a decade later. What Farage should have done, rather than flat-out resign, was simply threaten to resign. It’s a classic negotiation tactic. If Ukip really wanted him to stay, the threat would be enough to spook them into offering him more than he currently got out of the job. If they didn’t, he got to leave anyway. Actors do this all the time. In fact, Harry Shearer from The Simpsons is thought to be doing it right now. He will either walk away from the show’s contract negotiations, or agree to stay with a much bigger paypacket. Either way, he retains all the power. And that’s the smartest thing to do. By unresigning so inelegantly this week, Farage has shown that he has got no backbone. And who wants a leader with no backbone? Once the Ukip faithful get wind of this, they will probably give Farage the sack. And that’s even worse. |