Exactly how close is Nigel Farage to the court of Donald Trump?

It didn’t take long for the gloating to start. Within hours of Trump’s election, Isabel Oakeshott’s newsletter pinged into inboxes with a chastening message for a Keir Starmer government that had been foolish enough to spurn the entreaties of Trump bestie Nigel Farage.

“Make no mistake: Farage has a direct line to Trump and is intimately connected to his inner circle. Last night, he had the hottest ticket in town as the only British parliamentarian to be invited to spend election night rubbing shoulders with Elon Musk et al at Mar-a-Lago.”

What is singularly odd about all this shoulder rubbing, however, is that not one photograph of it yet exists. For a man obsessed with cataloguing his every encounter with Trump and his inner circle, the best Farage could come up with was a short video clip of himself standing outside on a cold pavement in the night, pointing into the distance as Trump’s motorcade made its way to the conference centre for his acceptance speech.

Not so much rubbing shoulders as dumped on the hard shoulder it seemed.
Perhaps photos of Nigel in contact with Elon, Melania and the Prez will be forthcoming but for now, the only really question is… are Nigel and Isabel in contact with reality?

Meanwhile, back in the UK, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Katherine Viner, was equally agile in emailing her readers on the back of Trump’s triumph.

In a Skibbereen Eagle-esque (the small Cork newspaper which warned the Tsar of Russia it was watching his despotic ambitions carefully) plea for more money from their weary readers, she pledged that the Guardian would keep Trump in check.

All very well, but as many have pointed out, as a battle cry it would ring less hollow if their star columnist Owen Jones hadn’t spent the run up to the election vociferously condemning Kamala Harris and Joe Biden as genocidal maniacs for their support of Israel.

Jones’ trip to the States to cover the election ended, predictably, in ignominy after he tweeted how his taxi driver, “a Muslim Pakistani-American”, had voted for Trump.

His evident bemusement was seized on by his swathes of Twitter critics, who were quick to point out that assuming a brown taxi driver should vote one way or another is at best ignorant and at worst racist.

JK Rowling spotted the disconnect between Viner’s pledge and Jones’ record: above a screenshot of Viner’s article headine – “How We’ll Stand Up To Four More Years Of Trump” she tweeted: “Ooh, let me guess. Emotive longform pieces from Owen Jones complaining that American taxi drivers aren’t reading enough [gender studies philosopher] Judith Butler?”