The Brex-Factor: 10 of the worst Brexiteers this week

(NEW ENTRY)

Pass the collection plate round for UKIP’s Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire MEP, now facing a legal bill which could run towards half a million pounds after a failed attempt to claim immunity as a member of the European Parliament. The former horse physio libelled three MPs by falsely claiming they were aware about child-grooming gangs in Rotherham but had ignored them because of political correctness. With stunning chutzpah, Brexiteer Collins then argued that she was not liable for damages in a British court because the rules of the European Parliament did not allow it. Alas, her new-found enthusiasm for European justice has gone unrewarded and now John Healey, Kevin Barron and Sarah Champion are asking for around £150,000 apiece.

Boris Johnson

(NO CHANGE)

BoJo on November 15 2016: ‘There is every reason to be positive. Donald Trump is a guy who believes firmly in values that I believe in too – freedom and democracy. As far as I understand he is in many aspects a liberal guy from New York.’ And so it has proved in a quiet and uneventful first few days in the Oval Office – so much so that diplomatic BoJo this week tried to silence protests about Trump’s planned state visit by pointing out that it couldn’t be that bad as we’d entertained Nicolae Ceausescu and Robert Mugabe in the past!

Katie Hopkins (down 2)

‘Petitions are like masturbation. Unproductive,’ the peroxide Ayn Rand told MailOnline this week. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for her, but perhaps we must add self-pleasure to empathy and compassion on the growing list of things which Katie Hopkins is obviously no good at.

Nigel Farage (down 6)

The former UKIP leader complains of being ‘poor’ despite his £85,000 salary as an MEP, so it’s sad to hear that dastardly Eurocrats are investigating him and seven party colleagues for alleged misuse of funds. In question are the £84,000 of EU dosh paid by Farage and Raymond Finch to their joint assistant, Christopher Adams, who happens to be the party’s national nominating officer. They’re also looking at Finch’s assistant Kirsten Farage, who was paid £20,000 and happens to be Nigel’s wife. UKIP say they have ‘scrupulously applied the rules of the European parliament’, but if the worst comes to the worst Nigel could always find the cash by selling some of his jackets to new tweed enthusiast Paul Nuttall, currently stomping around Stoke looking like something out of All Creatures Great And Small.

Roger Helmer 
(up 4)

‘By any standards Mrs May’s visit to Donald Trump has been a success,’ Tweeted the serially incorrect UKIP MEP last Saturday morning, just as the government was going into full U-turn mode over the PM’s kid gloves treatment of President Tinyhands. Another triumph for Roger, who also continued his baffling war on electricity smart meters this week, asking ‘would the average guy prefer to watch the TV? Or would he rather watch the smart meter telling how much juice the TV is using?’ That somewhat depends on whether Paul Nuttall is on the TV at the time, in which case the smart meter becomes the far more engaging and human option. But why is Helmer so opposed to the money-saving devices? The answer can be found in a 2014 blog post about smart meters in which he warns ‘they could allow Big Brother to turn off your lights’. Happily, if this happened at night, Roger’s own home would remain illuminated by the moonlight glinting off his tinfoil helmet…

Nadim Zahawi

(NEW ENTRY)

‘Freedom of movement makes it harder to monitor those who might represent a danger to the UK, better to #VoteLeave,’ Tweeted the Conservative MP for Stratford-on-Avon last year. Last Saturday Zahawi returned to social media to say he was ‘sad to hear I’ll be banned from the USA based on my country of birth.’ Remind us again about what happens to things which go around?

Paul Nuttall

(UP 1)

‘The truth is that UKIP have never stood on an agenda of privatising the NHS and we never will,’ declared party leader and Stoke by-election candidate Nuttall this week. That’s no thanks to former leader Nigel Farage, who admitted in a 2015 interview that he had wanted to make it a manifesto commitment but was pressured out of it by colleagues. And indeed no thanks to Nuttall himself, who only a few years ago was admitting: ‘I would like to see more free market introduced into the health service; this is the way we have to go.’

Kate Hoey

(NEW ENTRY)

Nudge-nudging like Eric Idle in his prime, the mystifying Labour MP for Vauxhall told Twitter: ‘Must find out exactly how many Syrian refugees have been taken in by other Muslim countries particularly in the Arab world?’ Though Kate could easily have looked it up on Google or used the House of Commons library, the answer is at least 4.6 million, with Lebanon and Jordan joining Turkey as the biggest contributors. Not quite the answer we suspect Kate was looking for.

jacob Rees-Mogg (NEW ENTRY)

Brexit happened because ‘everyone was sick to death of the establishment’, explained the old Etonian former fund manager in a Times interview conducted from his Grade II listed country house in Somerset.

As with Boris Johnson, profilers love to dwell on JRM’s fun eccentricities over his not-fun politics – so the Times gave us anecdotes about his nanny, his miniature of Charles I made from the executed monarch’s hair and the fact that he’s never changed a lightbulb or boiled an egg, but mentioned only briefly his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Just part of a big week for the human 
Ray Alan ventriloquist dummy in which 
he called for ‘the reddest of red carpets’ to be rolled out for Donald Trump and made his much-ridiculed speech comparing 
the referendum to Agincourt and 
Waterloo.

Michael Gove (RE-ENTRY)

Taking part in a Daily Mail debate on ‘whether sex in your 50s can be the best you’ve ever had’, the expert-shunning former Justice Secretary’s wife Sarah Vine wrote: ‘Somehow, it seems, there is always something more urgent on the to-do list.

‘At the end of most days, I feel too exhausted to contemplate anything more than a cup of herbal tea in the bedroom… even if I did have a spare hour, I’d rather spend it having a power nap. Sex is important – but it isn’t everything. And, sometimes, it can be nothing at all.’

Can the last time Gove pushed all the right buttons and felt the earth move really have been when he got into Donald Trump’s gold lift?