Olympic champion Imogen Grant says the row between Oxford and Cambridge over selection for the Boat Races is "very unfair".

Nigel Farage loves Donald Trump. The 60-year-old’s day job is as the parliamentary representative for the English seaside town of Clacton, and as the leader of Reform, the latest of his populist right-wing parties. But Farage is often focused on America, and his heavily advertised friendship with the 47th president. He was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration (and chafing that he didn’t get a prime spot in the Capitol Rotunda). He was also onstage last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, joking to his American audience that “you gave us ‘woke,’ and we gave you Prince Harry.”

As the leader of a party with fewer than half a dozen members of Parliament, Farage knows that his American profile gives him a grandeur he would not otherwise possess. In December, he posed with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago under a portrait of a young Trump in cricket whites. Days after Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Farage flew to the United States on a mission funded by a wealthy Reform donor. On his parliamentary financial-disclosure form, Farage recorded the purpose of his trip as being “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage.” Lucky Clacton.

But now Farage’s embrace of Trump has become a liability. The 47th president is broadly unpopular in Britain, where Farage hopes to improve the 14.3 percent vote share he received in last year’s election. (He likely needs to at least double that proportion if he wants to be prime minister one day.) Even worse for him, Trump’s MAGA movement is seen as overtly racist and pro-Russia, two huge turnoffs for the majority of British voters. Even Britain’s right-wing newspapers were outraged by Trump’s shabby treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, while Reform’s existing voters are already outliers in their sharply anti-immigration views. Heading further to the right is not a winning strategy in Britain.

Or elsewhere, really. “The populist right around the world has a MAGA problem,” Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future, told me. “There is a backfire effect in countries that aren’t America.”

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American]

Key figures in Trumpworld, such as Musk and Steve Bannon, continually urge European populists to take more extreme positions on race, immigration, and cultural issues. Hard-liners usually point to the success of the German far-right party AfD (known in English as Alternative for Germany), which placed second in the country’s recent elections, its best showing ever. Musk had enthusiastically endorsed the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, and he celebrated the result with a personal phone call to her.

In truth, the AfD did not achieve the electoral breakthrough its leaders hoped for. Although conditions were perfect for a populist surge—Germany’s economy is stagnant, and a car attack by an Afghan refugee 10 days before the vote helped keep immigration at the forefront of the national conversation—the AfD struggled to gain a foothold outside the former East Germany. Other parties still refuse to include it in coalition talks. By dabbling in German politics, Trumpworld’s second-most-powerful figure hurt his own business interests while being at best irrelevant to the AfD’s performance. The party “got nothing out of Musk’s backing,” Katwala told me. “It transformed Tesla’s reputation in Germany, but did nothing for the AfD.”

Ultimately, Trump’s fundamental positions have limited appeal to most European electorates. His abandonment of Ukraine is so unpopular in Europe that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen—two natural MAGA sympathizers—have carefully distanced themselves from it.

As MAGA becomes ever more extreme, allies such as Farage must decide how far to go along with it—in the knowledge that, if they do not oblige, their domestic rivals will. The Reform leader has just fallen out with one of his five MPs, in a drama precipitated by (who else?) Musk, which played out on (where else?) X. Back in January, Trump’s “first buddy” declared his support for the agitator Tommy Robinson, whom Musk credited with publicizing the so-called grooming gangs of men, mostly British citizens of Pakistani descent, who raped and trafficked girls in towns across England. But Farage recognizes Robinson for what he is: a rabble-rouser with numerous criminal convictions. When the Reform leader repeated his long-standing refusal to admit Robinson to his party, Musk declared that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes.”

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s preferred alternative to lead Reform was Rupert Lowe, a 67-year-old who used to be chairman of a soccer club. Lowe’s day job is representing another English seaside town, Great Yarmouth, in Parliament. But his passion is posting on X. His disclosure forms show that he now makes about $4,000 a month from pumping out spicy takes on Musk’s social network, and all the attention appears to have gone to Lowe’s head. He recently told the Daily Mail that Farage saw himself as a “Messiah” and that Reform risked being a “protest party” unless its leader surrounded himself with good people. By enormous coincidence, soon after the interview was published, Lowe was suspended from Reform for alleged HR violations.

