Britain's tea party.

• Author: Montgomerie, Tim

Nigel Paul Farage was a member of the Conservative Party when Margaret Thatcher was its leader. Today, he still looks and sounds a lot like an old-fashioned British Conservative. He wears pin-striped suits during the working week and bright red or yellow trousers on weekends--as many upper-class fashion criminals inexplicably do. He was educated at Dulwich College, a fee-paying private school where he enjoyed cricket and rugby and joined the army cadets.

The son of a stockbroker named Guy Oscar Justus Farage, Nigel (incidentally, a very Tory name) skipped university and went directly into the City of London, where he made his mark as a commodities trader. Since 1999, he has been a member of the European Parliament. He is married to a German, Kirsten Mehr, whom he employs as his secretary, quite legally, with taxpayers' money. And he is the leader of Britain's fastest-growing political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). His larger-than-life, straight-talking personality is central to UKIP's success, but, perversely, he is succeeding by attacking nearly everything he once embodied.

He laments Thatcherism's impact on Britain's working classes, for example. He criticizes the Tories and the nation's main newspapers for being dominated by privately educated "toffs." He grumbles that Britain is led by career politicians, even though he is now a fourth-term member of the European Parliament. He complains about how British industry employs so many foreigners, even though he employs one--his wife--as his personal aide. His party succeeds by pitting itself against London---the city where Nigel Farage made his money and where he was educated. And London is where the explanation of Britain's complicated UKIP phenomenon must begin.

London is the British economy's greatest success story. It is currently living through its second great age. It dominates the United Kingdom in a way that no American city comes close to doing in the United States. It is not just Britain's political capital like Washington. Or its financial capital like New York. Or its cultural capital like Los Angeles. It is all of these things and more.

Roughly ten million people live in the Greater London Urban Area. People commute from all over Britain and from many parts of Europe to what is now the world's third most productive city. Some dub London the sixth-biggest city in France due to the number of French expatriates living in Britain's capital, many of who are fleeing Franqois Hollande's confiscatory taxes. London accounts for less than one-sixth of Britain's population, but it contributes a quarter of its tax revenues. The properties found in Elmbridge--a London suburb home to 130,000 people--are worth an estimated 31 billion [pounds sterling]. That's more than the value of all of the houses in Greater Glasgow--home to over one million Scots.

The strength of London's economy is all the more remarkable because just seven years ago it was hit by the financial equivalent of a tsunami. London's banks were at the center of the global crash. Today, the financial companies headquartered in the Square Mile and in the Docklands are powering the city's resurgence, contributing to a $71 billion surplus in financial services for the whole UK economy. London is an outstanding example of a wider global trend where great cities such as Istanbul, Shanghai and Mumbai enjoy supercharged growth as they act as magnets for talented, inventive people--from their own countries and from abroad.

But guess what? London is the one part of Britain that UKIP cannot reach. In the May elections to the European Parliament, UKIP topped the poll. It beat Labour, Her Majesty's official party of opposition, into second place and the ruling Conservatives into third, UKIP did very well in most parts of England, winning 33 percent of electors in the East, for example, and 32 percent in the South West. But in London it could only muster 17 percent of the vote.

Asked to explain why UKIP had done so well across most of the country but relatively poorly in the nation's capital, Suzanne Evans, one of the party's principal spokespeople, may have revealed more than she intended. Londoners, she explained, are more "educated, cultured and young" than the rest of Britain. Twitter and social media seized on her candor and quickly presented the average UKIP supporter as stupid, backwards and, well, a little past it. Nigel Farage will not have minded. He feeds on the metropolitan establishment's contempt for...