Oh, it’s only Nigel, the politician who’s always standing because he never gets a seat. It’s only Clacton: practically Ukip-on-Sea. It’ll only harm Rishi Sunak, and he’s already terminal.
Oh, the excuses! Even as Westminster journalists this week trotted along an Essex pier after Nigel Farage, they made two arguments that pull in opposite directions. First, can you blame them for giving Mr Brexit the star treatment? A third of the way into a turgid election contest, they finally get a bit of box office – a “master of the theatrics of politics”, as the BBC put it, which is an awfully kind way to refer to a serial loser. Yet even as they splash the man across every front page, they trivialise his importance. To read the broadsheets this week, they are lavishing so much attention on an inveterate attention-seeker because he spells certain defeat for Rishi Sunak, who in any case is a total loser. Got it?
Except that’s not the way Britain works. Over the course of his career, Farage has shown time and again that you need not win Westminster elections to change Westminster politics. As a politician, Farage is no Boris Johnson; yet, as a mode of politics, the power of Faragism is vast.