Cast out from Farage’s party, Lowe has since become even more extreme—a known side effect of spending too much time on social media. He wants the families of grooming-gang offenders deported from Britain, not just men convicted of crimes—and perhaps even “entire communities” of British Pakistanis, who he says have ignored the problem. (The white police officers and social workers who might face the same accusation do not appear to bother him.) Lowe claims that his party leader tried to stop him from expressing these views, an assertion that I instinctively believe; Farage, sometimes known as the father of Brexit, has succeeded in disrupting British politics because he knows when a dog whistle is preferable to a whistle. He has repeatedly forced out people from his various parties when their inflammatory rhetoric tipped into overt extremism. In 2018, he left the U.K. Independence Party after it appointed Robinson as an adviser.

Farage has a winning formula, Katwala believes: be guided by the British press. “If the Mail and The Telegraph think the candidate has a racism problem, ditch them,” he said, referring to two right-leaning papers. “If it’s just The Guardian”—which leans left—“you’re fine.” In the U.S., however, any such boundaries have collapsed. The breadth of permitted opinion, Katwala said, “goes all the way out to the Proud Boys”—the far-right group whose leader was jailed for his part in the Capitol insurrection, and then pardoned by Trump.

Voters outside the United States have one more objection to the MAGA movement: Trump and his allies talk about other countries in a profoundly alienating way. “America First”? Fine, but not “America Thinks Your Tin-Pot Country Is a Joke.” The toxic combination of Trump’s pro-Russia leanings, Vice President J. D. Vance’s arrogance and condescension, and Musk’s sad case of advanced poster’s disease have tanked America’s reputation among its traditional allies.

The exultant right-wing influencers who cheer on MAGA’s sassy clapback anti-diplomacy should remember that insulting another country’s politicians is like insulting someone else’s family. I can be rude about my sister, but you can’t. The Trump administration has revived almost every negative stereotype that Europeans have about Americans: too loud, too brash, too big. Vance, who lectures U.S. allies about how to run their affairs, reminds us of every rich guy from suburban Pittsburgh who visits the Amalfi Coast in the summer, drives up the pedestrianized streets, and then complains that the pasta is too chewy and there’s no AC in his 15th-century villa.

As a result, even formerly bloodless technocrats have found new vigor when being picked on by the Trump administration. So far, the net effect of MAGA foreign policy has been to get exactly zero concessions from Moscow, while simultaneously reviving the fortunes of Canada’s Liberal Party and helping the mainstream center-right win in Greenland. The new prime minister of Canada, the former central banker Mark Carney, was able to appeal to voters’ patriotism when rebutting Trump’s demand to annex his country, and his punitive tariffs. “Americans should make no mistake—in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win,” Carney said, after taking over the Liberal leadership from Justin Trudeau. The Liberals have been able to stop their opponent Pierre Poilievre’s momentum by painting him as a MAGA lackey. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said.  

Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats, has been similarly energized. During a televised debate ahead of the recent German elections, he attacked the AfD for drawing support from the MAGA movement, painting his rivals as unpatriotic. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” he added.

Ben Ansell, a University of Oxford politics professor, believes that MAGA’s sympathy for Moscow has given Europe’s mainstream politicians a potent attack line. “We may finally be witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. When mainstream politicians attack conservative populists, the latter can easily shrug off any criticism as the revenge of elites. “Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy, though? Well, that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy.” In recent weeks, Farage’s approval ratings have noticeably fallen.

[Read: How not to hand populists a weapon]

“If you’re being directly attacked by Trump and you have your own elections, it’s hard to imagine being very successful in those elections by saying: Yes, please,” Ansell told me. Farage is plainly struggling to balance his desire to be close to MAGA with his domestic ambitions.

Populist parties define themselves as being against the status quo and the mainstream, but many of their members (and voters) hold eclectic and divergent views on economics and other issues. “These parties are more fragile than people have thought, and now you have this little lever that mainstream parties can use to split them apart—their closeness to much hated figures,” Ansell told me. European voters have long been wary of Moscow’s intentions. What’s new is a sense that the people now running the United States have lined up with Russia—and against Europe. “Vladimir Putin has been around for a quarter of a century,” Ansell said. “It’s Musk and Trump.”

