Farage’s Real Legacy Will Be the End of the Two-Party State

Just as Reform is poised to take power, splinter groups are forming that may derail the prospect of a Reform Government, one endorsed by Idiot Musk.

From The European Conservatice

By Joseph Robertson

Brexit changed Britain’s relationship with the world, a monumental feat. But if he succeeds, Nigel Farage’s final act will be even greater: to change Britain itself.

Political brands are not built overnight. They are forged in the crucible of public life, hammered into shape over decades of campaigns, controversies, media appearances, and electoral battles. They require a unique alchemy of personality, persistence, and timing. To imagine that a credible, national political force can be conjured from thin air by a disgruntled faction and a billionaire’s tweet is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in this country.

It is this delusion that has recently taken hold on the fringes of the new right, and it threatens to squander a once-in-a-century opportunity.

The emergence of splinter groups such as Ben Habib’s ‘Advance UK’ and Rupert Lowe’s ‘Restore Britain’ movement is a predictable, if regrettable, symptom of a successful insurgency. As Reform UK transitions from a party of protest to a government-in-waiting, those who prefer the purity of the pulpit to the messy process of power have peeled away. Appearing to give their endeavours a superficial gloss of credibility is tech billionaire Elon Musk, who, peering at Britain through the distorting prism of his X feed, has declared Nigel Farage “weak sauce” and anointed Habib’s fledgling outfit as the true vehicle for change.

This is a profound miscalculation, born of Silicon Valley naivety. Musk, a genius of engineering, fails to grasp the messy mechanics of politics. He sees a brand and assumes it can be replicated or replaced, like a new model of car. He is wrong. The Farage brand is not a startup; it is a political institution thirty years in the making. To back splinter groups now is not to accelerate change but to risk shattering the battering ram from the side, just as it is about to breach the gates of the establishment. Farage is the only man who has spent a lifetime building the war machine for the job.

How to build a political juggernaut

To appreciate the scale of the strategic error being made by the Online Right and their backers, one must grasp the sheer longevity of the Farage project. This is not an insurgency that began with the Brexit referendum or the collapse of the Conservative vote. Its origins lie in the post-Maastricht rebellions of the early 1990s. Nigel Farage was a founding member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in 1993, a time when Euroscepticism was a fringe, almost eccentric, political position. For the next three decades, he embarked on the slow, painstaking task of building a political identity from the ground up.

This was a multi-platform, multi-decade campaign. It began in the relative obscurity of the European Parliament, where he was first elected in 1999. From Strasbourg, he honed a unique style of political theatre, using the chamber as a stage for viral attacks on the EU elite that earned him notoriety and a growing following back home. But the brand was built far beyond the formal political arena. He became a fixture on broadcast media, hosting radio phone-ins on LBC and presenting on GB News, mastering the art of direct, unmediated communication with the public.

He cultivated a celebrity persona that transcended politics, one which culminated in an appearance on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! From an attack on Van Rompuy that became enshrined in the heart of every engaged ‘politics enjoyer’ to being locked in a caravan with writhing snakes for the benefit of the wider, less politically-driven British public, Nigel has walked a long path to notoriety. 

This is the political equivalent of what investors call ‘deep value.’ It cannot be replicated. While Farage was building a national profile, his current rivals were pursuing careers in business or as minor figures in other parties. They now seek to reap a harvest they did not sow, to build a brand in a matter of months that took Farage a lifetime to create. In terms that the ever-online Musk might understand: they are trying to purchase a pre-assembled battering ram from Temu, while Farage has spent 30 years forging his from Sheffield steel.

Why Musk gets it wrong

Elon Musk’s endorsement of Advance UK is a case study in the limits of technological genius. Not a strategic masterstroke, but a category error that views the complex, emotional, and deeply tribal world of British politics as a marketplace of ideas where the “best product” will win. 

His dismissal of Farage as “weak sauce” for refusing to embrace figures like Tommy Robinson is not merely an error of judgement. Rather, it reveals a wider failure to understand the central strategic challenge of any successful populist movement: the need to build a broad coalition. Farage’s political genius lies in his pragmatism. Unlike his detractors, he understands that narrow sects cannot move from the fringes to the centre of power. For that, a party must be a broad church, appealing to the disaffected Labour voter in the Red Wall as much as the disillusioned Tory in the shires. To maintain this coalition requires discipline and a ruthless focus on the issues that unite it—primarily immigration and the failures of the political establishment—while avoiding the toxic associations that would destroy it.

Ironically,  Habib himself once understood this. In 2019, he explicitly rejected joining UKIP precisely because of its association with Tommy Robinson, stating it pushed the party to a part of the political spectrum where he did not believe it to belong. Now, having been ousted from Reform’s leadership, he leads a splinter group that courts the very same fringe. Musk’s backing does not remedy this, nor make Advance UK a serious contender; it merely confirms its status as a marginal force born of the chronically-online right.

The demolition of the duopoly

The tragedy of this splintering is that it comes at the very moment when Farage’s career-long ambition is within his grasp. And that ambition is, and always has been, far greater than Brexit. Leaving the European Union was a monumental, history-altering event, but it was ultimately a single—albeit seismic—policy change. The true prize, the legacy that would dwarf even that achievement, is the permanent destruction of the two-party system that has dominated and failed Britain for a century.

Slaying this modern-day Orthrus would be the real revolution. For generations, the Conservative and Labour parties have operated as a political cartel, offering the illusion of choice while presiding over a consensus of managed decline. They have become hollowed-out, ideologically bankrupt institutions, commanding the loyalty of an ever-shrinking minority of the electorate. The combined Conservative-Labour vote share has been in a seemingly-terminal decline for decades, falling from over 97% in the 1950s to just 57% in last year’s election. The system is broken, the voters are detached, and the political establishment is ripe for demolition.

To achieve this requires a political force of unique character. It needs a leader whose name recognition is universal, whose brand has been stress-tested over decades, and who has the proven ability to build and maintain a coalition that cuts across traditional party lines. Only Nigel Farage fits that description. The ideologues seeking to divide the movement are playing with fire—a fire that threatens to burn to ashes the battering ram carried by the would-be reformers, just as it reaches the establishment’s gates. 

For voters desiring radical change, the choice is stark: They can indulge in the fantasy politics of startup parties, backed by politically naive billionaires.  Or they can unite behind a man who has spent thirty years building the only siege-tool capable of smashing the old system to pieces.

Brexit changed Britain’s relationship with the world, a monumental feat. But if he succeeds, Nigel Farage’s final act will be even greater: to change Britain itself. That will be his true legacy.