Fantasist Farage plays Thatcher or Attlee depending on which room he's in

Nigel Farage shuffled into a City of London banking hall this morning like a man returning to the scene of an old crime. Once the scourge of the so-called metropolitan elite, he was now courting their approval - a born-again Thatcherite preaching the gospel of fiscal discipline to the very bankers he once condemned for "running the country." I imagine the audience responded with the sort of polite applause reserved for a man balancing spoons on his nose at a Rotary Club lunch: faintly amused, but mostly embarrassed for him.

The speech was billed as a great economic reset, Reform UK's moment of seriousness. Instead, it was a half-empty pint of reheated pub politics; a sermon to the converted that somehow managed to be both pompous and hollow. Farage told us Britain was broken (true), that too many people are on benefits (false), and that the way out of this mess is to "cut regulation" and "make the rich feel welcome again" (double false).

It's a curious pitch, given that Reform have been in charge of a dozen councils across the UK for six months now, and what a record they've built. Their much-trumpeted DOGE savings have yet to materialise, but they've managed a small circus of resignations and scandals.

Councillors have quit in disgrace, journalists have been banned from Nottinghamshire County Council for not offering favourable coverage, and £75,000 has been blown on 150 flags. Oh, and they're raising council tax. If that's fiscal discipline, then I'm the Archbishop of Canterbury..

The self-styled champion of the working man now slips easily into the smooth argot of the City, debt ratios, liabilities, growth forecasts, as though reciting them might disguise the fact he's never really believed in any of it.

It's a strange spectacle: the old pub demagogue who once claimed to speak for ordinary people now auditioning to join the very club he spent decades railing against.

He talks about "alarm-clock Britain," but the only alarm he's setting off is in the heads of anyone who's ever worked for a living. Behind all the talk of discipline and responsibility lurks the same old right-wing bedtime story: if we just make life easier for the wealthy, they'll sprinkle their prosperity down on the rest of us like economic fairy dust. That's not policy; that's fantasy.

And yet, even fantasy has coherence. Farage's new economic creed does not. One minute he's promising "the biggest council house building programme ever", the next, he's vowing to slash benefits and shrink the state. He's Thatcher and Attlee in the same breath, depending on which room he's in.

The Conservatives called the speech "incoherent," which feels like the pot calling the kettle black. But they're not wrong. Reform's platform reads like the fever dream of a Telegraph comment thread: nostalgic, angry, and allergic to arithmetic.

He waxed nostalgic for the 1980s, when men were men, banks were free, and nobody worried about regulation. The same deregulation, incidentally, that crashed the world economy in 2008 - but let's not interrupt grandpa while he's reminiscing about the good old days.

Farage seems to think Britain's woes stem from too many rules, not too little compassion. That's what you get when you treat economics like a game of pub darts after six pints: plenty of noise, shaky aim, and someone always ends up bleeding.

He told us he wants "as many rich people as possible living in Britain." That's his big idea. Invite the oligarchs back, shake their hands, maybe ask them nicely to pay the tax they legally have to. This is the same Nigel who once claimed to stand for sovereignty, now reduced to begging billionaires for spare change. Please sir, can you pay your taxes, sir.

And let's not ignore his sudden distaste for "exorbitant" public sector pensions. You can always tell when a right wing populist has gone native: the first thing they do is turn on the teachers, nurses, and civil servants who keep the lights on. There's something biblical about it, the prophet of the people transformed into just another apostle of the market.

Farage's problem is that he's become everything he used to mock: a professional politician talking nonsense about fiscal maturity while pining for a Britain that never really existed. The lad from the pub has dropped the act, and returned to the gentlemen's club, and now lectures the rest of us about belt-tightening from behind a glass of Chablis.

The tragedy, or perhaps the comedy of it all, is that millions will still hear him and think he's "telling it straight." But there was nothing straight about today's sermon. It was a failed performance of seriousness, a man trying to look prime-ministerial while holding a match to the social contract.

In the end, Farage didn't give a speech about economics. He gave a eulogy for the Britain he helped break, and then blamed everyone else for the noise.