Populists outside America might love the reflected glow of MAGA’s power and success, but being linked to the Trump administration means tethering themselves, in the eyes of their home audiences, to an unpopular president, his unpopular celebrity adviser, his unpopular stance on Ukraine, and his unpopular bullying tactics. That is populists’ MAGA problem—and the mainstream’s opportunity to fight back.

The main attraction in the Wembley neighborhood of northwest London is the eponymous football stadium where the England national team hosts its matches. But just half a mile away, situated in an almost aggressively unbeautified six-story office block, you’ll find an even more impressive repository of human excellence.

The Michaela Community School is a “free school.” Like charters in America, these schools aim to provide more pedagogical options to poor and marginalized communities. They are publicly funded, privately run, and controversial—both for their approaches to education and, critics say, for diverting resources from the public system. Around Michaela’s asphalt courtyard, lines from “Invictus,” William Henley’s ode to grit and perseverance—“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul”—have been blown up to the size of billboards. The slogan “Knowledge is power” adorns a four-story banner hanging from the building’s brick facade. Another banner reads: Private School Ethos—No Fees.

Michaela has no admissions filters for entrance into Year 7 (the first year of secondary school in Britain) and draws nearly all its students from Wembley, one of the poorest districts in London. Most students are Black or South Asian, and many are the children of immigrants. Yet its pupils perform at the level of their counterparts at the most prestigious private schools, earning twice the national average on the English Baccalaureate and the General Certificate of Secondary Education. More than 80 percent of Michaela graduates continue their studies at Russell Group Universities (Britain’s top-24 colleges). One joke I heard repeatedly in conversations about Michaela was that a savvy posh family could spare the £50,000 annual tuition for Eton, purchase a flat in Wembley, and rest assured that their child would enjoy the same outsize chances of gaining admission to Oxford or Cambridge.

[Read: Is school-discipline reform moving too fast?]

Michaela is the brainchild of Katharine Birbalsingh, known widely as “Britain’s strictest headmistress.” Her emphasis on hard work and her unsparing critique of victimization has propelled her to national and international prominence. In her neat and unfussy office hangs a quote from the Black American economist Thomas Sowell: “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” A stack of books includes a collection of essays on Booker T. Washington, Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, and Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Near the doorway is a life-size cutout of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, bloodied sword in hand, with a piece of paper taped to his mouth reading HOLD THE LINE.

Birbalsingh is the daughter of Guyanese and Jamaican parents and a former French teacher. In 2010, she gave a viral speech at the Conservative Party Conference lamenting the school system’s “culture of excuses, of low standards, and expecting the very least from our poorest and most disadvantaged.” She argued that teachers were too afraid of “the accusation of racism” to discipline Black boys, and that reform required “right-wing thinking.” Her speech circulated so widely presumably because she wasn’t the only one fed up with the persistent achievement gap between poor and well-off students. And she wasn’t alone in believing that the gentler, more progressive approach to addressing students’ needs, which had gained traction in the United Kingdom (and the United States), hurts kids who are already behind. Nevertheless, she was promptly pushed out of her teaching job as a result of that speech. Four years later, she co-founded Michaela.

I visited the academy twice—in December and then again in January—to speak with Birbalsingh and her staff and students, and to rove among the classrooms. Multiple delegations of teachers from other schools in the U.K. and abroad were touring Michaela at the same time to try to soak up its protocols and ethos. Birbalsingh told me that the school receives some 800 visitors a year, and copious guest books in the lobby bore their ecstatic testimonials. The students, impeccable in their gray trousers and navy blazers, are so accustomed to this outside interest that they do not so much as glance at a visitor when he enters the classroom.

Those blazers tend to be covered in merit badges: for attendance, club memberships, academic achievement (the “Scholosaurus” badge). Pupils can earn demerits for infractions as minor as failing to maintain eye contact when a teacher is speaking. In the cafeteria, they shout in unison poems committed to memory before taking their seats. Over family-style meals that they both serve and clean up, conversation is guided by a formal question such as: What does it mean to be successful? Lunch—which is vegetarian—always concludes with students randomly chosen to address the room on the theme of gratitude. Teachers then provide candid feedback on these oratorical performances. I listened as one small girl with a braided ponytail gave an appreciation to her instructor for helping her better understand a math problem. She was praised for her delivery, for “doing all the basics: confident, loud; she’s owning the space.”

