Ukip’s feuding is not merely a sideshow. There is much at stake

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/19/ukip-feuding-nigel-farage-out-campaign-eu-referendum

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Is it a coincidence that Ukip is suddenly plunged into the same sort of intensely personal in-fighting that has been disrupting its far nastier rival, the French Front National, across the Channel? Of course not, it is in the nature of the populist beast.

Related: Nigel Farage is a 'snarling, thin-skinned and aggressive' man, says campaign chief

Fortunately for Nigel Farage it is not his old dad he is having to deal with from the reactionary wing of the party. That gives him an edge on Marine Le Pen, whose efforts to reposition the FN as more mainstream and respectable have been hampered by Jean-Marie, the former paratrooper-and-proud of it who ran the party for decades and seems unduly fond of the Holocaust.

Judging by his memoirs, Farage Jr worshipped his own father, a hell-raising City metal trader called Guy Farage, whose wine, women and cars career he sought to emulate before being diverted into politics by the EU’s 1991 Maastricht treaty after a good lunch. Nigel seems to have had an idyllic childhood in Downe, Kent, where he still lives, occasionally persecuted in the pub by rowdies.

But on both left and right, populist parties with simple solutions – “quit Europe”, “quit Britain”, “keep out the foreigners”, “repudiate the debt” – tend to become over-dependent on charismatic leaders who can sell the message to those voters who don’t pay much attention to usually-dull mainstream politics and don’t much like it when they do. Someone who tells hard-pressed people that he can give them cake-and-eat-it tomorrow (if only those bastards in the Establishment would let him) is always going to have appeal.

It can also be very exciting, as on those rare occasions when a populist campaign captures a major party. William Jennings Bryan, the spell-binding western orator who advocated inflationary “free silver” (don’t ask) to break the power of Wall St bankers, was Democrat candidate for president three times between 1896-1908, but lost three times: a divisive Marmite politician almost before Marmite.

Tony Benn leading the Labour party might have been much the same, and with the same result. You can see the same effect at work in a smaller way by examining the career of the talented George Galloway, who has never seemed able to work well with other people for long – he broke with Labour and went on his charismatic way to a predictable outcome (I hesitate to say “end” in his case) in Bradford West on 7 May.

Mainstream politics is littered with such train wrecks, but mainstream parties in our kind of first-past-the-post system are usually strong enough to absorb or reject charismatic, but disruptive insurgents. Labour survived Oswald Mosley’s disloyalty in the 1930s, though his economic analysis was smarter than theirs (William Jennings Bryan too?), just as it did the SDP gang of four’s defection in the 1980s. But for Hitler, Churchill’s career might have tanked the same way.

Major parties are like well-built houses in an earthquake: they survive where weaker properties collapse. That is the test Labour now faces in its existential crisis. But it is noticeable that none of the candidates to succeed Ed (it does seem a long time ago, doesn’t it?) Miliband are attacking a rival in the way Ukip’s Patrick O’Flynn did Farage in the Times last week. Not since the damaging Gaitskellite v Bevanite spilt in the 1950s has Labour been so ravaged. Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is divisive, but never that bad within her party and she was a fastidious respecter of party procedures.

In the end the party matters more than individuals in the big league, which is why the Tories knifed her when they deemed their triple election winner a liability in 1990. Ditto Tony Blair in 2007. Big parties are not always right, but they are broad churches which have been around a long time and plan to stay around.

Only in faction-driven politics, sometimes accentuated by the proportional representation forms of voting that encourage multiple parties – it’s even happening again now in Germany – is the leader the cement that holds it together. Just look at Bibi Netanyahu’s destructive grip on Israel, a rare example of a populist capturing a democratic state.

Despite last week’s failure to send more than Douglas Carswell (not a populist by temperament, but a high-minded, libertarian idealist) back to Westminster, Ukip still has huge disruptive potential because it lured David Cameron into promising an in/out referendum on Europe which – so we are told – will be a Queen’s speech priority. This is like betting blind in a card game – risky. Angela Merkel has more problems than Brexit to worry about.

Related: Cameron to publish EU referendum bill one day after Queen's speech

So Ukip’s feuding is not merely a sideshow. There is much at stake. Farage’s party critics clearly feel he has got too big for his boots, too divisive, too autocratic, too unpopular ever to break out of the 12.6 % share of the vote Ukip won on 7 May. Some simply think he made a fool of himself by promising to resign if he failed (again) in South Thanet and then changed his mind. What Nigel needs is a good holiday, they say. There are smart people and deep pockets on both sides.

In fairness to Farage, he has two points in his favour. One is that he didn’t really want to become party leader and resisted calls in the early struggling years of Ukip when assorted egomaniacs and nice no-hopers were in charge and botched successive opportunities.

Why not? It cost him his business career in the metals boom years (EU pay and expenses are only partial compensation) and it cost him a chunk of his self-indulgent lifestyle. He really does like a good time.

It’s one reason why he took the leadership in 2006, but resigned it (briefly) in 2009 to fight Speaker Bercow’s Buckingham seat (a mistake and – literally – a plane crash too), only to return after his defeat.

Secondly, Ukip’s organisation was appalling until Farage and his allies took a grip and set up viable structures. There have always been feuds and bitter websites launched by disappointed ex-members. Farage has run a tight ship, expelling those suspected of neo-Nazi tendancies or guilty of egregious financial misconduct and/or unforgivable conduct. He does have a point when he complains that similar offences in the big parties get less media attention – though Chris Huhne, Jonathan Aitken, Denis MacShane and others may disagree.

But Ukip is attractive to people who enjoy a scrap and dislike wishy-washy compromise which is the essence of mainstream politics except in acute crisis. That’s why they are in Ukip, why they’re populists. They boast that their councillors, MEPs and MPs (the ones who didn’t get elected on 7 May) are not bound by party whips, they vote as their conscience dictates or – in Farage’s own case in a string of Strasbourg voting gaffes – by ticking the nearest box.

It is surely no coincidence that the SNP, populist in so many respects, imposes very tough internal party discipline. O’Flynn is an MEP and his comments about his leader last week would have been an expulsion matter in the SNP. It may be illiberal, authoritarian even, but it works, at least for a while. That’s why the SNP is a party of government and Ukip is not.

In politics, as in much else, there’s always a make-your-mind-up moment. If Ukip is serious about giving Farage an enforced sabbatical and keeping him well clear of the out campaign in the referendum, it had better line up a tough, credible alternative first. It won’t be easy.

An ousted leader doesn’t have to be related to his or her successor to give them a hard time. Do they Ted, do they Margaret?