What Nigel Farage gets wrong about ‘alarm-clock Britain’

If the leader of Reform UK really believes his generation is the hardest working of them all, he’s never met a workaholic millennial like me, says Samuel Fishwick

On my smartphone, I have three alarm clocks. There is my “WAKE UP” alarm at 5.55am – and then “PLEASE, SRLSY, WAKE UP”, which goes off at 6am when the first has not worked.

Then, there is my 6.30am “WAKE UP YOUR DAUGHTER NOW” alarm. This is irrelevant, as the baby has woken well before 5.55am anyway. My wife has six alarms, but is awake even before the baby.

I don’t know how many alarm clocks Nigel Farage has on his phone, but what I do know is that the Reform leader, 58, is an “alarm-clock” person – and I, 34, am apparently not.

When he was asked about Reform UK’s new favourite voter at a Glasgow factory yesterday morning, Farage – working hard by standing around in a hi-vis jacket holding a brick – said that his ideal kind of alarm-clock person is “up early and working hard – they’re people who have got alarm clocks, or who have had alarm clocks, like me”.

Farage himself is, of course, a fizzing battery of unbridled energy who is only getting zippier with age. “I’m out of bed by 5am, and I’m first up,” he told The Times in 2016, when he won Brexit, powered, he said, by three pots of “loose tea… proper stuff”, if only to drive out “what I drank the night before”.

That was just a warm up. In July this year, Farage’s friends apparently told the Spectator’s Tim Shipman that he “now regularly puts in a working day lasting from 4.30am to 11pm”: “All his bodyguards are ex-SAS,” they continued, “and they’re knackered trying to keep up.”

And Farage is now getting up even earlier, if you can believe it. In Glasgow on Monday, he said, “I started work at 4am yesterday morning”. He is pitching — to anyone who will listen — to be part of what business magazines speak reverently of as “The Sleepless Elite”. At this rate he will be getting up before his head has even hit the pillow.

What I think is clear is that Farage thinks I am not the “alarm-clock” generation. As if to prove his displeasure at the younger orders, the Reform leader, laying out his vision for the UK economy at an address in the City of London, said he thought the minimum wage for younger workers was too high, one of the reasons that employers were discouraged from hiring them. The lowest paid, meanwhile, are “better off” if they claim to have “anxiety”, he said.

But I think millennials are the most “alarm-clock” generation to date. I also think – you won’t be surprised to learn – that we work a lot harder than Nigel’s generation, too.

Indeed, we are never not working. Nearly all of us sleep with our phones, putting them under our pillows, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. We check emails right before we go to sleep, we reach for our phones as soon as we wake up in the morning (we have to – we use it as our alarm clock).

We set alarms throughout the day, a blur of deadlines and appointments that need to be kept and emails that need to be sent and bills that need to be paid. Work never truly leaves us alone. Twitter/X user @TypeForVictory perhaps put it most succinctly: “55-year-olds: Two-hour boozy lunches, no emails, pub by 6pm. 35-year-olds: Lunch at desk, emails and calls 24/7, work late. 25-year-olds: Hour for lunch, emails during work hours, go home by 6pm. Millennials, I think we screwed up somewhere.”

And so this workaholic generation beats on ceaselessly, complaining about how little we sleep, a pastime that will one day presumably harden into boastfulness about how much we stay awake. Perhaps that is a gauntlet to throw down. I read last week that JD Vance, Donald Trump’s number two, says his boss sleeps for, “if we’re lucky”, two hours on Air Force One flights, and “if you’re unlucky, he’ll be roaming around, busting your chops for having fallen asleep, going ‘Oh, he’s low energy, look…’.”

I personally tend to think more sleep – especially for those who are actually in charge of stuff – is a good thing, and that long-term deprivation of the stuff of dreams sees capacity for actually thinking and caring about other people dwindle to the point of barely functioning. But that’s just me. Farage, a huge admirer of Trump’s, is clearly also one for busting our chops.