If Brexit is so unpopular, why is Farage winning?

Let’s start with some contradictory facts. Exhibit A is the almost historic unpopularity of Brexit. When Britons are asked if the 2016 referendum vote was a mistake, Yes leads No by 25%. Asked how they’d vote in a new one, Rejoin leads Stay Out by around 15%.

Perhaps these leads will grow still further as it becomes clear that not only has leaving the EU badly damaged the economy, it has also damaged our health. Last week came news of rocketing import costs for new cancer drugs – on average nearly four times as much, and up to tenfold. This week it’s a University of Surrey study concluding that Brexit’s impact on the NHS, with skilled EU staff leaving, led to 1,485 extra deaths per year in the three years following the referendum.

Exhibit B is that Nigel Farage, architect of Brexit and former leader of the Brexit Party, is likely to be the big winner from elections held on Thursday. Runcorn & Helsby has been won, by just six votes. Well before the polls closed, Nigel Farage had declared victory for Reform’s Luke Campbell in the Hull & East Yorkshire mayoralty election and talked of his party winning hundreds of seats and taking or sharing power on several councils.

The graceless Andrea Jenkyns, whose political career seemed likely to end in deserved ignominy when she raised a middle finger to Partygate protestors in the dog days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, is the new mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. If Brexit is so unpopular, why is a woman who nicknamed her son “Brexit” and who gave a character witness to a Tory activist jailed for making violent threats to Yvette Cooper over Brexit (“I’m already organising to hurt her… I’m going to get her beat up”) about to win a £86,060-a-year position? In 2020, Jenkyns predicted that Brexit would “put Grimsby back on the map, restoring the pride of our once great fishing ports, bringing jobs and wealth back to this forgotten community”. None of that has happened, so why is Grimsby voting for Andrea Jenkyns?

There are several reasons for Reform’s surge – disappointment with the pace of change under Labour and with some of Keir Starmer’s policies, the slow death of the Conservatives, the “one of us” appeal Farage has for some voters. Part of it is astute if repellent campaigning by Farage, who has barely mentioned what he used to call his “life’s work”, does not seem particularly excited about the so-called assault on “Brexit freedoms” and has put fear of migrants at the heart of his strategy instead.

But part of it must be Labour’s unwillingness or inability to tie Farage to Brexit. The party believes there is more to be gained by going after him on a paid-for NHS, but the tactic seems to have paid scant dividends this time. Nerves about seeming to insult voters who went for Leave in 2016 are surely outweighed by polls showing that 20% of them would now change their minds, and the knowledge that a good chunk of the other 80% are permanently lost to Labour in any case.

Farage has not run Brexit in government, but he made outlandish claims for its benefits and struggles to define how he would make it work any better than the Tories. Yet Labour refuse to point this out.

It is not how things normally work when your opponent has made a mistake. The SNP and Lib Dems profited hugely by targeting Tony Blair on Iraq. Labour successfully hung Partygate and a failed Brexit around Boris Johnson’s neck. Despite a tariff disaster that has made the world poorer, Labour will not attack Farage’s fanboying of Donald Trump either, because they need to do a little of that themselves in pursuit of a US trade deal.

You could argue that Labour are content to sit back, relatively happy to take their lumps as long as Farage does more serious damage to the Conservatives, defending most seats and councils this time. You could argue that the moment to attack Farage on Brexit is when Keir Starmer has a Europe policy worth defending, which he could have after the May 19 UK/EU summit.