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By day 31 of the war in the Middle East, Nigel Farage had become somewhat less vocal about the closeness of his relationship with Donald Trump.
“Trying to read what’s really in the minds of people in the White House right at the moment is a mug’s game,” said the MP, as he unveiled his party’s latest “pledge” to cut the cost of living on Tuesday.
Perched on a stool against the backdrop of departing flights, Farage had come to Heathrow airport to promote a plan to scrap taxes on short-haul journeys.
Yet when the questions inevitably came about the conflict’s potentially catastrophic impact on Britain’s economy, the Reform leader was forced to grapple with what has suddenly become the primary barrier to people voting for his party: Donald Trump.
The US president is now underwater in terms of his favourability even with Reform voters, having previously been the only set of supporters who saw him positively, according to polling by More in Common.
Reform’s Trump problem is particularly stark among British women, with 25% of those polled last week listing “Farage’s support for Trump” as the primary reason why they were not voting for his party.
Among both men and women it was 23%, ahead of a range of other reasons including the party being seen as too rightwing, racism on the part of some candidates, its lack of government experience or perceptions that they only represent the rich.
“From focus groups the idea of something like Minnesota happening here but also the general sense of chaos he might bring in the UK is kryptonite to would-be Reform voters, particularly women and those in Reform’s ‘second 15%’ they need to get close to forming a government,” said Luke Tryl, More in Common’s Executive Director.
“They can’t understand why Farage associates with Trump, and it’s the thing that makes them more nervous about ‘rolling the dice’.”
With Reform voters as vulnerable as any other – in some cases more so – to the looming economic storm, the daily uncertainty of the war is now also becoming a problem for the party. Even though its voters were found by YouGov to be more positive than others towards the US strikes, their expectations still tend to be negative when it comes to everything from geopolitical stability to household finances.
It’s a far cry from the days after the 2016 US presidential election, when the president-elect first started to moot the then Ukip leader as a man who would do a “great job” as Britain’s ambassador to Washington DC.
In the years since, Farage would routinely emphasise his ties to Trump, boasting in January last year that he had the incoming White House administration on speed dial.
Asked by the Guardian on Tuesday if he was concerned that his relationship with Trump was beginning to damage him with Reform’s base, Farage responded: “‘I’m not going to lie about it, am I? I’m not going to pretend I don’t know him. I do.”
“I think what he has done on the border is admirable,” added Farage, who listed other supposed Trump achievements, including on the economy “certainly in the first term”, and on energy policy.
“So there are things he’s done that I agree with hugely. There are other things he has done that I don’t agree with, and the American and the British public can judge that. But, you know, he is not dictating policy to me. I’m dictating policy to me.”
Earlier, the Reform leader was again less certain about Trump when asked if the US president should end the war without securing the straits of Hormuz. He also appeared less assured about his own earlier belief that regime change in Iran was about to be realised, expressed at a previous Reform event in the immediate aftermath of US and Israeli strikes.
“I don’t think we should take literally everything right now that Donald Trump says,” Farage said on Tuesday. “But the last thing he’s going to do, or the last thing his colleagues in the White House do, is to give the Iranians any idea of what their true intentions are and frankly, I don’t know ... Was it to remove nuclear capability? Was it aimed at regime change? I don’t think any of us quite know the absolute truth about that.”
Whatever impact the Trump-Farage relationship has in the months and years ahead, it’s also a relationship that appears to have been changing.
Farage faced mockery at the end of the first week of the war after he announced that he was flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump, only to fail to secure a meeting.
