In free societies, when you don’t like the government, you support the opposition. In dictatorships, or under military occupation, you join the resistance. The distinction isn’t precise but it matters.
All European democracies have radical anti-immigration parties, some on the fringes of opposition, some that have crossed into the mainstream. None qualify as heroic resistance movements, except in the minds of white supremacists who see liberal institutions as part of a conspiracy to ruin Europe by filling it with foreigners. That is also the view taken in the new White House national security strategy, published last week.
The authors identify “civilisational erasure” by mass migration as a threat to American interests. To counter it, they propose “cultivating resistance … within European nations”. That means meddling in other countries’ domestic politics to boost those extreme nationalists – paranoiacs posing as patriots – who want to sabotage continental cooperation.
The EU is the main target of that agenda, because the combined power of European nations as a single bloc is a nuisance to Donald Trump in trade policy. He wants many small European clients, not one big economic competitor. Promoting far-right parties that will send nationalist wreckers to Brussels advances that goal.
So does tacit encouragement of Russian interests in Ukraine. Washington is impatient to get a lopsided peace deal over the line, and to normalise commercial relations with a Kremlin regime that machinates ceaselessly to undermine stability and solidarity among European democracies.
This all means there is a vacancy for a Maga stooge in Britain. Donald Trump can do some business with Keir Starmer, but there is no affinity of belief or shared cupidity with a Labour prime minister. The obvious partner would be Nigel Farage. The Reform UK leader oversells his intimacy with the US president’s entourage, but he is a stronger candidate for patronage than Kemi Badenoch, and not just because he is a white man.
The Conservatives are the official opposition. The Reform leader styles himself as a figurehead for resistance. The difference is more significant than it appears when the two parties stand on overlapping platforms. The Tories crave restoration to what they see as their rightful position at the apex of the established political hierarchy. Farage depends for his support on people who see that hierarchy as the problem. Badenoch wants to reclaim the house from Labour squatters. Reform wants to burn the house down.
That doesn’t necessarily make the Conservatives more moderate than Reform. To prove how tough they can be on immigration, the Tories published a draft bill earlier this year that overshot even Farage’s anti-foreigner zeal in its intent to expel thousands of legally settled people from Britain. It didn’t improve Badenoch’s ratings. She can’t outbid Farage for the trust of voters who care most about demographic dilution. Her party has a legacy of border management for him to attack; he has no governing record to defend.
Badenoch has now understood, with help from party grandees who privately urged a different approach, that she is better off changing the subject. The preferred topic is now the economy, where some recent polls show Conservatives are trusted more than Labour or Reform. That advantage may seem unearned, given the legacy of Brexit and Liz Truss. But the image of the Tories as the team you don’t have to like but can trust with money runs deep in the political culture. So does its counterpart cliche – that Labour always raises taxes and spends the proceeds on benefits.
Since Rachel Reeves’s recent budget did so much to reinforce that caricature, Conservatives are starting to feel more bullish about their prospects. Optimism would be too strong a word, but MPs think they can discern a vacancy opening up for a party that promises low taxes, spending restraint and more professional economic management than anyone expects from Farage and whichever spivvy grifter he may choose as his chancellor.
The Tories expect doubts about Reform’s competence and the shallowness of its talent pool to grow, as inexperienced councillors and mayors struggle to run the offices they have captured in local elections. Mindful of that vulnerability, Farage will want to recruit heavy-hitting Conservative defectors – former ministers, not just bloviating backbenchers – as a general election draws nearer.
But Reform has to be careful not to contaminate its maverick brand by looking like an agent of Conservative continuity. Farage’s base is stacked with former Tory voters, but that doesn’t make them amenable to switching back. No one joins the resistance to help elect has-beens from the regime they thought they were resisting.
Rotten government and stale opposition constitute one “uniparty” in Farage’s telling. That is why he has to insist in public that he isn’t interested in pacts with the Tories, although it has been reported that, in private audience with donors, he accepts the likely need for such an arrangement.
The electoral logic is irrefutable, but hard to translate into an operational joint venture. There are heaps of seats that incumbent Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs will hold if the local rightwing vote splits between Reform and Tories. There are fewer where it is obvious which challenging party should stand down in deference to the other. There are no reserves of trust at local or leadership level to support a trade in political favours where the currency is bruised egos and thwarted ambition.
For now, it is a waiting game. Farage hopes the Tories may yet collapse and send him scores of sitting MPs looking for safe seats as Reform candidates. The Conservatives hope Reform has peaked; that normal political gravity will weigh on Farage as his suitability to be prime minister comes under scrutiny.
That would happen sooner if Badenoch opposed Reform with anything like the ferocity she brings to attacks on the government. But she doesn’t see that as her job.
Most frontbench Conservatives won’t go on the record saying Farage is unfit to lead the country, even if they suspect it to be true, because they also suspect they may be propping up his government, or pleading for jobs in it, by the end of the decade.
The dwindled pack of genuine Tory moderates, viscerally appalled by Reform rhetoric, view this whole process “from under the duvet”, as one MP puts it. They are waiting for the nightmare to end, despairing that they don’t have the numbers or the leadership to end it.
There is no encouragement in the experience of other western democracies where established centre-right parties have been eclipsed by radical challengers. The trend is for the old guard to switch from denial of the threat, via defeat, to craven collaboration, usually rationalised with the delusion that a restraining influence can be exerted from the inside.
Badenoch’s Conservatives have so far shown no more courage in fighting firebrand nationalism than those traditional Republicans who let themselves be consumed in the Maga inferno. One important difference is that British voters see what is happening in the US and most don’t like it.
The offer contained in Trump’s national security doctrine – to turn Britain into one of Washington’s satellite states in a Europe partitioned between Russian and American spheres of influence – is not one that any truly patriotic politician should accept. It is easy to see the appeal for Farage, as a fellow traveller of the Maga project. For Badenoch it presents an important dividing line, albeit one that Conservatives cannot see or dare not name. It is the difference between an opposition party that is loyal to British democracy, and one that would serve a foreign despot and call it resistance.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
