It was finally Nigel Farage’s time to appear before a BBC Question Time audience this evening, more than a week after Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer had theirs. The Reform UK leader took the podium in the same hour as a Green Party representative, Adrian Ramsay. Yet only one of these men has excited reaction from our writers.
Here, Sam Ashworth-Hayes and Tom Harris give their verdicts: both believe Mr Farage faced a tough fight, and could have done better.
After a bruising week in the press, this was always going to be a challenging evening for Farage. There was an early hint of the trouble in store during the questions for Adrian Ramsey, co-leader of the Greens, who gleefully took the opportunity to reference Channel 4’s undercover filming in Clacton, before promptly failing to answer a question about the views of candidates in his own party, and sinking gently without a trace.
Up stepped Nigel. Question one: “What is it about you and your party that attracts racists and extremists?”
So, a friendly audience then. Farage started off ok, pointing out that he does not in fact want racists or extremists, and condemned the comments made over the weekend, before veering off-piste into allegations of an establishment stitch-up. Channel 4, of course, denies any such thing.
There were ways of handling it – “yes, we condemn it, there are bad people in every party, we’ll get better at weeding them out” – that might have moved the matter on. Instead, we got a lengthy discussion of whether it was or was not “a political setup of astonishing proportions” that set the tone for the rest of the evening.
A series of questions focused on immigration, without which “this country would be nothing”, according to one audience member. Farage handled that one well – saying it worked well when it was low and managed – and was generally polished in his performance. But it was hard to shake the feeling that the audience was enjoying putting the boot in, and he appeared discomforted.
For a politician who thrives on sentiment and rhetoric, this appearance was a problem. The audience was not one his particular mix of policies and personality chimed with. His strength as a disruptor is when he’s allowed to do the heckling, standing opposite a politician from a larger party and needling them on their own record. This evening was an illustration that he is not entirely immune to those tactics himself.
Presumably Nigel Farage is reconsidering his demand that he and his party deserve more TV coverage.
To give him his due, he didn’t wilt under the pressure from the BBC Question Time audience, quite a few of whom seemed rigidly opposed to everything the Reform UK leader stood for. It felt like some sort of cathartic experience for ordinary Britons who felt free at last to be as rude – or at least as forthright – as they liked.
Question after question sought, and succeeded in, skewering Farage, mainly over immigration, but also the foul language of some of his candidates and volunteers. Fiona Bruce, who was in charge, almost gagged as she read out one appallingly offensive quote, offering Farage the opportunity to clarify that the party had distanced himself from him. Which it had. We think.
It’s all the fault of someone else, said Farage, in this case the private company who was paid to vet candidates on his behalf.
The sure-footedness of the man who triggered the Brexit debate was put under pressure as never before, and given he has had plenty of time to prepare for this grilling, given he has publicly demanded such an opportunity, he was rather short on answers.
It would be natural, for instance, to assume that he would be able to capitalise on the Government’s inaction in the face of the arrival of small boats on the south coast, or from Labour’s determination not to come up with an alternative to the Rwanda scheme. Instead Farage fumbled what should have been a gift of a question from an audience member who was somewhat sceptical about how asylum seekers can be returned to France.
Leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights was about the extent of the “solution”, and it’s fair to say that he sounded unconvinced about his own response.
Towards the end it was another question from the audience that left Farage flummoxed: why was his party advocating fear, in contrast to the Green Party co-leader who had appeared earlier in the programme advocating hope?
Again, Farage was out of answers, and sought instead to deliver the same old “bloke in a pub” schtick that has worked so often in the past but which now looks tired and just a bit embarrassing.
