The Nigels of this world get my vote

BLAME Farage! My father — a fellow Nigel — was yesterday cursing the rubicund rottweiler for turning their name into a nomina non grata. It isn’t just Captain Cumber-world, though, that has stopped parents christening their kids Nigel: names follow a cycle, falling out of favour until a new generation no longer sees them as an old-age indicator (hence Iris,

Lily and Stanley jumping from the geriatric ward to the playground).

Nigel doesn’t deserve this fate, though. We are forgetting a gallant Nigel, the hero of my childhood: the moustached Mansell, a Formula One champ who still takes his holidays in a caravan park in Wales. Mansell was once greeted by a fan in the South of France as “Nee-gel mains sales”, transliterating as “Nigel dirty hands”. Mansell was also the subject of a triumph of Nineties pop — a song titled “Red 5” after the number on his Williams F1 car. The lyrics included the line: “There’s no doubt about Nigel ...” My family bought my longsuffering father the tape and played it at him on repeat.

That isn’t the best Nigel-themed present that has been come his way, though. Recently, my mother gave my (very pro-Remain) father a 2014 Peter Brookes cartoon, a riff on The Shining. It has Farage bursting through the door of

No 10, beside a terrified David Cameron: “Here’s Nigey!” It hangs, fittingly, in the loo.