“Black people, Muslim people, minorities of any sort” should not “have to hold their hand out to the white man and say, ‘Please look after me,’” Birbalsingh told me later in her office. She objected fiercely to what she saw as the “patronizing” idea being conveyed to young Black people that “the only way you can get to Oxford is if there is affirmative action of some sort to let you in, or the only way you can get the job is if they have a list of quotas that allows you in because, well, they have to feel sorry for you.” Instead, she’s teaching her students “the knowledge and the skills that they need to be able to make their lives successful.”

Birbalsingh, herself a graduate of Oxford, said that she opens the school up to visitors because she wants “to show people what’s possible.” She conceives of Michaela not merely as a stand-alone educational institution making a difference in the lives of the local children lucky enough to attend it but also as a laboratory for expanding our understanding of what is socially and pedagogically possible for “kids from the inner city.” She wants people to take her insights and methodology “back to their schools and make their schools better. A huge part of the mission, actually, is seeding the ideas.” For those who cannot make it to Wembley, she has edited a volume of contributions from more than 20 teachers titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way.

You won’t encounter them in Michaela’s hallways, but critics of the school are legion. Some say that it is overly focused on test scores and rote memorization. It has little use for “differentiation—catering differently within a lesson to students of varying ability,” George Duoblys observed in a 2017 London Review of Books essay. Teachers have little flexibility—their role, Duoblys wrote, is “reduced to the transmission of an existing body of knowledge by means of a set of optimized techniques.”

“Michaela is an absolute monarchy,” Will Lloyd wrote last year in The New Statesman, and Birbalsingh “its formidable, Gradgrindian headmistress-queen.” The article dismisses the school’s conservatism as fetishizing a “pseudo-British” past. Birbalsingh “is never more than 30 seconds from saying she wants to return education to the 1950s, or lamenting that it’s unfashionable to teach what your grandmother would have taught you,” Lloyd writes. “She talks about ‘love,’ but the public persona is more ‘Nightmare Victorian Patriarch.’”

[Read: A remarkable school-choice experiment]

Michaela isn’t a monarchy, but Lloyd is right that it’s not a democracy either. Call it a benevolent dictatorship. Roughly half of the school’s 700 students are Muslim, and Birbalsingh forbids them from gathering in large groups to pray during recess, arguing that nonobservant students might feel pressured by such outward displays of piety. One student’s family took the school to court over the policy, and last year, a judge dismissed the case, arguing that the student knew about the rule before applying to the school. “If parents do not like what Michaela is,” Birbalsingh remarked, “they do not need to send their children to us.”

Birbalsingh is now involved in a contentious dispute with the new Labour government’s secretary of education, Bridget Phillipson, over proposed reforms that would limit free schools’ autonomy by imposing new hiring rules and an as-yet-to-be-defined national curriculum. Birbalsingh argues that teacher-certification requirements would undermine her ability to recruit and develop nontraditional candidates who might be put off by bureaucratic hoop-jumping, and that the national curriculum might force her to lower her own standards. She also called Phillipson a Marxist. Phillipson’s office did not reply to a request for comment.

Birbalsingh believes that she’s been punished for her political orientation throughout her tenure at Michaela. “As a teacher, you’re not really allowed to be a conservative,” she told me. She may not always vote conservative (she told me that she didn’t in the previous election, though she wouldn’t say whom she’d voted for). But she embraces the label of cultural conservative—“old-school, Black, small-c conservative,” advocating all manner of progressive taboos: hierarchy, personal responsibility, respectability politics.

When she was drumming up grassroots support around London for what would become Michaela, Birbalsingh recalled, she was protested by white people whom she believes had been “bused in from the suburbs.” Opponents argued that the school would take resources away from the public system, which was already short on money for primary schools. “We had to hire bouncers for our events because of the possible violence that might ensue,” Birbalsingh said. “White people would stand up and shout in order to drown out our voices so that the Black people, the Black moms, generally speaking, could not hear what I was saying.”

Birbalsingh also struggled to find a space for the school. “That’s why we’ve ended up in this terrible building,” she told me with a laugh. “No school building has six floors. Normally, it’s two floors. You’re not right next to the trains. When my staff are trying to talk to the kids, you can hardly hear them because of the trains. We have no car park for the staff. We have no trees and grass for the kids to run around. It’s by no means ideal. But because I don’t believe in feeling sorry for ourselves, you don’t hear me going on about it all the time.” She added, “I’m not going to spend my time being a victim.”

