Nigel Farage is no original thinker. This week, he was quaffing the bubbles in Manchester at Tory party conference, throwing shapes with Priti Patel and bellowing his support at every dog whistle blown by a succession of leadership hopefuls. After staggering away from it more than 30 years ago, it seems that Nigel is once again at home within the Tory party. It reminded me of someone you may never have heard of: Preston Manning.
Little considered in British politics, the Canadian rightwinger Manning is the proto-Farage, the Betamax to his VHS, version 1.0, and the parallels are stark. A longtime party member, Manning grew frustrated with the Progressive Conservative party of Canada (PCP) and led a breakaway rump in 1987 to establish the socially conservative Reform party of Canada. It was strongly affiliated with the Christian right, and eventually rose to prominence as a populist party, strongly advocating retrenchment of the state, anti-LGBT values and fiscal conservatism.
