Rick Wilson’s Warning From America: Nigel Farage Will Be Your Donald Trump, Unless You Act Now

The former Republican strategist and Lincoln Project founder has some hard lessons for Conservatives and Labour alike

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage

A postcard from the country that already crashed the car, sent with love and a small amount of nausea, to the cousins who are about to crash a bigger one.

Friday afternoon in Westminster, and the smoke is still rising. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, the folks who won a sweeping landslide less than two years ago, just got fed into a wood-chipper.

Hartlepool, which already broke for the Tories in Boris Johnson’s 2021 by-election and has now gone Reform, completes its journey from cast-iron Labour redoubt to populist trophy in less than half a decade. Wales, which had voted Labour first in every Wales-wide election for over a century, just snapped that streak like a dry twig.

And here is the part that the early American write-ups are going to miss: Labour didn’t just lose. Labour got pincered. The Greens at seventeen per cent, eating the young, urban, liberal flank in London and the metropolitan areas under Zack Polanski, who is having the kind of breakout night that should be making Starmer’s strategists wonder if their entire coalition is dissolving in real time.

The SNP and Plaid Cymru, meanwhile, are hoovering up the pro-European, anti-populist vote in the devolved nations and quietly preparing arguments about whether Britain itself is still a going concern. This is not a one-front war. It is three.

The Tories, our protagonists for another paragraph, somehow managed to also lose, which is the kind of trick only a party of Kemi Badenoch’s garbage-tier calibre can pull off. And Nigel Farage… your Trump, but with worse taste and a hand stuck out for more obvious bribes, is calling it “a truly historic shift.”

He’s right. He’s also lying about what’s coming next. So sit down, pour something stronger, and let me tell you a little story about how this ends, because we Americans have already lived through Act One.

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The Lesson from the GOP

Once upon a time, there was a centre-right party in America. It believed in free trade, NATO, balanced budgets, and the idea that Russia was…stay with me here…the bad guy.

It had its problems. God, it had its problems. But it was a normal political party that lost normal elections and won normal elections, and the republic didn’t catch fire either way.

Then, in 2010, came the Tea Party. The respectable Republican consultants like me told themselves the populists were a useful little engine: bolt them onto the front of the train, harvest the Rush Limbaugh and Fox News-addicted angry Facebook Uncle vote, steer them toward tax cuts, and everyone goes home happy.

The grown-ups were going to be fine. “The Establishment Always Wins” was our not-so-secret mantra. Until it didn’t.

Six years later, the grown-ups were roadkill on the highway, and Donald Trump was rebranding the party in his own image.

This is the part the Tories need to understand, sitting there clutching their commemorative Thatcher mugs: you do not absorb a populist movement. The populist movement absorbs you. It eats your donors. It eats your activists. It eats your local associations. It eats your moderates first because they’re the most nutritious. Then it eats your conservatives. Then it stands there in your skin and tells everyone it was always there.

The Republican Party of 2026 is a death cult that does cosplay of the Republican Party of 2000. Mitch McConnell is a coat rack. Liz Cheney is in exile. The party of Reagan is the party of a man who thinks the Baltics are a nightclub and Vladimir Putin is just misunderstood. Everything they touched died. Their think tanks, their magazines, their agency, their ideas, their dignity, their grandchildren’s view of them at Thanksgiving… all of it, gone, converted into MAGA red hats and bluster on Twitter.

That’s the future the Conservative Party is staring at right now. Not “a tough cycle.” Not “a rebuilding period.” Extinction. Farage himself told the Evening Standard this week — and credit where it’s due, the man understands what he’s doing… that the Conservatives “will disappear as a national party.”

He’s not bragging. He’s filing the death certificate.

So before we move on to the rest of the horror show, let’s give the Tories their funeral. Stand up. Hat off.

This was the oldest continuously functioning political party in the democratic world. Disraeli. Churchill. Macmillan. Whatever you thought of them, and I thought a great deal about them, they were a serious institution that took serious decisions about a serious country. They built the modern Conservative-Labour duopoly. They governed an empire, then a Commonwealth, without burning the place to the ground. They were, in the long view, adults.

Hat back on, because here comes the moral.

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Eaten by the Tiger

The Tories did this to themselves. They did it the day David Cameron looked at UKIP rising in his rearview mirror and decided the cure was to hold a referendum he was certain he’d win. They did it every day Boris Johnson chose the easy lie over the hard truth. They did it when Liz Truss took the gilt market out behind the shed and nearly took the LDI pension funds with it.