From what I saw, none of this presented a hindrance to learning. Nor was I very convinced that Michaela’s teaching style sacrifices intellectual nuance and rigor on the altar of standardized-test scores. In December, I took a seat in the back of a room of 11- and 12-year-old students involved in a spirited discussion on atheism. When the teacher, a young man named Josh Cowland, posed a question, every single student’s hand shot up. “Atheists therefore argue that God cannot be omnipotent,” Cowland said. “Because what is he not doing?” The students were given 10 seconds to consult their neighbors. “Four, three, two,” Cowland counted down, and on “one,” the room was blanketed in silence, as if you’d slipped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Once again, all hands were raised. A boy answered confidently: “He’s not stopping evil!”

Another teacher, James Sibley, told me that he knows the school has a reputation for drilling and being strict—as if “you’re going to get a knife in the face” if you get an answer wrong. But the expectations aren’t the problem, he said: “I think children are most unhappy not when there’s pressure on them, but with inconsistency.”

“It was quite difficult to adapt to the expectations that the teachers had for us,” one boy told me, “but once we did, it allowed us to be more successful and to be able to have high goals for ourselves as well.” An older girl agreed. “The whole environment is mutually reinforcing the norms of excellence,” she said, “which I think is what’s so difficult in certain schools where even if you want to try your hardest, if you’re not around other people who are doing it, it can be very difficult to be the only person living by certain standards.”

That sense of shared purpose is very different from what I remember of my own high school, where kids would laugh in your face for “talking white.” My father, another Black, small-c cultural conservative, also made me recite “Invictus.” From ninth to 12th grade, my best friend, Carlos, and I studied with him for hours in the evenings and on weekends, and we hid this deepest aspect of ourselves from our classmates. All of us judged one another by the quality of our outfits, by our physical indomitability and sexual prowess, and by our ability to evince an above-it-all insouciance in the face of the larger, white society around us. Sociologists call this “cool-pose culture,” and it hobbled my friends and me when we were navigating adolescence. I saw no sign of it at Michaela.

In the hallways, the only talk I heard was “Good day, sir,” as I passed earnest boys and girls moving efficiently between their classes. No one roughhoused or wasted time or teased one another. Nor did anyone laugh. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t notice this distinct lack of levity. What was it like to always have to be a model student on display for curious onlookers? By comparison, my friends and I were free—luxuriously so—in ways these children possibly couldn’t even imagine. But that freedom that so many underprivileged and minority children bask in isn’t worth a damn thing if it leads to an adulthood boxed in by self-inflicted limitations.

[Read: The challenge of educational inequality]

“The stuff that really matters here is who our children are as people,” Birbalsingh told me. There’s “no exam in that,” she said, but you can “look at our children, look at how they walk. Look at how they talk to each other. These are normal inner-city children, but they’re not walking with that bop. They’re not talking with that slang” or being “rude to people on the buses.” None of this is accidental. “We are teaching them how to behave,” she continued, so that they may “live lives of dignity and of meaning.”

This all sounds like common sense, but it’s hard to overstate the visceral disdain it can elicit. In a Guardian column about a 2022 documentary on Michaela, Britain’s Strictest Headmistress, Zoe Williams sneered that the film “continues to do the diligent work of Katharine Birbalsingh, in mythologizing herself so furiously that, if you didn’t have a memory or know any better, you would think she invented the phrases ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’” Such condescension would be merely impolite if it weren’t leveraged in service of a status quo that has been failing children who are not already the beneficiaries of privilege. “Competence is controversial,” Birbalsingh said, when I asked her why she thinks there is so much enmity directed at her project.

But competence is also infectious. On my second visit, I struck up a conversation with a young teacher named Ryan Badolato from Vertex Partnership Academies, in the Bronx, a charter school with a mission similar to Michaela’s. “I’ve never seen kids so invested in their academic success, praised so much for their hard work, or any group of teenagers as polite and respectful as they all were,” he expanded several days later over email. “Despite the outside world viewing their school as overly strict—a place where students should feel unhappy and eager to leave—what I witnessed was the opposite: They are the happiest and most proud teenagers I have ever met.”