Politics / The thinking behind Nigel Farage’s shadow cabinet |
James Heale has narrated this article for you to listen to.
There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?… Because nothing grows under him.’ The comparison to this acid-leafed tree which stifles all beneath it is one the Reform UK leader has never accepted. ‘I don’t fall out with people,’ he once said. ‘They fall out with me.’
Like Tintin, Farage has enjoyed many different adventures in different guises: ‘Nigel in America’, ‘Nigel in the Jungle’, ‘Nigel in the City’. This week, we got another: ‘Nigel and the Gang of Four’, the leader who seeks power only to yield it to others. Four names were unveiled as part of Reform’s new ‘shadow cabinet’ to show he is building something bigger than himself.
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Robert Jenrick, onetime hope of the Tory right, is now recast as Farage’s ‘shadow chancellor’. His first speech identified two areas where his new party is most vulnerable to attack by his former colleagues: welfare and fiscal stability. In pledging to restore the two-child benefit cap and retain the Office for Budget Responsibility, Jenrick showed a ruthless desire to deny the Tories any oxygen as the party of prudence.
Richard Tice’s role is akin to that of John Prescott in New Labour. As ‘shadow deputy prime minister’, he heads a souped-up super-ministry of various briefs and connects the leadership to its party grassroots. Energy, trade, business and housing are all part of his portfolio. Having listened to the grievances of almost 1,000 business leaders over 50 breakfasts in recent months,........