Farage has done the decent thing – the Tories need to reciprocate

This is undoubtedly a seismic moment in the 2019 general election, but beyond that basic realisation even the most informed commentators are struggling to understand what its exact consequences will be. Nigel Farage’s grand renunciation, in withdrawing his Brexit Party candidates from 317 Conservative-held seats, is a dramatic development in several respects.

Firstly, it presents the unfamiliar spectacle of a political leader putting country before party. There have been patchy agreements involving small groups of Remain politicians forging pacts in an attempt to frustrate Leave candidates, but this is different: standing down hundreds of candidates who posed a threat to the Tories’ tenure of existing seats is a far larger exercise. But will it have far larger consequences? The answer is yes – and no.

Professor John Curtice credibly argues that the Tories will benefit from Farage’s move, but that it provides “not as big a boost as we might imagine”. He has pointed out that it will not help Boris Johnson in marginal seats he hopes to take from Labour: “Nigel Farage’s offer doesn’t really give the Prime Minister the price he would really want, which is a free run against the Labour Party.”

Exactly so. This development does not remove the threat of the Brexit Party splitting the Tory vote in seats it needs to capture to gain a majority, so that the Tory/Brexit Party confrontation still endangers Brexit by threatening to let Labour and the Lib Dems through the middle. There is still an impasse: how can it be resolved?

Consider the dilemma from each party’s point of view. Has Nigel Farage really made a major concession or is it a political ploy? It is undoubtedly a genuine and major concession which Farage hated making – his demeanour during the announcement spoke volumes – but that does not prevent it also being an adroit political calculation.

It was not just the hyper-active Tory propaganda machine that was demonizing Farage as the man most likely to destroy Brexit – the chief ambition of his life. Leave voters and even some of his own candidates were dismayed by his initial hard-line stance against Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement. Of course it was Theresa May’s treaty reheated, but political reality demanded action to obviate a Remain election victory producing a second referendum, revocation of Article 50 or some similar horror.

Farage has accepted that. He is no longer making the unrealistic demand that Boris Johnson should abandon his deal, all he is really asking is that the Conservative manifesto should not rule out No Deal in all circumstances: that and some electoral quid pro quo in seats where he honestly and rightly believes his party has a better chance than the Tories of ousting Labour.

From Boris Johnson’s point of view it was never conceivable that he would abandon his EU agreement; fortunately, that is no longer the issue. He leads a movement that, despite recent batterings, still considers itself one of the historically great parties of state, making it almost unthinkable to barter seats with a parvenu party just one year old.

That de haute en bas mentality is the Conservatives’ worst danger, with resonance of the arrogant Tory grandees’ mantra about supporters: “They have nowhere else to go.” Have they forgotten what the Brexit Party did to them as recently as the European elections, when This Great Party of Ours scored a derisory nine per cent of the vote? Yes, there are huge differences between an EU and a general election, but by common consent this election does not conform to any precedent, being uniquely unpredictable.

The Conservatives need to reciprocate with some kind of concession to Farage. It need not be on anything approaching the scale of his withdrawal, but something is needed. The Tories standing down in Hartlepool would be a good litmus test. Boris Johnson cannot realistically afford to alienate his more Europhile supporters with headline concessions to Farage, but he should turn an encouraging Nelson eye to local pacts in Labour seats in the north of England, the Midlands and Wales.

Farage is right when he claims that, for cultural reasons, there are huge numbers of Labour voters disenchanted with Corbyn but emotionally incapable of voting Tory: let the Brexit Party harvest them for the Leave camp. Otherwise, trench warfare in Labour Leave seats between Tories and the Brexit Party could ensure the survival of a Leninist revolutionary movement that bears no relationship to the party of Hugh Gaitskell.

Under those circumstances Nigel Farage’s concession would have very little impact on the election outcome. It is important to recognize, however, that the principal outcome of Nigel’s grand renunciation is psychological. It lances the boil that threatened to diffuse poison throughout the Leave camp. If something catastrophic happens on 12 December, in the subsequent recriminations the man in the focal point of a Bateman cartoon will not be Nigel Farage but Boris Johnson, in the role of The Man Who Broke Brexit.

This move diminishes the feeling of self-destruction that was demoralizing many Brexit Party and wider Leave activists who saw the Remain camp creating electoral alliances while they prepared to exchange friendly fire with fellow Brexiteers. Less evidently, of course, the real danger persists in Labour-held seats. That can only be neutralized by some kind of goodwill gesture from the Conservatives.

For Remainers, which includes a flaky fringe of Conservatives, the narrative is that Nigel has blinked first and the great Tory Party has seen off his Mickey Mouse outfit and is sailing serenely to election victory. That kind of delusion is lethal. The Remain parties, of course, are deploying precisely that triumphalist narrative. But behind the bravado they are dismayed. At a stroke, the small advantage possibly accruing from their Macchiavellian pacts (perhaps half a dozen parliamentary seats) has been obliterated.

That much Farage has delivered and its damaging effect on the morale of the Remain camp should not be underestimated. More than that is needed, though. The Conservative Party needs to moderate its language with regard to Farage and the Brexit Party or a gulf may develop that cannot be bridged, with catastrophic consequences for Brexit.

The Tories have developed a neurotic fear of being seen to be in any way allied with Farage, cowed by Jeremy Corbyn’s rhetoric about a “Trump” coalition. The public is not so easily gulled: it is already contemplating the implications of a Corbyn-led cabinet debating what percentage bloc vote should be allocated to trade unions in the people’s assembly summoned to debate possible retaliation against the incoming missiles.

Farage will be seen by many voters as having done something few politicians have done in recent memory – the decent thing. The British sense of fair play awards him kudos for that and will expect some reciprocal gesture, even if minor, from the Tories. Over to you, Boris.