‘Ladbrokes bet says it all – price of Labour failure is Nigel Farage as next PM’

It’s quite sobering to see how quickly the political landscape is shifting.

At the end of May, Nigel Farage was asked on Question Time why he was bottling standing at the coming General Election: “Is it because the last seven attempts that you did try to stand, you didn’t get selected?” a woman asked, producing raucous laughter from the audience and, on stage, a very isolated and crimson-faced toad.

Farage then decided to stand, won a seat in Clacton and saw his three-year- old Reform UK party draw four million votes. Six months on, an opinion poll puts Reform ahead of a landslide-winning Labour party and Ladbrokes make Farage 9/4 favourite to replace Keir Starmer as PM.

Almost as astonishing is that five years ago this week Boris Johnson won a thumping 80-seat majority with pundits claiming he, and the Tories, would stay in power for a decade.

Now, with only 121 MPs, and running out of ideological road, they face either terminal decline or a humiliating merger with Reform. Under the leadership of Farage.

How we ended up with one of the most dangerous and divisive politicians on the brink of real power is as depressing as it is obvious.

Since the banking crash of 2008, people have felt that Britain has stopped functioning properly.

Successive Tory governments not only failed to cure that through growth, but made it worse with a disastrous Brexit. The country turned to Labour but thus far Starmer only appears to be offering much of the same, with added pain.

Throw in the perception that our two mainstream parties have no solution to rising immigration and you see why the disillusioned might want to jump on a Faragist bandwagon vowing to take down the elites and Make Britain Great Again.

Even if that bandwagon is driven by wealthy elitists who have no credible answers to Britain’s deep-rooted problems. Just gaga-land fantasies about cutting immigration to zero, smashing all things woke, slashing taxes and blaming every problem on foreigners. Yet those fantasies are delivered with a persuasive bluntness by a chameleon who has perfected the Populist art of appearing to speak the language of the common people.

Labour has inherited a country stuck in a doom-loop with record debt and a stagnant economy, making it seemingly impossible to satisfy voters’ twin demands of low taxation and world-class public services.

Starmer’s first five months in Downing Street have mostly been error strewn, dull and visionless. Which is manna from heaven for the charismatic chancer Farage and his divisive fiction. A fiction that will be turbocharged in the coming years as more billionaire opportunists like Nick Candy and Elon Musk throw in their lot after whiffing power.

If Starmer does nothing but preserve a stagnant status quo his government is doomed. And so is Britain.

The price of Labour failure is not, as normally follows, a decade-and-a-half of Tory misrule, but a possible descent into division and despair under Farage.

The longer Labour fails to cut through with an inspirational vision or meaningful solutions, the more its working-class support will believe it has nothing to lose by turning to Reform.

It needs to realise that it won a 174-seat majority five months ago and believe in itself.

Or watch the country suffer death by a thousand Populist cuts.