Nigel Farage’s French stunt double turns up at Reform conference

If you happened to tune into the speech without knowing who he was, or where he was speaking, you could have almost found it quite touching. Having quipped, at first, about a shared history that has been “a little turbulent”, the smartly dressed 30-year-old moved on to Napoleon. His accent made it clear that he spoke of him as a compatriot, and he welcomed the fact that, despite having spent a lifetime fighting against them, the emperor just couldn’t help but respect the English.

“A century later, in the darkest hour in our history, France would once again turn to England,” he said. “In 1940, when the general De Gaulle needed a helping hand, he found it here. When France fell, England welcomed her.”

“When the voice of free France could no longer be heard in Paris, London gave it a microphone with which it could speak to the world”, he added. “It was from your capital that De Gaulle called on the French people to resist.” These years, he said, bound the two nations together.

None of what he was saying was novel, and he did lay it on quite thick, but his heart seemed in the right place. Really, it’s a shame that the conclusion Jordan Bardella drew from the events of the Second World War was that France and Britain – his Rassemblement National and Nigel Farage’s Reform – must unite to turn Europe towards the far-right.

It even felt quite ironic at times, to be calling on the memory of those who died fighting against fascism to promote a new wave of stridently right-wing populism. Aside from being the RN’s president, MEP Bardella also chairs the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament. Its members include, among others, Hungary’s Fidesz, which was run by Viktor Orbán until earlier this year.

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In 2019, the then-governing party of Hungary was found to be “minimising its country’s participation in the genocide, rehabilitating war criminals, and introducing anti-Semitic writers into the national curriculum.”

Another fellow traveller of Bardella’s party is Vox, the Spanish far-right party, who have gleefully spread the dogwhistle – sorry, the foghorn of a rumour that George Soros was, for some reason, behind the Catalan separatist movement.

None of this was mentioned in Birmingham on Friday, though. At Reform’s conference, the single-minded, obsessive focus of both leaders was small boats, and the people using them to cross the Channel.

Somehow it doesn’t matter at all that figures were down 43% over the first seven months of this year, compared to the same period in 2025. At no point was it discussed that the raw number – 16,513 people – is laughably small, especially compared to the size of the overall British population.

Of course, there was no recognition of the fact that many of the people choosing to risk their lives by crossing such a dangerous stretch of water fled from warzones and certain death, and human nature ought to make us want to help our fellow man.

Instead, Bardella and Farage grinned onstage at the end of the former’s speech, as they unveiled a new Entente Cordiale document that looked a bit like an oversized reproduction of the US Constitution in a museum for children. This protocole d’accord – “memorandum of understanding” – will, the audience was told, “stop the boats forever”.

Naturally the pair received a standing ovation, and their love-in continued during the press conference later that afternoon, at which most questions were brought back towards those reaching France or Britain through irregular channels.

There are a number of ways in which to look at what happened on that day. An obvious reaction would be to worry, and wonder what may happen in 2027 and 2028, as both countries go to the polls. It would be the right one, though it would fail to quite capture the essence of what happened in Birmingham.