Nigel Farage’s Brilliant Failure
When Britons go to the polls today, Nigel Farage won’t be on any of the ballots. Many of the prospective candidates for his nascent Brexit Party won’t be featured, either. At the start of this election campaign, the arch–Brexit supporter announced that he and his party would stand aside to help Prime Minister Boris Johnson secure a governing majority—and, crucially to Farage, finally “get Brexit done.”
Yet even if Johnson does get the majority he craves, defeating an array of parties that want to delay or reverse Brexit, and he takes Britain out of the European Union in the months to come, Farage is unlikely to receive any credit.
What the Brexit Party leader framed as a selfless and tactical move to ensure that Brexit takes place, others saw as an admission of his own failure. Farage has underdelivered on grand promises before: He failed to get his first political project, the UK Independence Party, into Britain’s political mainstream; he failed to win a seat in the House of Commons—not once, but seven times—and he even failed to win a spot on the official pro-Brexit campaign during the 2016 referendum, despite being instrumental in bringing it about. By bowing out of this election early on, Farage seemed to be avoiding a sad, similar fate.
Farage’s lack of electoral triumph doesn’t mean
