LONDON — Nigel Farage is supposed to be on his way to the east end of London, where he is due to stump for a Brexit Party candidate at a floating Chinese restaurant. Instead, he finds himself in the gilded tea room of the Ritz Hotel at 3 o’clock in the afternoon during his final election push.
“It’s off. The venue was getting threats,” he says with a sigh to the Washington Examiner.
It is a blow for a campaigner who relies on personal charisma and an everyman touch. Instead, he will be traveling north later for an eleventh-hour blitz seeking support from northern Labour voters who say they feel abandoned by political leaders who do not share their Brexit enthusiasm.
Yet for all the talk of a Brexit election, Farage’s Brexit Party is in danger of being squeezed into irrelevance by a Conservative Party that has adopted much of his language and some of his ideas.
In May, Farage’s new party stunned observers by taking almost a third of the vote in European elections. Its five and a quarter million votes reflected Briton’s fatigue with Brexit wrangling by the big parties and made the 55-year-old leader a major voice in the European Parliament.
But the political landscape has changed since then. Theresa May resigned as prime minister, to be replaced by Boris Johnson, who has taken a tougher line on Brexit.
As a result, Farage has stood down his candidates in the 317 seats won by Conservatives at the last election for fear of splitting the Brexit vote and letting in Labour or the Liberal Democrats, the most pro-Europe of the parties.
Worse came in the final days of the campaign. His party has been hit by a string of allegations of harboring racist or Islamophobic members; several of his team in the European Parliament defected, saying supporters should vote Conservative if they wanted to get Brexit done.
And then there is the personal abuse, the “milkshakings” — he was doused with a banana and salted caramel concoction in May — and threats that he blames on “Labour yobbos.” Which is how the leader of the Brexit Party finds himself amid the well-heeled tourists admiring the Ritz’s Christmas tree, grabbing a few minutes to himself and lunch away from the hurly-burly of campaign, instead of with voters in east London.
“The Left have been so horrible, so intolerant. Voter contact now has become almost impossible,” he said, explaining that it has become all but impossible to publicize events before they happen.
“I still do it, but I do it on an impromptu basis.”
The sentiment is a reminder of how politics on both sides of the Atlantic has become the stuff of insult and injury.
As campaigning draws to an end here, Johnson’s Tories have about a 10-point lead over Labour in opinion polls, enough for a slim majority in parliament. Brexit Party support has dipped to about 3%, but Farage insisted that was a result of his decision not to put up candidates everywhere.
“We got five and a half million votes in May,” he said, with a touch of exaggeration. “If I’d stood in all the seats, I would have got four and a quarter million votes in this election. They are different elections.”
At one point this year, he looked as if he might be kingmaker, able to make or break a Johnson government with his expected cadre of MPs. Instead, his aim now is simply to win his first seats.
“I’ve done it through easy electoral cycles, I’ve done it through difficulty electoral cycles,” he says of his ability to compete politically. “So I’m hoping to establish a bridgehead in parliament,” he said.
Johnson’s “oven-ready” Brexit deal, as the prime minister calls it, does not go far enough, said Farage. Although it removes Britain from its political institutions, it leaves everything from fishermen to financial services subject to EU regulations.
“Taxation without representation” would be the result.
“That won’t just make people angry on the Leave side. It will give the globalists on the Remain side a strong moral argument for using that same rallying cry of the American revolutionaries to go back in.”
That “oven-ready” deal will lead to years of indigestion, said Farage, who believes his bridgehead is essential to press Johnson into a full Brexit.
Farage is his own best spin doctor. But even opponents admit that he will almost certainly be back at the center of things whatever happens on Thursday.
“I think he will be disappointed in the result,” said one senior Conservative strategist, who went on to explain that the British voting public has almost certainly underestimated how difficult it will be for London to extricate itself from Europe.
“Expectations have been heightened, and that could really come back to bite Boris on the bum. Nigel Farage you can then see, whether with the Brexit Party or this new Reform Party, having an opening.”
Farage has already begun plotting life after Brexit. He has applied to register the next phase of his campaign in the shape of the Reform Party.
The idea might not be as easily digestible as the Brexit Party, but Farage said it was connecting with voters as he outlined a democracy deficit exposed by the 2016 referendum.
“Interestingly, what is working is the sense that Westminster is utterly disconnected from the real world,” he told supporters at one of his final events. “And our entire political system — postal voting, the House of Lords — all of these things need radical political reform.”
The path to winning his bridgehead is clear. His campaign is hammering the line that Britain’s blue-collar Brexit voters in the north of England have been let down by their Labour MPs, who are equivocating on leaving the E.U., running on a promise to hold a second referendum.
Americans might imagine a British Pennsylvania or Ohio as the kind of places Farage is talking about.
And in that, there is a clear lesson for President Trump, he said, whose supporters also had a legitimate case that their democratic will was being thwarted by an elitist establishment blocking the wall with Mexico or trying to remove the commander in chief.
“Interestingly, the London bubble mirrors the Washington bubble,” he said. “Three years on from those electoral shocks, the bubble are even more out of touch with Middle England and the flyover states even than they were three years ago.”
