The real reason Starmer loathes Farage

Hearing the succession of speakers at this week’s Labour Party conference talking about Nigel Farage (even when they weren’t saying his name, which they were a lot of the time), I couldn’t help thinking counterintuitively of the way people find any excuse to mention the name of a person they’re falling in love with. I’ve had conversations with friends about everything from the ECHR to constipation that they’ve all somehow managed to bring back to Mr X. And in a weird way, that’s what this feels like.

It’s not love, of course – Labour hates Reform for bursting its bubble – but it is a fascination with Farage that goes far beyond the usual political animosity. I think it comes from a place somewhere between bafflement and envy, the crux of the matter being that Farage is a ‘real’ person while many Labour politicians are simply a series of constructs – Starmer most of all, hence his inability to express passion without seeming like a robot about to short-circuit. Hearing him talk about patriotism in this week’s speech reminded me of the bit in Red Dwarf where the robot Kryten becomes ‘human’ for a day, and has to navigate issues such as whether it’s okay to still be sexually attracted to household gadgets as he peruses them in a brochure. (He’s also confused by having nipples, which I can see Starmer being, too.)

The rest of his gang aren’t quite so visibly Uncanny Valley. But you can see in many of them – Reeves, Cooper, Phillipson and Lammy come to mind – that they’ve made a decision at some point to ditch the things that made them want to be in politics in the first place, in favour of what would assist them in their ascension of the greasy pole. Now that the tide is so visibly turning against them, we may expect them to distance themselves from everything from mass immigration to transvestites’ rights, again perhaps not even consciously.

But they look at Farage, who won’t ever feel the need to take himself apart and put himself back together again, and they feel an overwhelming envy. That’s where all the endless pillorying comes from, as they dub him everything from a snake-oil salesman to a fan of the Hitler Youth.

Farage reminds me of a quote by my favourite Stoic, the former slave, Epictetus: ‘If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, “He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone”’. That Farage became more popular after appearing on a reality show – and coming in third, even after showing his behind – speaks volumes. A Yahoo poll, asking ‘Has your opinion changed on Nigel Farage during I’m a Celebrity…?’, found that 52 per cent liked him more, 36 per cent liked him less and 12 per cent had an unchanged opinion. (My favourite bit was when his I’m a Celebrity… campmate, TV cook Fred Sirieix, was reduced to accusing him of ‘hiding behind facts’ when they differed on Brexit.)

The deconstruction of the person in order to fit the persona has led to monumentally funny moments in the past, such as Ed Miliband not knowing how to eat a bacon sandwich or Gordon Brown getting het up about what kind of biscuit it’s okay to prefer. Both of these men must have entered politics as fairly normal people, but they were rightly mocked and rejected as mere husks of men when they exposed the desiccated essence that was left after decades of twisting and turning.

Nothing sticks to Farage because he has little or nothing to hide. His enemies have stopped childishly pointing out that his first wife was Irish, his second wife was German, that his current girlfriend is French, and that he himself has a Huguenot name. This was always something of an own goal, in any case, merely confirming that just because one is against the EU, one doesn’t dislike Europe in the least. (My first act after the Brexit result came in was to book a long weekend in Barcelona to celebrate.)

Similarly, they’ve laid off banging on that ‘He’s not a common man – he’s really rich!’ drum, due to his past career as a commodities trader. As the rise of Donald Trump as a totem of blue-collar rebellion proved, people aren’t that bothered by politicians being rich. They’re bothered by rich people finagling their way to further riches while pretending to be one of the common people – see the downfall of Angela Rayner. Farage is popular because he’s not a career politician. Like Trump, it doesn’t matter that he isn’t a common man – compared to Labour / Democrat politicians he seems like a common man, which says something shocking about Labour / Democratic Party elitism and nepotism.

A cliché in politics is ‘Who would you most like to go down the pub with?’. The safe answer used to be the smoking, drinking Tory Kenneth Clarke, until he revealed an entitled, petulant streak a mile wide after Brexit. Now it’s Farage; beer in one hand, fag in the other, he is the living, boozing, puffing embodiment of everything that Labour is seen only wishing to scold people over.

A little bit simian, a bit amphibian, he looks like he’d be a laugh – also quite like you thought Nick Heyward of Haircut 100 might grow up to look. He looks like one of the very few politicians – certainly the only party leader – who would know how to behave in a pub. (The idea of Ed Miliband or Gordon Brown ‘getting a round in’ is quite surreal.) He might wave a 50 at the barkeep if he was feeling flash, but you know he’d always have good solid cash on him. And unlike the freeloader from No10, he wouldn’t be looking around ceaselessly to let his rich mate pick up the tab.

I have one recollection of an image of Keir Starmer in a public house. It was during the pandemic, when a very angry landlord ordered him out of his pub, and Starmer just kept going towards him, offering him a pen, as a gift – because does not compute! More and more, with each weird speech and each lame ‘phase’, he reminds me of the William Hughes Mearns poem, ‘Antigonish’:

‘Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…’

The more Keir Starmer tries to be human – to do ‘passion’ – the more robotic he appears. And it’s getting much more noticeable and pronounced as his premiership goes on, whereas you’d think he’d pick it up as he went along. It’s odd to look back and remember that only last year, he was making the likes of Caitlin Moran sexually excited. I bet she’s not feeling ‘fruity’ now.

There will be an interesting time at the local elections, but it’s when Starmer and Farage go head to head at the General Election that we really will be in for one of the most entertaining contests ever – as the Hollow Man and the all-too-human man show what they’re made of, once and for all.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.