June 24, 2024 - 10:00am

Reform UK has performed startlingly well since the return of Nigel Farage, and is now ahead of the Conservative Party according to several polls. It’s unsurprising, then, to find Farage’s opponents — on the Right as well as the Left — leaning into an issue on which Reform’s supporters are clearly split: Ukraine.

Since Farage defended earlier statements from a BBC interview with Nick Robinson, in which he laid some responsibility for the Ukraine war at the feet of Nato and the EU, a frenzy of media condemnation has ensued spanning most mainstream press outlets, 10 Downing Street, and every other major party leader.

Now, Farage has hit back at the press, after the Mail on Sunday’s front page quoted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office as joining the dogpile by describing him as “infected with Putinism”. The Reform leader retorted, via his X account, that this was a misleading hit piece and “breach of the editors’ code”. In the same edition of the Mail on Sunday, the headline was joined by an editorial denouncing “sympathy for Putin, or even an attempt to explain his actions”, as “not much better than sympathy for Hitler”, a view the MoS regards as aligned not just with elite consensus but also “British public opinion”.

Certainly, if you scroll far enough into the front-page Zelensky report, the body of text does indeed acknowledge that the Ukrainian President has not, in fact, made this statement about Farage (or anyone else). Rather, an anonymous source in his office said “the virus of Putinism, unfortunately, infects people” — without specifying which “people”. In Farage’s view, the newspaper has spun a misleading headline on this basis so as to whip up emotion against Reform and support “their friends” in the “dying Conservative Party”. He added that he so adamantly contests this falsehood that he has instructed the notorious legal attack dogs Carter-Ruck.

The exchange that provoked the brouhaha was an exasperating instance of soundbite TV: a medium in which it is, by design, impossible to explore divergent assumptions. It’s clear that Farage’s assessment of the Ukraine situation has long been premised on a currently-unfashionable realist understanding of geopolitics, while Robinson’s hews to the liberal internationalism currently dominant in American officialdom and its global outposts. Conclusions which read as coherent within a realist frame, such as the notion that one may “provoke” retaliation without being “in the wrong” in any absolute sense, read as morally bankrupt within an internationalist one.

Pitting these perspectives against one another without acknowledging the divergent assumptions is at best futile. But even accepting that sensationalising this kind of disconnect is the whole point of soundbite TV, to my eye the more interesting gulf remains unacknowledged across the board: a generational split in baseline assumptions about Russia.

Anyone who is part of Generation X or older can at least dimly remember the Cold War; many Xers will vividly recall nuclear panic from their own childhoods. In that context, the prospect that Russia might be the primary threat to our safety feels intuitively correct, and sympathy for Russia codes reflexively as treacherous. By contrast, the entire 18-34 cohort was born following the end of the Cold War, and as such has no such first-hand memories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a February poll showed that this group is much more likely to rank Russia lower in the list of UK foreign policy priorities.

This generational divide, rooted in different historical experiences, represents a vulnerability for Farage, whose recent success rests on a potentially unstable coalition of older provincial voters and extremely online Zoomers. For as UnHerd polling noted earlier this month, Ukraine is the exception to a general mood of “realism” among the British public: overall, UK support for Zelensky against Putin is backed by voters. Farage’s unfashionable realism on the Nato question may be less of a vulnerability among his younger supporters, who don’t remember the Cold War, but it’s clearly out of step with the older portion of his base, as well as with British media and political consensus overall.

It’s hard to say whether his longstanding Russia realism will be enough to dent Farage on polling day. But it’s the first substantive wedge his enemies have identified with which they could potentially split the Reform coalition. So it’s no wonder that they’re hammering at it with all their might.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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