IF you have tears, prepare to shed them now; we come to bury Nigel Farage, not to praise him.
The Brexiteers have finally turned on the Reform leader, meaning he is esteemed only by those who voted for his rag-tag bunch of right-wingers at the last election.
Now that is still about four million people in Britain, but you take what you can get in this life.
Leave voters now join the ranks of most Britons in taking a dim view of the Brexit firebrand, with his net favourability rating dropping from 7% to minus 4%.
He is also reviled by 2024 Tory voters who gave him a minus 27% favourability rating – down a whopping 17 points in the space of a week, according to pollsters YouGov.
Among Remain voters, he is overwhelmingly unpopular, with a net rating of minus 79%.
The blame for Farage’s unhappy predicament can be laid at his own door, with his comments about the Southport stabbings, which saw three little girls killed at the end of last month, and the subsequent far-right riots.
In the immediate aftermath, the Reform leader questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us” as misinformation spread about the identity of the attacker.
Farage demanded to know whether the attacker was on a terror watchlist, amid baseless speculation the knifeman was both a Muslim and an asylum seeker.
And yet, despite his dwindling popularity – perhaps the glare of the spotlight ain’t all it's cracked up to be – he has kept at it.
In the pantheon of degrading public outings by UK politicians, a video posted by Farage in response to Twitter/X owner Elon Musk yesterday must surely rank alongside George Galloway pretending to be a cat on Celebrity Big Brother.
Yesterday, an abject Farage reached out to Musk (above) in a video message, in which he claimed the media and the government were in league to portray anti-migrant politicians as “the bad guys”. They must have had to work hard on that …
But in the finest traditions of extreme sects, it seems key players are now turning on each other.
Farage has kept his distance from far-right agitator Tommy Robinson and the man otherwise known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon has in his turn denounced the Reform leader.
Andrew Tate (below) also got in on the action, accusing Farage of selling out.
In a Twitter/X video post, he said: “I’m gravely concerned by Nigel Farage throwing me under the bus when he speaks to the legacy media.
“It shows that Nigel will bend to pressure. And if he’s afraid to stand up to a propagandist, how can he be trusted to stand up to the World Bank, to the UN, to the WEF, to the military industrial complex?”
Happily for Farage, he clarified that he still wants the Reform man to be prime minister.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the backing of four million Reform voters and an alleged human trafficker does not a premiership make.
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