Nigel Farage MP is even worse than you thought

Nigel Farage’s parliamentary career has thus far produced only one highlight, a moment from his maiden speech that came while, as usual, he was droning on about himself. It is recorded in Hansard like this:

Nigel Farage (Reform): “I was described as being a sad, lonely, desperate figure, always seeking attention, and I have no doubt there are some who think that is still the case today.”

Pete Wishart (SNP): “Spot on.”

Nigel Farage (Reform): “Thank you.”

After Farage won Clacton on July 4, no-one seriously expected him to roll up his sleeves and get right down to the serious business of how to turn around the economic fortunes of an area which ranks in the bottom 1% of British towns and cities economically, with Jaywick Sands named as the most deprived neighbourhood in England. Yet some – me included – thought Farage might choose to begin his career as an MP by protesting against the fact that while the Lib Dems took 72 seats from 12% of the vote, Reform got 14% and only five seats. Could he potentially change the British political game for a second time by temporarily dialling down the hate and instead making a positive case for PR?

Well, of course not. The theory foundered on three aspects of Farage’s character – his unquenchable desire for publicity, his undeniable commitment to brown-nosing and his unpleasant and deep-rooted desire to demonise people who do not look like him.

The first two were on display when Farage abandoned his constituents to fly to Milwaukee in order to wave to a supposed close chum across a convention centre filled with thousands of people wearing sanitary towels on their ears. The last has been on full view since his election, with more bashing of asylum seekers and more dogwhistling about ethnic groups already established in the UK. How any of the above helps the 95.3% white British population of Clacton is anybody’s guess.

In that maiden speech, Farage criticised “massive acceleration in our population through immigration” under Conservative rule, though without mentioning that net migration has significantly increased in the years since the Brexit he advocated, with the small boat crossings he deplores booming partly as a result of the botched Brexit deal he supported.

He told the Commons, “Rents have risen by 25 per cent by 2021. Why? Population increases and pressure.” But this does not take into account rising interest rates that have forced up mortgages and therefore rents – partly due to the invasion of Ukraine by a dictator he admires, exacerbated in the UK by the Liz Truss mini-budget he hailed as genius and of course by the Brexit he loves.

These are not the only untruths Farage has peddled in the past weeks

While in Milwaukee, he briefly tore his gaze from Trump and turned it to Harehills, tweeting of the disturbances there: “The politics of the subcontinent are currently playing out on the streets of Leeds. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Yet Harehills had nothing to do with “the politics of the subcontinent” – its spark was an incident involving the Roma community and a range of ethnic groups, seemingly including white Britons, were involved in the subsequent lawlessness that involved attacks on vehicles and the police rather than on each other.

Invited to correct himself on a Daily Telegraph podcast, Farage conceded that race was not a factor in Harehills (of course, he has yet to delete or correct his tweet). But, he immediately added, “it was on the same evening in East London, where it was directly related to Bangladesh. We’ve seen pitched battles in the streets of Birmingham between Hindu gangs and Muslim gangs.”

From there, Farage was allowed to continue his dogwhistling tropes unchallenged. “The politics of the subcontinent”, he defined, was “the racist hatreds between the different tribes and religions”. There is no racist hatred in the west, of course, and certainly not among followers of Farage or Donald Trump.

He bemoaned what he called “sectarian voting” at the general election. “I’ve never seen sectarian voting in my lifetime, not in England anyway,” he said. Farage’s own vote in Clacton will, of course, have been hugely diverse. There was more vile bile about how “the centres of towns are unrecognisable, you wouldn’t even know you were in England”.

But on the Telegraph podcast and in the Commons, there was surprisingly little about Brexit – apart from a section of that maiden speech in which Farage claimed: “There are more supporters of Brexit in the European Parliament than I sense there are in this parliament of 2024. This is very much a Remainers’ parliament, I suspect in many cases, it’s really a Rejoiners’ parliament.”

Why should this be? The answer is that a) some far right MEPs still support leaving the EU because they have yet to feel the enormous damage it would do to their country, and b) most Britons (and their MPs) no longer support leaving the EU because they have felt the enormous damage it has done to their country.

But this won’t occur to Nigel Farage. Instead – if he remembers where Clacton is – you will find him standing defiantly on Jaywick Sands, trying to turn back both migrant boats and the tide of popular opinion. In short, a complete Cnut.