Michael Gove has given a withering assessment of Nigel Farage’s election chances, saying the Reform leader is not ready to be prime minister and – still won’t be in four years’ time.
The senior Tory, a cabinet minister for many years during the Conservative government, praised the former Ukip leader, saying he admired “his skills as a communicator”.
But he said: “I don’t believe that he is a plausible prime minister”.
He added: “Because if at this stage you’re saying that Reform should be the government – I know we’re four years away – he doesn’t have the team, or the policies or programme that would make me believe that he would govern effectively.”
Mr Farage declared his party as the main opposition to Labour in May, after it won 676 seats and overall control of 10 councils at the local elections, which also saw the Tories lose 15 councils and 674 seats.
But, in an upcoming interview with the Politics Inside Out podcast, with former Labour MPs Gloria de Piero and Jonathan Ashworth, Mr Gove said that Reform’s success was “not because they’ve developed a compelling story about how the country can be different”.
It was because “they’re the repository of anger at the failure of the political classes to do what they said they would do”.
He also revealed that Mr Farage had been “personally grateful” to him when he helped to resolve an issue between the then-Ukip leader and The Times newspaper, where Mr Gove was working at the time.
He insisted his feelings about Mr Farage were “very powerfully ambivalent” but he praised his skills as a communicator.
He said: “I think that he does have, which Boris [Johnson] had in a different way, an intuitive feel for how parts of the country think at any given time, and he is not burdened or constrained in the way that some of the rest of us are by thinking that’s unrespectable, or that’s outside the Overton window, or that would never work in government”.
He added that one “underplayed element” of the Reform leader, however, was that “he is, in effect, a bulwark against greater extremism”.
In a high-profile row with billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who was earlier this year working in a specially created post as Donald Trump’s ‘first buddy’ in the White House, Mr Farage refused to endorse far-right activist Tommy Robinson, saying: “My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles.”
Last month, a leading pollster suggested that support for Reform had “topped out” and that the momentum that was leading the party to soar in the polls had ground to a halt.
Conservative peer Robert Hayward told The Independent that the results of recent council by-elections, which Reform lost while defending seats, and national polling figures, suggest that the march of Mr Farage to Downing Street at the next general election could be facing a setback.
