Why Reform Needs Danny Kruger – Farage Is Learning from 18th Century Tories…

Britain today faces political upheaval on a scale unprecedented for a century, with Labour and the Conservatives both dissolving before our eyes. Yet if the strange death of Liberal England in the Twenties clearly has parallels to today, the most apt comparison may, in fact, be the first age of party politics, the Whig versus Tory “rage of party” of the early 18th century. For if Keir Starmer could learn a thing or two from Britain’s first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, Reform, bolstered by new recruit Danny Kruger, should heed the example of the distant ancestors of the party they are now trying to supplant: the Tories of Queen Anne and George I.

The period between 1688 and the 1740s was roiled by culture wars and economic change as dramatic as our own. Long before today’s keyboard warriors stereotyped their enemies online — either as skinhead flag-shagging gammons or spittle-flecked blue-haired harpies — Grub Street partisans were doing much the same. Instead of mocking lager louts in England shirts, Whig propagandists attacked a target that was, in many ways, the 18th-century equivalent: the ruddy-cheeked fox-hunting squire who made up the backbone of the Tory Party.

Urbane Whig essayist Joseph Addison depicted the average Tory backwoodsman as being…