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In January this year Dominic Cummings – once of this parish – warned The Spectator’s editor and assistant editor that Whitehall and the establishment parties would “stop at nothing” to prevent Nigel Farage from becoming prime minister. As Cummings told the Quite right! podcast: “The people around [Keir] Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Donald Trump. They’re looking across Europe, and they’re saying to themselves: ‘The lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in… Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage, and make sure that he doesn’t win, by fair means or foul.'”
Cummings may be right about that, but the two most obvious comparisons with the recent hosing of Farage demonstrate how this maneuver can just as easily backfire.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Spectator (paywall)
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Douglas Murray is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.