Farage's unelected Cabinet idea would lead to a peculiarly British form of dystopia

There’s a lot of talk about the possibility of Reform UK winning the next general election in 2029 and Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister.

It’s true that the party is leading the polls at the moment and that both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are doing their incompetent best to facilitate such an outcome.

What’s also in Reform’s favour - so long as the party’s level of support holds up - is the first-past-the-post electoral system. It’s quite conceivable that Farage could secure an overall majority with a percentage of the vote in the low 30s. After all, in the July 2024 election, Labour won a thumping majority of 174 seats despite its vote share being just 33.7%, the lowest of any majority party on record, making this the least proportional general election in British history.

If Farage emulates Starmer’s victory, he will have hundreds of Reform MPs to choose from as he puts together a Cabinet to run the UK for up to five years. Yet in a move that hasn’t received nearly as much attention as it deserves, he has indicated that, in the main, he won’t be appointing his MPs to such posts at all. Instead he intends to appoint non-elected individuals of his choice.

[mid-content-banner]

Personality cult

Anyone worried about the prospect of Farage and his personality cult posing as a political party taking power needs to take this enormously seriously. His plan would represent the greatest subversion of parliamentary democracy since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1928, when women were granted equal voting rights to men.

The other day, Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda and Ogmore, drew attention to the idea in a social media post from Zia Yusuf, previously the chairman of Reform UK and now head of the party’s DOGE unit, named after the disastrous Trump initiative formerly spearheaded by Elon Musk. In his post, Yusuf stated: “A key problem is that Britain has a Minister of Science and Technology that has never even worked in Science nor Tech. He wouldn’t get a job at any tech firm. Yet has the biggest job in tech. This is why @Nigel_Farage has said most of Reform’s Cabinet will not be MPs.”

Bryant commented, half facetiously: “So we’d be governed by an unelected elite if Reform ever formed a government? We’d have to take back control.”

I checked out Farage’s original comments, made on LBC in July. He said: “I think the way we run our country is ridiculous. We put Cabinet ministers in charge of departments, over which they have absolutely zero knowledge. “They’ll often last in that job for 12-18 months, I mean barely time to get their feet under the table, and understand the brief, but we’re stuck in this mindset that the Cabinet must all be politicians in the House of Commons. Why? It’s nonsense.”

Farage went on to cite the example of the United States, where Scott Bessent is the US Treasury Secretary, despite never having stood for election in his life. There is, of course, a tradition in the US of appointing Cabinet members who don’t hold elected office. But in the UK we have a parliamentary democracy and are used to Cabinet ministers being routinely questioned and held to account in the House of Commons.

During his radio appearance, the Reform UK leader refused to tell presenter Nick Ferrari what a Cabinet under him would look like, but he didn’t rule out the idea of businessmen (sic), for example, featuring in it.

He then went on to say: “I really do think that you’ve got to think a little bit more about running the public finances as if you’re running a business.”

[lower-mid-content-banner]

Ignorance

Once again, Farage was demonstrating his ignorance about the way government works. Running a country is nothing like running a business. Businesses are run to make profits for their owners, while the government of a country is responsible for facilitating public services, regulating sectors of the economy, funding creative endeavours, and providing security and law and order as well as the infrastructure to help the economy thrive. There is no shame in running a government deficit.

The idea of having the country run not by democratically elected politicians, but by unelected individuals appointed on the whim of the Prime Minister is alarming. And in a piecemeal sense it isn’t original, with a number of precedents.

Blaenau Gwent Labour MS Alun Davies said: “There’s enough unaccountability as it is. This is something Gordon Brown tried with not much success - putting people in the House of Lords and then using them as ministers. There was Digby Jones from the CBI and an admiral called Alan West.

“Keir Starmer has done it too, although as with Gordon Brown they are lower rank ministers who are not in the Cabinet. Recently we had a Prisons minister giving evidence at the Senedd who is also in the House of Lords. I’m sure he is a decent guy who sends flowers to his mother, but he’s not democratically accountable, even if the argument is made that he’s personally accountable to the Prime Minister, who has been elected.

“Rishi Sunak, of course, appointed David Cameron as Foreign Secretary, and put him in the Lords.

“Doing this is an erosion of democracy, but what Farage is suggesting goes a stage further in that he’s saying that members of the Cabinet shouldn’t be elected MPs.

“I know there is a lot of disillusionment with politicians, and I get that, but at least people have the opportunity to vote us out.

“This idea of circumventing democracy by putting people in the Lords and then putting them in the Cabinet is a disgrace. I want to end the House of Lords, not keep it going.”

Catastrophic disruption

Alun Davies is right, of course. The inability to scrutinise a Cabinet minister in the House of Commons is a catastrophic disruption of the democratic process. If Farage were to get into Number 10, we can envisage a situation where he is engaging in all kinds of Trump-like anti-democratic behaviour, using non-elected Cabinet members to push through highly controversial measures without restraint.

In the US, Trump justifies his unconstitutional behaviour by saying it’s what people voted for, even when he’s taking actions that were never flagged in advance of the 2024 election in which he won a second term.

Farage would undoubtedly do the same here. It’s easy to envisage a situation where he pushes to the limit the powers of Cabinet ministers controlled by him, precipitating constitutional battles that are played out in courts for months and years. Trump has the US Supreme Court in his pocket to a large extent, but has made it clear that he would be prepared to defy court orders if that is what has to be done to pursue his political agenda. It’s easy to imagine Farage doing the same.

'Slash and burn'

It’s perfectly clear that Zia Yusuf is being lined up to run a UK version of DOGE. In the not unlikely event that he falls out with Farage again, another Farage appointee would be put in his place. There’s little doubt that the kind of destructive “slash and burn” approach adopted towards federal budgets in the US would be replicated in the UK, putting huge numbers of public sector employees out of work and crucial services and regulators cut to the bone or abolished.

With unelected figures loyal to Farage running the government, and with inexperienced and sometimes moronic Reform backbenchers complicit in the chaos, a peculiarly British form of dystopia would be unleashed.