When MPs lose the plot, Nigel’s filthy smirk blooms
YOU don’t see many politicians smiling these days, but Nigel Farage is positively beaming. Actually, it’s less of a smile and more of a filthy smirk.
It shoots along one side of his face as though someone’s just recited a particularly inappropriate limerick, culminating, more often than not, in a Popeye-like cackle.
Nige is chipper. In the pink. Cock-a-hoop. The reasons are not hard to discern.
Ever since our two main political parties connived to serve up a half-baked Brexit compromise, his new outfit, the Brexit Party, has sprung up faster than mustard cress. The EU elections are in a fortnight’s time and, if the opinion polls are accurate, Nige’s lot are going to win in a rout.
It’s become an axiom of modern British politics: when Westminster wavers, Farage flourishes.
Yesterday, the Brexit Party invited the media to an upmarket venue off London’s Pall Mall. We were shown a pacey video of Farage and his disciples out on the stump, complete with swooshy production values and what I can only describe as car alarm music. The Brexit Party clearly has a fat wodge of dough floating about.
We heard briefly from party chairman, ex-property magnate Richard Tice, a creamy sort with wavy hair and a taste for expensive tailoring. More Pouilly-Fume than best bitter. Then Farage rose to his feet. Click click click. Photographers swarmed around him the way ants march to a honeypot. Tice, meanwhile, remained studiously ignored.
Farage looks fitter than in previous election campaigns. He’s lean and mobile. Gone, too, are those sweat-beaded brows.
During the half-hour he spent under the heavy lights in what was a fairly pokey room, his tanned features remained bonedry. There is also added angriness to his diction. He’s less jokey than in his pie, pint and pinstripe Ukip phase.
THIs is deliberate, I’m sure. An attempt to reflect the public mood. I wonder also if his chums across the Atlantic in Trumpland have been giving him a few pointers. He eased himself in with a few ruderies about Westminster.
Our political class is ‘despicable’. The Prime Minister, in particular, is hopeless. Nor does he think much of Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab – Brexiteer candidates lining up to replace her.
Winning the European elections on May 23 is not going to be enough, he announced. Over the next few months, the Brexit Party will begin vetting candidates to
fight the next general election. They will be people with ‘real world experience’ – not a bunch of swotty, Oxford PPE graduates who have rarely ventured outside sW1.
Farage made it clear he isn’t much interested in attracting disaffected Tory MPs. His experience with Ukip was that when it bagged an anti-EU defector, they usually ended up causing him trouble. What he was more interested in was nabbing their donors. And he’s already done just that – or so he claimed.
At this point, he got a tad shirty.
BARELY ten per cent of the Brexit Party’s funding has come through private donations, he said, and their identities will only be revealed when the Electoral Commission publishes them. And, no, his old friend from the referendum campaign, Arron Banks, is not involved.
There were a few Trump-style verbal pork pies lobbed at broadcasters and the Press. He took a pop at the BBC for not inviting any Brexit Party candidates on TV over the weekend. ‘I’m not sure what that should mean for the future of public broadcasting,’ he muttered.
A reporter from the Guardian got short shrift for asking about his appearance as a guest on a conspiracy theorist’s webcast. ‘When it comes to conspiracy theories, your paper’s way, way ahead!’ Farage scoffed.
Policies? Pah, don’t need any of those, he insisted. Not yet, anyway. He simply wants to get as many Brexit Party MEPs as possible so they can stick it to Monsieur Barnier et al in Brussels.
And with a final flick of his wrist, he went back to grinning for the cameras.
say what you like about Nigel Farage, if there’s general election before the end of the year, his signature grin will be as immovable as the one on the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland.