Nigel Farage sat in the Commons on Wednesday, silent for once, as the wreckage of his latest political miscalculation settled around him. On Tuesday night he had used his GB News show to insist that American pollsters had got it wrong and that Republicans would come good in the US midterm elections. With Donald Trump as president and more than $400m of Elon Musk's money behind them, how could they not? They could and they did. Americans had taken Trump at his word when he said "pretend I'm on the ballot" — and rejected a president who had promised to avoid foreign wars and protect against rising energy bills, then broken both pledges. The midterms delivered a Democratic victory that left Farage as the last true believer in Trumpism's transferability to British politics. His political judgment, already under strain from Reform UK's declining poll numbers, now looks actively dangerous to his own project. The Tories moved fastest. Kemi Badenoch and her shadow cabinet were busily scrubbing their social media accounts of all Trump-adjacent posts by Wednesday morning. The same politicians who had praised Trump's disruptive energy were now insisting they had always considered him a crook and a liability. The speed of the reversal tells you everything about how shallow the conviction was — Trump was useful until he wasn't, and now he's toxic. In the chamber itself, it was a battle of deputies — Labour's Louise Haigh against the Conservatives' Alex Burghart. Haigh was making her primetime PMQs debut, standing in for Keir Starmer while Andy Burnham attended the Commonwealth heads of government summit in Antigua and Barbuda. Both deputies delivered safely forgettable performances. Neither made a major error; neither distinguished themselves. The exchanges on welfare spending produced no clarity on Labour's plans to bring the bill down. Burghart's performance captured something essential about the Conservative opposition's current state. He read prepared questions in order, seemingly indifferent to whether they had been answered, delivering scripted jokes that died on contact with the chamber's air. His closing line — "If Labour doesn't want to do the right thing, why doesn't it just get out of the way?" — required the kind of righteous anger that a man bright enough to know his own party's culpability simply cannot manufacture. The idea that the Tories are somehow a new party remains delusional. The Lib Dems' Daisy Cooper used the moment to celebrate the Democratic victory and push on the Epstein files and the prospect of putting Trump back in the dock. Haigh was diplomatically restrained — pleased at the turn of events but noncommittal about British intervention. Several rows behind Cooper, Farage stared into the middle distance, the physical embodiment of a political bet gone wrong. The deeper structural story here is the collapse of Trumpism as an importable political model for Britain. Reform UK's strategy has been built on the premise that what works in American populism can be transplanted across the Atlantic. The midterm results suggest the original product is failing in its home market. Badenoch's hasty distancing, Farage's silence, and the Tories' social media purge all point to the same conclusion: the Trump franchise is closing, and its UK licensees are scrambling for the exits.
