He’s part Mel Gibson and part Norman Wisdom. Who needs a manifesto if you’ve got Nigel Farage?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/02/brexit-party-do-not-need-manifesto-it-has-farage

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On a drowsily warm Saturday afternoon in Peterborough, party activists were out in the city’s Cathedral Square. There was a stall of the Renew party doing lacklustre business. “What we’re trying to do primarily,” explained Haseeb Ur-Rehman, “is get normal people into parliament.”

Good luck with that. Across the square stood two female Ukip members with placards, being harassed by a man who told them that all they were doing was taking away votes from the Brexit party.

Then there were the Brexit party activists, scores of them with their sky-blue rosettes, banners proclaiming “Change Politics for Good”, and the confident smiles that come with EU election success and being favourites to win this Thursday’s byelection.

The poll is being held after former Labour MP Fiona Onasanya was unseated in a recall vote, following her jailing for perverting the course of justice over a speeding fine.

The message that all the Brexit party activists echoed was best voiced by a supporter called Craig, who said there was a new politics afoot that didn’t conform to outdated categories like left, right or centre. “What matters,” he said, “is policies that work.”

It was a noble sentiment, but one slightly compromised by the fact that the Brexit party doesn’t have any policies other than leaving the EU as soon as possible, ideally this morning – although Craig disagreed. “That’s nonsense. There are plenty of policies in preparation but you have to ask the leaders about that.”

In the middle of the square the former Revolutionary Communist party member, and now MEP for the Brexit party, Claire Fox, was handing out leaflets.

As someone who’s never been shy in voicing her opinions, she wasn’t bothered that her new party was fighting an election without any policies other than the determination to leave the EU. “People will say ‘Where’s the Brexit party manifesto?’, but the strong message around democracy is quite enough at the moment,” she said.

Elsewhere in town, Jeremy Corbyn made a flying visit in which he ran through the Labour party’s policies: an end to austerity, a national education service, increase in corporate taxation, and, with a rather laboured nod to local politics, stopping fly-tipping. He seemed to cover the whole political horizon, except the small matter of the EU.

Given that it was a Labour seat, Peterborough is going to be fought between a party that doesn’t want to mention Europe and a party that doesn’t want to mention anything else. But it was Brexit party supporters who packed the town centre like visiting football fans. Labour activists were as rare as penguins in the Sahara.

The Brexit party candidate is local entrepreneur, onetime The Secret Millionaire participant and Keith Chegwin-lookalike Mike Greene. He addressed two rallies at the Broadway theatre – one in the morning and one in the afternoon – that were heady with an insurgent atmosphere.

The party chairman Richard Tice said that they had enough of the “waffle of things called … manifestos”, pronouncing the last word as if it should be held at a distance with a pair of tongs.

The party has had enough of the waffle of things called manifestos

Then Greene dealt with the manifesto question by dismissing the very concept of manifestos. They were just a means of instituting “broken promises”. Greene wasn’t interested in making promises. Promises, like manifestos, are out. Instead he had a radical new approach. He was going to make pledges.

One of his pledges was improving education in Peterborough. The education system has to find out what children’s passions are, he told the boisterous crowd. Look at Mick Jagger, he said. “If he’d been told by his parents to focus on maths, do you think he’d be happy?”

Considering Jagger got three A-levels, went to the LSE, and is renowned for his interest in very large numbers in multiple currencies, the answer is probably yes, though I don’t think that’s what Greene was driving at.

For all his obvious concern about Peterborough, Greene’s message was perhaps undermined, for many in the audience, by his haunting resemblance to the late great presenter of Cheggers Plays Pop.

And in any case, everyone was waiting for the main act. Nigel Farage looked tanned and relaxed as he basked in the adulation of his devotees. He told them that the dreaded political establishment was “mortified” by the EU election results, but that the coming byelection was going to be even bigger.

He praised Greene for being that rare kind of politician who “didn’t go to Eton” or, he could have added, his own alma mater, Dulwich College.

“The establishment talk down to us,” said the career politician and former commodities broker. “They think we’re all thick, lazy, fat racists… They act as if they are the masters and we are the servants.”

At this the crowd, which was not noticeably obese, went crazy. And after telling them that Britain’s real friends in the world were “the Canadians, the Americans and the Commonwealth”, he declared that they were fighting for “democracy, liberty, freedom”.

It was Mel Gibson in Braveheart, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Norman Wisdom in Man of the Moment. The audience leapt to its feet. They were in no doubt that a “real person”, as Farage called Greene, was on his way to Westminster – what the Renew party might call a normal person.