The Brex Factor: Dan ‘the naan’ Hannan fails to curry favour

9. Katie Hopkins Like an alt-right Miss Havisham, she turned up to the Tory conference in a wedding dress. But Katie’s big news of the week is that she’s at war with Nigel Farage for not being Brexity enough. Nigel’s lack of support for Anne Marie Waters in the UKIP leadership election has led to peroxide hate machine Hoppo branding him a ‘cockwomble’ who has been ‘felating (sic) the left-wing Establishment.’ She added: ‘He chose his Labour Broadcasting Corporation @LBC pay check over 17.4 million Brexiteers. End of.’ This is shaping up to be the best Baddie v Baddie battle since Darth Vader took on Emperor Palpatine, and all Brex Factor can say is ‘pass the popcorn’.

8. Boris Johnson More proof of the foreign secretary’s extraordinary gift for diplomacy after it emerged he had to be stopped from reciting a colonial-era poem containing a jokey reference to the Buddha while on a visit to one of Myanmar’s most sacred Buddhist sites. The man with more red lines than a drunk’s eyeball attempted to recite Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay in front of local dignitaries at Shwedagon Pagoda in January, but was prevented from getting to the line referencing a ‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud/ Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd’. A bullet dodged there, and we look forward to Boris’ forthcoming visit to the Golden Temple of Amritsar, where he will be performing Peter Sellers’ version of Goodness Gracious Me.

7. Theresa May You can’t keep a bad slogan down. Before kick-off in last Saturday’s Premier League match between Huddersfield Town and Tottenham Hotspur, Talksport analyst Joey Barton referred to the Yorkshire side’s defence as being ‘strong and stable’. It worked for the Terriers just as well as it had done for May during the general election. They were 0-3 down inside 25 minutes and lost the game 0-4.

6. Kate Hoey In these days of seeing through a glass darkly, it’s not unusual to hear a senior politician protest of the BBC’s Brexit coverage, ‘everything the EU commission say is presented as good and being right and anything the UK Government does is presented as wrong and in a negative way’. However it’s a bit of surprise when a) the person defending the Conservative government is a Labour MP and b) she’s having a go at the impartiality of the UK’s public service broadcaster during an interview with Russia Today, the utterly unbiased international TV network which just coincidentally is funded by the Russian government.

5. Craig Mackinlay Sounding like the bastard son of Norman Tebbit and Swiss Toni, the Brexit-loving South Thanet MP told a Tory conference fringe meeting that unemployed young Brits should ‘get on your bike’ and pick fruit alongside ‘gorgeous EU women’ on Kent fruit farms. Mackinlay, facing trial next May in connection with his expenses for the 2015 by-election in which he defeated Nigel Farage, claimed British workers would fill jobs left behind by departing European citizens after Brexit. He said: ‘Why wouldn’t a youngster from Glasgow without a job come down to the south to work for a farm in the summer with loads of gorgeous EU women working there? Get on your bike and find a job.’ Yes, but won’t those gorgeous EU women have all been sent home because of Brexit? Or will there be a Highly Gorgeous Migrant Visa alongside the promised Highly Skilled version?

4. Mark E Smith Following in the disappointing footsteps of Morrissey and Ringo Starr, The Fall’s leader and founding genius has told Louder Than War magazine ‘I thought Brexit was great… still do’. Asked to explain, Smith replied with a forensic dissection of the referendum debate which has led everyone at The New European to question our position: ‘Middle class kids here want to go to Europe, but why do they think all those European kids are here? They’re the sort of people who go on about India. But now I can bargain with Spain and Portugal. But middle class groups who don’t sell any records used to get the same money as the Fall, now that’s well out the window. You know what I mean? It’s incredible innit.’ Indeed it is. Get that man on Question Time now-ah!

3. Anne Marie Waters Reacted with dignity to her surprise defeat in the UKIP leadership election, tweeting ‘Today: Jihad 1 Truth 0’ before retweeting messages from ‘Kippers who were cutting up their party membership cards in disgust. More retweets followed, including one correspondent who posted ‘The Fight for Justice has only just Started the Battle for Britain will Never End’ together with a photo of Waters’ face in the skies next to Big Ben, above the caption ‘Through me your voice will be heard’. Honestly, haven’t these people ever heard the phrase ‘you lost, get on with it’?

2. Morrissey Having complained last year that the BBC was smearing Leave voters as ‘irresponsible drunken racists’, while demonising Nigel Farage as an ‘educator’, the Moz doubled down during a rare live BBC 6 performance, telling the audience that he was ‘surprised to see Anne Marie Waters is the new UKIP leader. Oh she isn’t, the vote was rigged’. Morrissey later performed an excellent cover version of Back On The Chain Gang, which is where many of Waters’ supporters would like to put Muslims. Note: Morrissey is higher than Mark E Smith on this list only because it will upset Mark E Smith.

1. Daniel Hannan In a televised Channel 4 debate, the so-called ‘Brain of Brexit’ promised an audience of Leave voters in Wakefield that ‘our curry is going to get better’ after we leave the EU. But how could that be, asked one of the audience, when the cuisine’s finest chefs will no longer be granted passage from south east Asia under tougher immigration targets? ‘I think you’ll agree we could be doing more to train up people in this country to be curry chefs,’ Dan sniffed, leaving the questioner – apologies in advance – naan too pleased. So, to paraphrase: Our curry is bound to get better if the best chefs leave and are replaced by trainee armed with a second-hand copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Bible. Never a dhal moment when Dan is around!