You have to feel sorry for Nigel Farage. Time and again he has told us how much he despises the EU and how its MEPs are worthless parasites. Yet for the last 20 years he just hasn’t been able to drag himself away. He has been forced against his will to pocket more than £12,000 a month in salary and living allowances, not to mention a generous pension on top, just for making the occasional unhelpful appearance in Brussels. It’s an outrage. And to add insult to injury, now he’s being made to get himself elected to the European parliament yet again. This time as leader of his new Brexit party.
For a man who clearly suffers so much in the service of his people, Nige was looking remarkably chipper at his latest press conference in London. Suntanned, relaxed and with the blissed-out look of someone whose grin has been stitched in place by a third-rate plastic surgeon operating out of the backstreets of LA, he is not so much a politician as a cable TV evangelist promising salvation in exchange for his followers selling their mothers and their souls.
First though, we were treated to a Robert Kilroy-Silk tribute act, the property developer and man of the people Richard Tice, whose wealth has played no part in establishing him as Farage’s go-to warmup act. “People want change in politics,” said Tice. Which seemed a rash claim given that Nige has been something of a broken record for decades now and was not offering anything very different from before.
No matter how often he tries to reinvent himself, Farage invariably reverts to his default settings. At heart he still has the air of the dodgy financial salesman who mis-sells you an insurance policy then later phones you up to say he is prepared to act on your behalf in reclaiming the money you are owed provided you agree to give him one-third of whatever he can get out of the insurance company. Not content with that, he will then try to get a third hit out of you by persuading you to reinvest the damages in yet another of his iffy schemes.
Tice went on to outline the new modus operandi. After winning the EU elections, the Brexit party was going to insist that its MEPs be invited to take part in negotiating a no-deal Brexit. Even though the whole point of a no-deal Brexit was that there wasn’t anything to negotiate, the Brexit party’s MEPs were going to be on hand to oversee the negotiations that weren’t going to happen. Like Nige before them, they would be in Brussels to do absolutely nothing whatsoever.
“We have the highest-quality candidates,” Tice insisted. “People who are far better qualified in negotiations than our current MPs and civil servants.” Because the reason the UK was in its current state of crisis was that no one had asked Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Claire Fox, Ann Widdecombe or Martin Daubney to be involved as its chief Brexit negotiators.
Think about it a minute. What had been missing was a woman who couldn’t even negotiate the family nanny away from her brother, an apologist for IRA killings who holds others to far higher standards than she does herself, a Strictly Come Dancing contestant and a man whose chief contribution to public life had been to edit a lads’ mag. Who knew that the last three years could have been so different if only this quartet had been called into action. It’s a view, I suppose.
Not that Farage seemed bothered. “This is about democracy,” he declared, without any sense of irony. Nothing Nige has ever done has been about democracy. It’s always been all about him. Ukip was his baby and the Brexit party is much the same. He runs the organisation like a totalitarian regime.
What he says goes: everyone else is just a satellite orbiting his ego. Useful objects of desire to be used and discarded in the fulfilment of his narcissistic fantasies. Fantasies that change week by week, year by year. Before the referendum he was happy with a Norway-style Brexit. Now it’s no deal or nothing. Regardless of what the majority of the country may want. His is a democracy that tells the people what they are going to get and then sets about giving it to them.
Nige rattled on undeterred. The Brexit party would contest a general election but it wouldn’t have any credible policies. But he wouldn’t seek to become an MP himself. Far too risky. Seven times bitten, eight times shy. Rather he was far better off showing his MEPs the Brussels ropes. How to fiddle expenses. That sort of thing. And just because he had previous form on antisemitism and Islamophobia didn’t make him a racist.
After 30 minutes or so, Farage appeared to lose interest. Enough was enough. It had been a decent morning’s work. The more useless Westminster politicians appeared to be, the easier his job became. And right now it was something of a doddle. He didn’t need to sound even vaguely plausible. All he had to do was stand up and insist he would be different. As long as nobody started to look too closely, all would be well.