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Around last year, I had just moved back to Britain from the United States and was basking in the nearly widespread envious looks of American acquaintances. While they were looking down the barrel of a second Trump term with its assurance of turmoil and polarization, we had elected Keir Starmer by a huge majority and were feeling quite content with ourselves. I remember people complimenting me on the prescience of my move, which I certainly took even though politics hadn’t been part of my reasoning.

Growth of Farage’s Party

Maybe the answer to that is Nigel Farage and his political party, which has in some way managed to channel the anger, letdown and shame felt by many of people who voted for and were then let down by Brexit, and are now in search of a new fire to light. To this extent, the foundations of the conservative rally last weekend and the growth of Reform overall feel largely of a pattern with their US antecedents.

It is a scenario, at least in part, of people reaching at anything that vows to rip up a structure that has serially failed to reward them.

What has felt alarming to many of us this year, though, is how quickly the scene seems to have shifted in this nation, and how a figurehead as frivolous as Farage could get anyone to follow him at all, let alone in the direction of No 10.

Superficial Figureheads and Political Ridicule

And by lightweight, I do not mean in the Trump/Boris Johnson style. You can dislike those men while acknowledging their skill as orators. Farage, by contrast, is a fool, a grinning fool roundly mocked to his face by Democrats in Congress earlier this month when he arrived, at the invitation of Republicans, to give testimony before a House judiciary committee on freedom of expression.

Farage didn’t arrange the ‘unite the kingdom’ rally on Saturday, of course; that was Tommy Robinson, the ex- BNP member with convictions for violence, drug possession and deception – details that, British broadcasters were at pains to point out on Monday morning, shouldn’t tar all those who participated at his march with the same brush.

Similarities and Differences with the American Right-Wing Landscape

Americans will identify this as a pivot-point: a similar moment to that period of Trump’s rise in popularity during which his supporters were given endless sympathetic portrayals in the US national press, and invited to explain why following a man who said monstrous things didn’t make them in the slightest bit self-serving or monstrous.

Meanwhile, the whiplash speed of Reform and Robinson’s rise means that the country Trump is touring this week is apparently very changed to the one he went into business with in January. There may be a moment when the US president pauses to admire his own work, and he will certainly be pleased to see British white nationalists gaining ground.

But he is also a man who rejects and is quick to distance himself from “losers” – a category into which, arguably, his friend the prime minister presently falls, and who we can assume he will discard as quickly as he supported him.

Future Outlook: Momentum and Cultural Divergences

For the rest of us, it is a question of waiting to see how much influence our own version of the Maga movement will have. There are crucial differences between the two nations that leave some large constituencies who turned out in the US for Trump without exact British equivalents.

• British white nationalism nods to the religious institutions as an influence, but evangelical Christianity has no influence in a country where, historically, foxhunting is a bigger wedge issue than abortion.
• I cannot see JD Vance’s pronatalist leanings, based in his fervent Catholicism, being much of a viable option here, either.

In fact – and this may be sheer national bias on my part – Vance appears to be the kind of American who even Britons on the far right might regard intuitively as a creepy little individual. Conversely, if enough people are willing to swear loyalty to a agitator or an ambitious pub bore, these are differences that may hardly matter.