As Farage sacks an acolyte for his ‘shameful’ words, how far is too far for the high priest of toxic politics? | Martha Gill

The Reform leader cynically pushes the boundaries of how far he can go without alienating too many of the voters he needs – but it’s a perilous calibration, says politics and culture writer Martha Gill

What counts as beyond the pale these days? Having successfully pushed back the cordon sanitaire that surrounds British politics, Nigel Farage is struggling to work out where, precisely, it now lies. Some decisions are simple. Attacks on Grenfell victims are, and have always been, beyond the bounds of decency. Farage promptly sacked Simon Dudley last week after the housing spokesperson mused of the victims that “everyone dies in the end”.

But on other choices Farage dithers. Not wishing to sound prudish to his more hard-boiled supporters, he previously dismissed accusations he was racist at school as “banter in the playground”. It was only in January that he did what any other mainstream politician would do with likely unprovable claims of racism and denied them completely.

When the Guardian found he had sold a number of questionable personalised messages to fans on the Cameo website – Farage recorded a message giving a “pep talk” to what turned out to be a Canadian neo-Nazi group, and spoke positively about one of its events – his first instincts were to defend them as a sort of disinterested response to the free market. If a shop unwittingly sells shoes to a murderer, he said in an ITN interview, “is that the fault of the person selling shoes?” Now he has “paused” his account.

Elsewhere, boundaries seem to have grown more flexible. In 2024, Farage condemned anti-gay comments among his campaigners, but when a video surfaced last month of a Reform UK candidate making a homophobic joke, he jumped to defend him.

On immigration, too, Reform has slid into a position it blanched at just a few months ago. Previously, the party trod a mainstream line, pledging to stop small boats, but since August it has been promising mass deportations, even for people with indefinite leave to remain. This week came a new plan to block visas for people from countries that want slavery reparations.

Other lines, meanwhile, remain uncrossable. In February, Farage toyed with scrapping the pension triple-lock – a sacred cow of British politics. Now he says he will keep it.

This trial-and-error testing tells us plenty about Farage and his current position. He is trying to hold the loyalty of true believers without scaring off its more moderate wing, which, according to an excellent new book by Labour’s Liam Byrne, now makes up a hefty 40% of the Reform-considering coalition.

But it also tells us something about Britain itself. Anxiously perched on the very edge of the mainstream right, Farage has inadvertently become a sort of explorer-cartographer, tracing out our new line of political tolerance.

The boundary is not always obvious. Shouldn’t it be screamingly clear to a party spokesperson not to attack the blameless victims of a fire? Not necessarily on the right’s farthest flank, where there is after all considerable mileage in taking a hard stance on some groups of tragic victims – drowned asylum seekers, for example – as well adopting a general “pull your socks up” approach to the downtrodden. In fact, Jacob Rees-Mogg made the very same mistake in 2019, when he said people who died in the blaze lacked “common sense”.

One way to think about Britons – particularly the voters Farage is interested in – is that they dislike anyone they suspect to be “taking advantage”, but nevertheless suffer from bursts of generosity towards some groups. Take welfare, for example. Reform supporters are clear: they wish scroungers to be relieved of state help where possible. Unless, that is, you’re talking about boomers and their pensions. Hence support for the triple lock. No wonder Farage was confused.

Or take refugees. A crackdown on asylum seekers has long been top of the political agenda. But this attitude totally reverses for Ukrainians, for whom Britons threw open their homes and demanded exceptions to the same anti-immigrant policies they had voted for – a campaign led by, of all things, the Daily Mail. So, last year, Farage was forced to hit reverse on anti-migrant policies, but only for Ukrainians. “Genuine refugees” like these, he somehow found himself saying, are “some of the hardest working and most successful people in the country.”

The biggest test of what is and is not acceptable to British people these days will, of course, come in the 2029 election. Westminster conversations about Farage predictably circle around the same question: what are his chances? But there is a second question worth asking, which is: even if he does not win, how will he change Britain?

The truth is that in probing where the line of acceptable discourse is, Farage is also to some extent setting it. A sort of quantum politics is at work, where observation alters reality. Farage is a uniquely charismatic politician. He is the darling and, to some extent, a creature of the rightwing tabloids, and the Tory party follows his lead. He is widely credited with dragging our centre of gravity to the right. When he rows back on a decision, calculating that after all it is beyond the pale, we may very well believe him. When he holds the line, even in the face of backlash, we wonder if this actually reflects the views of a swathe of Britons, too.

It is, after all, hard to gauge what voters believe in their innermost hearts. Journalists and politicians tend to patch it together from polling – notoriously unreliable – past experience and guesswork. Those conclusions in turn have an effect on public beliefs.

What is acceptable? It often depends on what everyone thinks everyone else thinks is acceptable. An assumed new line, sketched out by edgy rightwing groups and unregulated new-media platforms, means we tolerate conversations we would not have had a decade ago. That suggests a troubling flexibility in our moral limits. Following an imaginary herd, what outrageous positions might we condone in three years’ time?

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, reckons Farage himself is not entirely cynical and has his own ethical limits. “He would draw the line at any sort of racism based on skin colour,” for example, says Bale. Some sort of perimeter does exist, at least until a “nastier successor” comes along. It will be cold comfort for most of us.

For politicians who want to fight Farage, meanwhile, Bale suggests emphasising his association to Donald Trump and Maga – who represent a position beyond the tolerance line of most British people. Byrne thinks an alternative vision, stressing fairness, is important. We could add that opponents might have a little more confidence asserting what the country will and will not stand for. Sometimes saying it makes it true.

• Martha Gill writes about politics and culture