There is no situation where an intervention by Nigel Farage won’t make things worse. He has, after all, made a career out of detecting, exploiting and exacerbating people’s grievances and fears, a grim cycle that has delivered electoral success. The man is gifted in his insidious trade, if nothing else.
Nowhere is this strategy more dangerously deployed than in issues of migration, race and crime, so often shamelessly conflated by the Reform UK leader with a studied and long-experienced hand. It is done almost instinctively. Once, he even blamed being late for a “meet-the-Ukip leader” event in Wales on traffic jams on the M4 caused by immigration, rather than, say, the infamous bottleneck at Newport.
