[Twosugars]

If Brexit party members were happy to swallow their principles for the greater good, they would have backed the bigger parties


Nigel Farage must be furious with Nigel Farage. After all, the Brexit party leader is forever accusing conventional politicians of settling for grubby compromises when they should have been shooting for the moon. He’s always quick to condemn a sellout, to cry treachery and betrayal.

So we can only imagine what this Nigel Farage, the man who never surrenders, makes of the Nigel Farage who secretly offered the Tories an electoral pact that would mean his party pulling out of all but a few dozen seats – the one who boasts of having told Boris Johnson that he could “win you the general election now”, only to be rebuffed.

But that’s not all. Nigel Farage will not, he informed us, be voting at all in this election because the other Nigel Farage has withdrawn the candidate in his home constituency. Nigel Farage has disenfranchised Nigel Farage. Confused? Imagine how Brexit party voters feel.

Their leader has done his best to bluster his way out of all this, accusing the Tories of not being truly committed to securing a pro-leave parliament. But the fact remains that he blinked first. The man who vowed to stand in every seat in the country has already pulled his candidates out of more than 300 Tory-held seats and was secretly prepared to dump over 200 more in return for a free run at fewer than 40 seats. All that stopped him was the Tories’ refusal to openly remove themselves from the ballot paper in his chosen seats, promising only to covertly down tools and make it easy for his candidates. But for that technicality, he would presumably have hopped happily into bed with them.

No wonder there are reports of confused Brexit party supporters, unsure of what game their leader is playing. They still complain that Johnson’s offer isn’t real Brexit, but Tory candidates can now retort, “Well, Nigel Farage thinks it is.” After all, if the deal is good enough for the huge swathes of the country he is happy not to contest, why isn’t it good enough for the rest?
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...t-party-farage