Who’s ready for Nigel Farage as UK Prime Minister?
If he wins, Britain is heading for a constitutional crisis and more.
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It is the morning after the next general election and Nigel Farage is standing on the steps of Number 10, fresh from having visited the King who asked him to form a government. Farage, looking tired round the eyes but elated and beaming that famous grin, echoes the phrasing chosen by his hero Margaret Thatcher when she stood on the steps in 1979.
“Where there are illegal immigrants, let there be no illegal immigrants,” says the new Prime Minister. "Where there are human rights judges, let there be no human rights judges. Where there is a House of Lords packed with Labour and Tory cronies, let there be a House of Lords packed with my friends. Only joking! We’re going to abolish the whole rotten thing. And now, The People’s work begins. Vive le common sense revolution. In the words of my friend President Trump, beginning his third term in the White House, Britain is back, baby. We are so back.”
Actually, hold on, let’s stop that here. This is making me - and possibly you - feel slightly queasy.
I was planning to write one of those futurology pieces. In my youth as a political editor, an editor would sometimes ask me to do this. To imagine what lay ahead if the unimaginable happened and, say, Labour’s devolution plans went wrong and the SNP’s Alex Salmond became First Minister of Scotland. Like that was ever going to happen.
But in the case of Farage and Reform, the future is rushing in fast. His insurgent party is consistently ahead in the opinion polls and public anger is mounting over the inability of the British state, or any of the main parties, to get a grip on illegal migration and mass migration more broadly.