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October 27, 2025 
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 | By Tim Schneider Senior Staff Editor, International Opinion |
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Britain’s a pretty weird place these days. We have a Labour government, theoretically empowered by an enormous majority, marked by vacillation and delay. The opposition Conservatives, so long Britain’s masters, are meanwhile languishing in the wilderness. Instead, one figure bestrides the political scene, riveting attention: Nigel Farage.
A fixture of public life for three decades, Farage is not new. But his political prominence — domination, even — certainly is. His party, Reform U.K., tops every poll, and he is regularly touted as a prime minister in waiting. By any measure, this is an extraordinary development.
In a profile for Times Opinion, the journalist Samuel Earle takes the measure of the man. Bibulous, blokey, bluff, Farage has “always been a master of political innuendo.” But his rise is no joke. It is, Earle writes, “both a symptom and a cause of the newly febrile mood in Britain.”
Discontent is widespread and the far right is on the march. With a wink and a nudge, Farage corrals this diffuse distemper into a potent program that combines nativism with tax cuts. I’m sure this will sound familiar.
Where it ends is anyone’s guess. For now, it’s Farage’s world, and we Britons are just living in it.
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