Farage’s bitter whine about that inauguration snub

Anyone seeking crumbs of comfort from the deeply grim opening day of Donald Trump’s second presidency can find it in Nigel Farage’s reaction to seeing Boris Johnson granted a seat at the inauguration while he had to watch it on TV.

The freeing of January 6 thugs, the boosting of climate and anti-vax cranks and Nazi salutes from Elon Musk were among the lowlights. But it would teke a heart of stone not to laugh at Farage as he complained that, unlike him, Johnson was not a true friend of Trump.

On GB News, the Reform leader moaned that Johnson “is a former prime minister of the nation, and he’s an occasional friend of Donald Trump’s.

“He supports Donald Trump when he’s going up, and he doesn’t support Donald Trump when he’s going. I’ve supported him consistently now for almost a decade.”

Farage admitted that “I didn’t make the cut, sadly” but that he still “had a good seat in another room”.

As regular readers of Rats In A Sack will know, the gossip in Tory circles is that Johnson got his seat in the Rotunda because he has formed a close relationship with key Trump ally Musk – and is even thought to be guiding some of the Tesla billionaire’s attacks on Keir Starmer.

We wrote a week ago: “Allies of the former prime minister, who is still said to be furious about his own removal from office, believe he has been in close and regular WhatsApp contact with Musk for months, and say they can detect Johnson’s fingerprints on several of Elon’s most famous interventions. One suggestion is that Musk’s adoption of the phrase ‘two-tier Keir’ in the wake of the August riots across the country was thanks to a Johnsonian intervention.”

Alas, Johnson’s place at the top table for the lengthy inauguration ceremony and Trump’s deranged rant did not stop him from penning a fawning Daily Mail column about the event, in which he praised “a speech that will have had his opponents chewing the carpet”. Much as Farage must have been when he saw the inauguration seating plan.