Brexfactor: Dead ringer… but he won’t get Bannon role

Paul Nuttall

Little has been heard of the Nobel Prize-winning Olympic 100m champion since his resignation as UKIP leader, but it’s now emerged that during the election campaign he failed in an attempt to rebrand his party ‘The Patriotic Alliance’. That, of course, was the name former ‘Kippers donor and Nuttall critic Arron Banks was planning for his own new movement, so this failed hijacking is one of the rare occasions when you can actually feel sorry for Paul Nuttall. A UKIP spokesman said the rebrand had only been one idea and was just ‘another arrow in the sheaf’. A phrase which, like UKIP itself, does not really exist.

Patrick Minford

The perennially debunked academic claimed a Hard Brexit would boost the economy by £135bn annually, winning widespread derision from economists but plenty of airtime from the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News.

Once a favourite of Margaret Thatcher, Minford’s greatest hits include a 1990 Economic Review magazine article in which he argued the Poll Tax was a vote-winner, writing: ‘The Community Charge has much to commend it … opponents underestimate the political maturity of the electorate.’ Last year he authored a happy-clappy article about Brexit for the Sun, but conceded it might have one tiny side-effect for the UK: ‘It seems likely that we would mostly eliminate manufacturing.’

Jane Collins

‘There are people on that contenders list that really worry me,’ said the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber of her fellow UKIP leadership candidates. Of course, Jane’s own CV contains no worries at all. She’s a stable, healing candidate – well, she used to work as a horse physio – and she’s intimately acquainted with the finer aspects of British laws and economics, since she’s is currently facing potential bankruptcy having failed to pay £358,000 in damages and costs after falsely claiming three Rotherham MPs were aware about child grooming gangs in the town but had ignored them because of political correctness.

Peter Murdoch

Interviewed for a news agency piece about Brexit voters, this retired construction worker from Kent called for the demolition of the Channel Tunnel to stop immigration. He told Reuters: ‘This used to be a lovely town, Chatham. Now all you hear is foreigners. They’re coming over getting all the benefits, houses, the lot. Of course it should stop. Blow the tunnel up as well.’

Steve Crowther

UKIP’s caretaker leader issued a press release calling former EU President Martin Schulz a ‘complete idiot’. That accusation was somewhat undermined by the fact that Crowther spelled Schulz’s name incorrectly throughout, including three incorrect spellings in the first two paragraphs. Which left Crowther looking like – now, what’s the phrase? – a complete idiot.

John Rees-Evans

The UKIP leadership candidate, who famously claimed that a gay donkey had tried to rape his horse, wants to offer British Indians and other dual nationals £9,000 apiece to leave the UK. It’s a plan which recalls the old Lenny Henry joke, ‘Enoch Powell says he wants to give me £1,000 to send me home. That’s great because it’s only 20p on the 74 bus from here to Dudley.’

Sir Len first told that one on New Faces in 1975 – how we’ve moved on as a nation since then!

Boris Johnson

The Foreign Secretary is said to be ‘at a low’ by allies, with other sources telling The Times it would not be a surprise if he resigned. Bozzer is reportedly refusing to engage in Cabinet, is excluded from key conversations and has resorted to sending ‘bizarre notes’ to Theresa May setting out his red lines. Honestly! Shouldn’t Boris take heed of the words of a politician he admires greatly and snap out of the ‘general doom and gloom … and collective ‘whinge-o-rama’ that seems to be going on in some places’? So much for ‘people moaning and droning about the state of the world’!

Those words, of course, were uttered in the last year by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Roger Helmer

The man who put the kip into UKIP when he was photographed ‘resting his eyes’ in the EU Parliament is going into bat for the future of a great British meal. ‘Enjoy the very occasional takeaway pizza,’ he tweeted this week. ‘Furious that the gov’t wants to take the cheese & meat out of it. No more food police!’

What Helmer is referring to is a government request for restaurants, takeaways and supermarkets to reduce the calorie count on pizzas in order to reduce obesity. It’s hardly a complete ban on cheese and meat toppings, which would leave your pizza as just a hard-to-swallow lump of dough – much like Roger Helmer himself.

Nigel Farage

The nicotine-stained man-frog is reportedly miffed that he will only appear in the allegedly forthcoming Brexit movie in news footage, while Leave.EU chums Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore will be played by actors. A Farageist told the Mail On Sunday: ‘It’s ridiculous. Nigel is Hollywood, Banks and Wigmore are just spear-carriers.’

Poor Nigel. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, he IS still big – it’s just the UKIP vote that got small …

Daniel Hannan

The so-called Brain Of Brexit ended his Sunday Telegraph column with the words ‘truly, we are beyond the realm of reason’. A few hours later came evidence that this is indeed so, as Hannan tweeted: ‘When they make the film version of the Trump presidency, I want this guy to play Steve Bannon.’

Accompanying those words was a photo of Philip Seymour Hoffman – an inspired choice but sadly unavailable for the role because of his death in February 2014. Maybe Nigel ‘Hollywood’ Farage could give it a go instead?