The pinstriped proletarian

IT WAS so dark, when Bagehot first met Nigel Farage outside an East Anglian village hall, that the leader of the populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) was only visible when he sucked on his cigarette. The encounter was more than a year ago and over in seconds. But you would not guess that from the fulsome way Mr Farage describes it and the meeting of Suffolk “Kippers” that followed (“it was like the black hole of Calcutta in there!”) Assailed by his blokeish charm, at UKIP’s swanky new Mayfair office, your columnist reflects that Mr Farage is not only an unusual British politician, with his spivvy pinstripes and jackanapes gags, but also unusually good.

It is said he rarely forgets a face, which is amazing, given the quantity of ale he sinks on the campaign trail. And given the thousands of miles he covers, as the talismanic leader of possibly the fastest-growing party in British political history. In tough times, UKIP’s blend of Euroscepticism, mild xenophobia and yearning for the old, conservative Britain that Mr Farage’s hail-fellow bonhomie recalls is political dynamite. The party has roughly doubled its membership in three years, to 35,000, and is expected to top Britain’s elections to the European Parliament in May. As the first truly national political movement to emerge in Britain since the Labour Party in the late 19th century, UKIP has shaken British politics. If its mainstream rivals are wise, its insurgency will also inspire a more profound democratic overhaul.

No longer able to dismiss the party as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”—as the Tory prime minister David Cameron once did—they are scrambling to understand and maybe emulate it. A general rise in populism is a sign of this: including Labour’s serial apologies for the mass immigration its governments allowed and Mr Cameron’s promise of a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. So was a televised debate on April 2nd between Mr Farage and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Britain’s EU membership. Struggling in the polls, Mr Clegg wanted to tap Mr Farage’s popularity—though, in the event, the UKIP leader battered him with savvy putdowns.

UKIP’s established rivals are right to be anxious. The party’s rise has mainly damaged the Conservatives: a bit under half of UKIP voters are reckoned to be disaffected Tories. But the other two main parties have supplied most of the rest, and Labour’s losses are expected to grow. Mr Farage predicts UKIP’s spending on the European Parliament elections will be concentrated in the Labour strongholds of the post-industrial Midlands and north. Yet mainstream politicians will not see off UKIP by rivalling the populism of a party whose 2010 election manifesto amounted to £120 billion in unbudgeted spending pledges. Instead of trying to copy it, they need to consider why it is so popular.

With its roots in a Eurosceptic pressure group, formed by academics with a view to getting Britain out of the European Union, UKIP had until recently little to say on any other issue. That changed in the run-up to the 2010 general election, when the party began to connect Euroscepticism with public hostility to immigration from Europe, in increasingly propitious circumstances. Mr Cameron’s efforts to modernise his party, by stressing such lofty metropolitan concerns as gay rights, alienated traditionalists, while the euro-zone crisis boosted Euroscepticism. The Lib Dems’ decision to go into coalition with the Tories created a vacancy for a protest party. Almost accidentally, UKIP had discovered its core constituency—aggrieved, and deeply pessimistic, working-class white men. They are the Britons who have proved least adaptable to globalisation. They also feel least represented by the middle-class, Oxbridge-educated political class that rules the country, whichever party is in power. It is this disgruntlement that Mr Farage, almost alone in his party of, to be fair, quite a few nutters and fruitcakes, has proved most adept at speaking to. When he castigates his rivals as “cardboard cut-outs”, for their similar backgrounds and almost total lack of professional experience outside politics, he nails an important truth.

That is not all that can be said for his party, which is much less objectionable than many of the populist outfits growing across Europe. This reflects Britons’ historic wariness of hate preachers, which UKIP’s rise has in fact reinforced, by hastening the demise of the racist British National Party. But that does not mean the party has good answers to the problems its leader outlines. It is economically illiterate and wrong on every big issue. And Mr Farage can be horribly cynical. When your columnist put it to the UKIP boss, who lives partly in Brussels and is married to a German, that he simply did not believe his claim to feel “uncomfortable” at the babble of foreign languages on British public transport, Mr Farage blustered unconvincingly.

UKIP if you want to

That is why younger, better-educated voters—especially female ones—are warier of UKIP. And given Britain’s first-past-the-post system, this may be enough to stop it winning any seats in next year’s general election. But that is nothing to celebrate. It would mean the party was sufficiently powerful, in a crowded field, to influence the composition of Britain’s next government, but not to provide its core supporters with the representation they crave. Instead of improving British democracy, Mr Farage’s insurgency would have exacerbated one of its biggest weaknesses.

So it would be better for the mainstream parties to undertake remedial action themselves. There are no easy answers for disaffected Britons fighting the economic currents. But there are some difficult ones. Britain needs a more diverse political class than the increasingly professionalised and homogeneous one it is getting. More urgently, it needs party leaders to start prizing creative thinking—especially about the country’s left-behind—above personal loyalty. That would be a boon for everyone, not just the aggrieved minority whom Mr Farage has helpfully identified.