They did it when they let Suella Braverman and her successors compete to see who could sound the most like an old man yelling at clouds. They thought they could ride the tiger of right-wing populism for an electoral sugar rush. They thought they could harvest Farage’s energy without becoming Farage. They thought wrong, and they died of it, and the autopsy is going to be brutal because they wrote it themselves, in real time, on the front page of the Daily Mail, for fifteen straight years.

This is what happens to conservative parties when they make peace with Yahoo authoritarianism. Every. Single. Time. Ask the French centre-right. Ask the Italian Christian Democrats. Ask the CDU in Germany, now rightly wary of being eaten by AFD. Ask the American GOP, if you can find a Republican willing to take your call who isn’t currently writing a book titled I Tried to Warn You.

Now. About your incoming Prime Minister. Oh, he’s not there yet, but the wind is behind him.

Nigel Farage spent years on the payroll of RT. Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language psy-op channel, kept him hopping, making appearance after appearance until the British Government finally banned the thing in 2022 because it turned out broadcasting Russian state propaganda during a war of aggression was, weirdly, bad.

He met privately with Alexander Yakovenko, then the Russian ambassador to London, in 2013, and then denied meeting him until photographic evidence forced a memory upgrade. Yakovenko was later identified in Parliament’s own Russia Report as a Kremlin influence operator, and was reportedly so pleased with his London tour that, upon recall to Moscow, he toasted having “crushed the British to the ground.”

Asked by GQ which world leader he most admired, Farage said Putin. He defended the annexation of Crimea. His closest MEP ally for years, Nathan Gill, was convicted at the Old Bailey of taking bribes from a pro-Russian Ukrainian operator working with Putin’s man in Kyiv.

Reform UK’s single largest donor at £9 million, the biggest political gift in modern British history, has financial entanglements with a video platform that has hosted Russian state broadcasters and a US Justice Department-exposed Kremlin influence operation.

Now, Farage will tell you he is a patriot. He will wave the Union Jack so hard it generates its own breeze. He will tell you he loves Britain. And perhaps in some way, he believes it. But here is the only sentence you need to remember:

The man who is about to inherit your country has spent twenty years on the wrong side of the war for Europe’s future.

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Regime Change

Putin lost in Kyiv. He lost in Berlin. He lost in Helsinki and Stockholm, when both countries joined NATO precisely because of him. The European project he set out to break is, somehow, still standing, and growing, almost against its own will, stronger.

The one place his project keeps winning is in the broken back end of the Anglosphere… and it wins every time a charming man with a pint glass tells working people that immigrants, the EU, the experts, the BBC, and the deep state are why their high street is boarded up.

That’s not a political program. That’s a Kremlin Christmas list.

Here’s the part where the cousins across the pond need to wake the hell up.

Brexit was the trailer to this coming horror film.

Brexit was a referendum on a single technical question that got hijacked into an emotional spasm and cost you four-plus per cent of GDP, your fishing industry, your students’ Erasmus year, and your seat at any table in European power or economics that mattered.

Brexit was, in fact, the dumbest unforced strategic error a major nation has committed in my lifetime, and I pitched the Iraq War for the GOP in my misspent youth, so I know a self-inflicted wound when I see one.

But Brexit was a policy. What’s coming next is a regime change.

Reform isn’t running on getting out of the EU. You already did that, folks. Congratulations. Enjoy your slow isolation.

Reform is running on mass deportations. On gutting the BBC. On war with the judiciary the moment a court tells them no. On a foreign policy authored in Mar-a-Lago and proofread in the Kremlin. On the Trump playbook, page for page, with broader vowels.

And here is where the American analogy actually undersells what’s coming, because America, for all its sins, is constitutionally and geographically locked together. You aren’t.

The pincer that hit Labour last night isn’t just an electoral problem; it’s a constitutional one. While Reform devours England, the SNP is sharpening its second-referendum pitch, Plaid is contemplating Welsh independence with the most serious face it has ever worn, and Northern Ireland’s politics keep their own grim arithmetic.

A Reform government in Westminster is not just a domestic policy catastrophe. It is the loudest possible argument for Edinburgh and Cardiff to head for the exits. Britain doesn’t just risk becoming a worse country. It risks becoming several smaller ones.

And then there is the arithmetic that Americans don’t grasp and that you cannot afford to forget.

First-past-the-post is brutal and non-linear. Reform on twenty-nine per cent could mean a two-hundred-seat majority or fifty seats. It depends entirely on whether the Tories collapse into them as a single column or hang on as a spoiler that splits the right-wing vote in three hundred constituencies.

