After the barbarous assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday, Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage flew out to this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to show his support for his longstanding friend and ally. Hardly the strangest thing, one might have thought, for a leading British political figure to pay court to the man who in all likelihood will be the next President of the United States, days after he dodged death by mere inches. (Both Liz Truss and Boris Johnson have also been pressing the flesh at the RNC this week, with the latter meeting Trump in person.) Yet Farage’s decision to head Stateside after the King’s Speech on Wednesday has occasioned a chorus of outrage from the great and the good that the newly elected MP for Clacton-on-Sea would dare to spend a few days away from his constituents.
There has been the inevitable Guardian column. Reporters have been sent to Clacton to see what locals made of it. The sensibles have been up in arms on X (the alleged comedian Jonathan Pie, anxious to find a new target for his centrist-dad ire now that we’ve entered the era of Starmer, has tweeted about it four times and counting). And at the convention itself, Farage has been pressed about it by reporters from both Sky News and Channel 4.
The signal moment, however, came on the News Agents podcast. On arriving in Milwaukee on Wednesday he was cornered by Emily Maitlis, and the excruciating interview that resulted has since gone viral on X. “Nigel Farage, what are you doing here?” begins Maitlis, in obvious faux-surprise. Maitlis proceeds to sneer and condescend her way through the two-minute clip. Is he in the U.S. “Because this feels more exciting?” she asks. “Given the circumstances it was right that I came,” Farage says. Maitlis titters: “Right for who?”
Insufferable as it is, Farage continues undeterred. One of his strengths as a media performer is that he rarely allows himself to be provoked in the face of hostile questioning, instead playing them with a straight bat. When your friends are “having a tough time” he explains calmly, “it’s right to go and support them”. This is what prompted the extraordinarily tone-deaf question that made the clip go viral. “Is that the sense you’ve got,” Maitlis asks, as if the thought has only just occurred to her, “that [Trump’s] having a tough time right now?” (Presumably, this is what the News Agents mean when they claim to be “Lifting the curtain on the biggest stories in the U.K., U.S. and beyond”). Farage simply answers with the obvious: “He nearly died.” After a long pause she then asks the inane question again and receives the same answer.
Is there a person in the country who believes what’s motivating this haranguing of Farage is concern for the people of Clacton? Remainer liberals’ view of that Brexity town, home to the poorest neighbourhood in the country, has long been known. As Matthew Parris put it ahead of its 2014 by-election (won by UKIP): while people should not be careless of their needs, “We should be careless of their opinions”. For Maitlis, voters of Clacton are easily-led idiots, and Farage the “celebrity snake oil salesman” who has swindled them repeatedly. Nor can we put this down to a principled concern about MPs’ constituency duties. Have the News Agents ever puffed themselves up in outrage that Keir Starmer, in his role as Labour leader, is failing adequately to serve the voters of Holborn and St. Pancras?
For Farage’s haters, any argument will serve to have a pop at him, no matter how contrived. He’s trying to “boost his profile”, complains the Guardian’s John Crace. A politician, trying to boost his profile – Heaven forbid! Maitlis and others have poured scorn on Farage’s relationship with Trump, even suggesting that he invited himself to Milwaukee. In reality, Farage clearly enjoys significant influence with the Trump team – just ask David Lammy. As the New Statesman reported in May, the now Foreign Secretary, who has previously called Trump a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser”, was able to secure a meeting with Trump’s top team during his trip to the States in May only at Farage’s nod. Indeed, despite two former PMs attending the RNC this week, Politico reports that Farage “remains Trump’s go-to guy for U.K. issues”. A less churlish media would recognise that the fact that a U.K. politician can bend the (bandaged) ear of the man who could soon be the leader of the free world is no trivial matter.
There is also something so dismally parochial about this round of Farage-bashing. It has been one of the most dramatic weeks in U.S. politics we have seen in years, which is saying a lot. The Presidential front-runner came within inches of being killed, and his opponent, the sitting President, may soon drop out of the race. In J.D. Vance, Trump has named a firebrand running mate, just 39 years old, who will cement Trumpism in the GOP for years to come. All huge stories. Yet our liberal-Left media are so obsessive and petty that they insist on harrying Farage around the convention with this feeble gotcha.
Politics should be about more than potholes. And whatever the Maitlises of the world imagine, the voters of Clacton know this – they are not stupid. They understand that Farage is not just (as the News Agents snidely captioned him) the MP for Clacton – he is the leader of Reform U.K. and, like him or loathe him, an influential political figure. Campaigning for the Essex seat last month, Farage pledged to “put Clacton on the map”. Can anyone seriously deny that he is doing that?
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