Borissey: The joke isn’t funny any more

Arron Banks’ floppy-haired sideman was recorded telling an academic that the Leave.EU campaign had used some of the ‘clever’ tactics once employed by Adolf Hitler.

‘Wiggy’ told Dr Emma Briant: ‘The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance – you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did… And looking at that now, in hindsight, having been on the sharp end of this campaign, you think: crikey, this is not new, and it’s just… using the tools that you have at the time.’

Next week: In an echo of the old Mitchell & Webb sketch, Wigmore is heard asking, ‘Arron, are we the baddies?’

RICHARD LEPPINGTON

The UKIP councillor for Blakeney and Bream and Gloucestershire acted swiftly after a political rival asked about rumours that he had a swastika tattooed on his leg. Leppington posted a photo showing that the marking was, in fact, an Odal Rune – a Nordic ancestral symbol he had done in tribute to his late father.

Alas, it turns out that the rune in question was a favourite of Hitler’s, was worn by a branch of the SS in the Second World War and was taken up by American’s National Socialist Movement as a replacement for the swastika, 
which they felt carried with it certain PR problems. Leppington said: ‘I don’t know about all those other things and if people want to make mischief out of it that’s very sad.’

DANIEL HANNAN

‘Here’s an unpopular opinion on the Windrush affair. You could say, the system worked,’ wrote the Tory MEP. Yes, that’s the same Daniel Hannan they call the ‘Brain of Brexit’.

Like that other great comedy character Paddington, Dan was born in Peru.

So if tomorrow he’s deported to Lima and loses his job in the process but finally wins vindication thanks to a Guardian expose and is granted leave to return several months later, presumably he’ll say it was all just another example of the system working.

TIM MARTIN

The Vote Leave donor and Blanka from Streetfighter 2 lookalike who runs pub chain Wetherspoons has shut down his company’s social media accounts, explaining that ‘people spend too much time’ on them and ‘struggle to control the compulsion’.

Can any readers think of something else which leaves users struggling to control a compulsion, and is available in Tim’s outlets from 9am-midnight?

KIM KIMBERLEY-BLACKSTAR

Perhaps Tim Martin’s lead should be followed by UKIP candidate for Newcastle’s Kingston Park South and Newbiggin Hall wards in the forthcoming local elections. Old Facebook posts by the ‘Kipper include hoping Gina Miller will be ‘hanging from Trafalgar Square by the neck’ before we ‘blow up all the mosques, nuke Jerusalem, the Vatican, Mecca & Brussels and let’s invade and get our empire back’.

A UKIP spokesman clarified: ‘It is not and never will be UKIP policy to blow up mosques, nuke the Vatican, or hang people from lamp-posts.’ Well, not until the next manifesto maybe not…

DAVID DAVIS

The blustering Brexit secretary had to be corrected to a member of the audience during a conference speech when he claimed Brexit negotiations over Irish border issues were complicated by a ‘change of government, south of the border’.

Of course, there’s been no change of government in Dublin – just a change of Taoiseach in June 2017 to Leo Varadkar, who Davis accuses of being vulnerable to ‘quite a strong influence from Sinn Féin’. Just imagine that – a government in thrall to a minority party who operate in Northern Ireland!

AUBREY and SHEILA ATTWATER

With a combined age of 153, this married couple are standing for UKIP at Swindon’s local elections after returning from a decade in Malta. ‘We don’t know quite where our position is, but we think we know what people want,’ said Attwater, who said she and her husband get much of their news from the Russian satellite channel RT.

The Attwaters’ platform includes the scrapping of a new building for the local gallery’s collection of modern British art, which includes works by Henry Moore, LS Lowry and Lucien Freud. ‘What the bloody hell does Swindon need with an art gallery? I can’t imagine anybody going there,’ said Mr Attwater.

NIGEL FARAGE

A couple of weeks back the nicotine-stained man-frog tut-tutted over Labour’s anti-semitism issues, saying: ‘If I found anybody in UKIP who had been a member of an extreme group or organisation we expelled them immediately… I think the Labour Party has a very major problem over this’

Farage’s war against extremists and anti-semites has continued with an appearance on the Infowars show run by Alex Jones, who claimed last year that American neo-Nazis attending the far-right rallies in Charlottesville were actually ‘Jewish actors… leftist Jews that want to create this clash and they go dress up as Nazis’.

Former Infowars video editor Rob Jacobson recently claimed that Jones had subjected him to anti-semitic bullying, calling him ‘The Resident Jew’, ‘The Jewish Individual’ and ‘Yacobson.’ Yet it seems appearing on his show isn’t a ‘very major problem’ for Farage.

NEIL HAMILTON

‘The idea that Enoch Powell was some kind of uniquely racist villain is absolute nonsense,’ claimed the Welsh UKIP leader after the BBC aired Powell’s uniquely racist and villainous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Hamilton added that Powell had been ‘proved right by events’ as London was now ‘like a doughnut’, with whites moving out to the suburbs and ‘our great cities transformed into effectively racial ghettos’.

If anything or anyone is a doughnut, it’s definitely Neil Hamiltion.

MORRISSEY

In a rambling interview on his own website, the big- chinned balladeer declared ‘Brexit did not happen… The people said Leave but the EU said no… England is today is a country that is not leaving the EU. Hungary, Italy, Finland and Poland will leave before the UK is allowed to.’

Like a parody of himself in a Stewart Lee routine, the former Smiths singer added, ‘as far as racism goes, the modern Loony Left seem to forget that Hitler was left-wing’ before criticising Mayor of London Sadiq Khan for having a London accent (‘he cannot talk properly… Civilisation is over!’). Clearly, there is some shite that should never go out, and this interview is a bit of it. Just call him Borrissey.