Every Tory MP who survives is, paradoxically, a buffer against a Reform government. Every Tory MP who defects is a paving stone on the road to Number 10. The most important political question of the next eighteen months is not who leads Labour. It is whether the Conservative Party fights its own death, even badly, even pathetically, even while losing… or whether it lies down and lets Farage walk across it.

You have, by my count, until the next general election (2029 at the latest, but almost certainly sooner given Thursday night’s results) to figure out whether you want to be a serious country or a colony of the global authoritarian-populist franchise that’s currently busy dismantling the post-1945 order.

That’s not a long runway. We had eight years from the Tea Party to Trump. You’re already further along the curve than we were in 2014.

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Corruption Is the Killer App

The good news, such as it is: you’ve watched us do this. You have a free preview of the grim and terrible ending. You know what the assault on the civil service looks like, what the loyalty oaths look like, what the loyalty-purged intelligence services look like, what happens when a populist takes the keys, and the media thinks the guardrails will hold when they’re made of papier-mâché and good manners.

The bad news: knowing didn’t save us. It might save you.

Pour another one. Get organised. Find the few Conservatives left who still believe in the rule of law and shake their hands while you can…they’re going to need allies, because their party is about to be a smoking crater and they’re going to be standing in it.

Tell Labour that the policy that sounds lovely in a Whitehall briefing is often a tone-deaf shriek in Doncaster. Stop imagining the “Reform will kill the NHS” line will save you. It hasn’t, and it won’t.

You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — imitate Reform’s policies. That’s a losing trade every centre-left party has made for thirty years, and it never, ever works, because the original haters are always going to outbid the cover band. But a reboot and a rewrite of Labour’s message and strategy is long, long, long overdue.

American Democrats are, slowly, learning one lesson.

Outside of a narrow coastal band of intellectual and policy elites, no one cares about the issues that animate the upper tier of economic and cognitive elites. A decade ago, Democrats were utterly convinced that climate change would reshape generations of voters. It has not. Regardless of the merits of addressing it, it’s a political dead issue.

Economics and affordability are the pinnacle political issues globally, and until Labour locks down on those to the exclusion of almost all else and speaks to working-class voters in their language and vernacular, Farage and his rabid wolves will continue to eat you alive.

The man on the doorstep in Leeds does not give a damn about your fiscal rule or your golden thread or your mission-led government.

He cares whether his wages cover his rent, whether his daughter can see a GP, whether the bus still runs on a Sunday, and whether his kids will have a life that is not measurably worse than his own.

Speak to those four things. Not in white papers. In sentences a human being would actually say. Morgan McSweeney has reportedly been telling Starmer some version of this for two years; Starmer has been governing as though Whitehall press releases were love letters to the electorate. They are not. They are the quiet sound of you losing.

Don’t shrug off working- and middle-class anxieties with some snippy variation of, “Well, you don’t understand the complexity and the nuance of our brilliant long-term plan. Read Appendix 4, and you’ll see, prole.” That is the sound of a Government measuring itself for its own coffin.

Stop being ashamed of the cultural signifiers of ordinary British life. Yes, this is harder for you than it is for us… the Union Jack carries Northern Ireland and an empire’s worth of bodies along with it, and the St George’s Cross has been let to the louts because the respectable left flinched.

Your symbols are messier than ours. I get it. But there is a way to speak to ordinary patriotism, to the chip shop and the cathedral and the village green and the NHS itself, which is the most genuinely beloved British symbol you have left, without sounding like you are apologising for being born British.

Find it. American Democrats spent two decades letting the flag become enemy property, and we are only now, painfully and partially, beginning to take it back. You do not have that kind of time. The argument that “no one cares about symbols when they can’t pay the rent” is half-true and therefore dangerous; people care about both, simultaneously, and a politics that cannot speak to both will keep losing to one that can.

Learn the lesson that took too long here: corruption (and Reform is lavishly corrupt) is the killer app. Pay attention to who’s funding what. Demand to know where Reform’s money sleeps at night, and with whom.

Farage has a kind of feral cunning that he shares with Trump. Elites will scan him as a boob, a fool, a crass and brassy clown. I beg of you: don’t make that mistake. Feral clowns are ripping America limb from limb, and all the precious indignation of the elite classes in business, media, and American politics seems still helpless to stop it.

Cheers, and good luck.

You’re going to need it.

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Rick Wilson is a Republican political strategist, writer, speaker, commentator, ad-maker, and a founder of the Lincoln Project political action committee.