Can there really be just 202 spellbinding days to go until the Brexit deadline? The answer is: maybe. Having played to extra time without a result, the UK is now subject to the controversial golden own-goal rule, a form of sudden death meaning this electrifying war of attrition could end the minute any EU exit deal is got over the line. However scrappily. What we can say for sure is that Betamax prime minister Theresa May has been made to accept a “flextension” by the EU. So instead of screaming “NO!” really urgently, as we have been in recent weeks, we will instead be screaming “Noooooooooooooooooooo!” in slow motion till the end of October. We hold all the cards, and the sunlit uplands are within our grasp.
Naturally, not everyone is happy. Nigel Farage is so angry that this morning he came out of retirement to launch his new party in Coventry, with a rally in Birmingham promised tomorrow. Yes! Maverick is re-engaging, sir. The small man’s back in town. Like me, you probably missed Farage’s latest retirement, which involved him being on the airwaves more than even Holly Willoughby, who people actually like. He is now the frontman for something called the Brexit party, which – in the usual way of these things – was led until last month by a Catherine Blaiklock, before she was forced to resign after some unfortunate social media posts were unearthed.
Decidedly upbeat this morning, Farage would only refer to this episode as “teething difficulties”, a metaphor which powerfully recalls that exhausting period in an infant’s development when you’re up half the night with it telling you Islam means submission to rapists. Shhhh, little one. Back to sleep now. If only someone would bring out a product that would ease this period of pain in any Faragiste leader’s life, they’d make a fortune.
Anyway, on with the show. Having watched Farage’s speech about wishing he didn’t have to be back, my main takeaway was how excruciatingly grateful he is to be back. All his moaning, over all the years, should be taken with a vast pinch of salt. This is how he likes it.
Farage has always been a very recognisable character type: the sort of “hero” who largely shirks their personal responsibilities, to the despair and exhaustion of whoever is left having to take up the slack. There are plenty of them in the public eye, of course – self-styled questers who profess themselves to be involved in a Higher Struggle, when the reality is they really just prefer being on the road having “proper fucking lunches” with their acolytes, or nearly dying up Everest, or doing some ludicrous postgrad that allows them to take someone more deserving’s place in the Boat Race, or being Russell Brand, or whatever important/noble/epic/responsibility-free challenge it is this week. Sorry, luv. They are “special”. They are “artistes”. They are “too important for that stuff”.
Or as Nigel once put it to me, back when he had them: “I am useless with young children. Completely useless. I mean, so bad it’s frightening.” Literally the next minute he was boasting about just how much of his time he was then lavishing on fighting some notional ban on menthol fags. Forgive me if the following political analysis comes off as too rarefied or opaque, then, but what a total effing eyeroll.
I wonder if Nigel’s failure to get elected to parliament seven times has anything to do with voters smelling his selfish priorities a mile off. Either way, given that our current political system seems to be fracturing, perhaps all these men’s ex-wives who had to do all their shit for them in their absence would stand for public office? I’d vote for them in a heartbeat, on the basis that they actually understand taking responsibility. Please spare the UK any more political hero quests, which produce politicians like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage, lead to single-issue governments, and distort an entire nation’s reality simply to enable their stripe of narcissism.
As for what we’ll charitably describe as the content of his speech, Nigel several times stressed that the Brexit party was a “respectable vehicle”. And then, having barely drawn breath, he promised a European elections campaign that will “start to put the fear of God into our members of parliament”.
Ah, there it is. Nobody can have missed the sheer volume of MPs stating in recent weeks and months that they seriously fear for their safety. So Nigel’s decision to go there, as it were, reminds you that he was the guy who specifically chose to mark victory in the referendum by giving a speech in which he claimed that it had been won “without a single bullet being fired”. And yet, only a week before, a bullet had been fired, in the attack that killed the MP Jo Cox. That murder was committed by a far-right extremist who saw apparently Cox as “one of ‘the collaborators’ and a traitor”, and what Nigel and co still seem to be saying with their “respectable vehicle” shtick is: appease us to keep the worse lot out.
To which the only possible response is the most mirthless of laughs. Really? REALLY? Because after years of the Tories effectively pursuing this policy, the hard right and far right are stronger than they were before. Convicted criminal and street thug Tommy Robinson is now gearing up to run as an MEP. I mean, maybe it’s time we realised that appeasement only ends one way? Or maybe this kind of politics is like homeopathy, where you have just a really little bit of extremism and it stops the big extremism coming?