As I wrote yesterday, Nigel Farage's "journalistic" assignation with Julian Assange might look suspicious, but in the absence of a smoking gun, I still imagine that, like the journalist in Humbert Wolfe's poem, he didn't need any external inducement to behave horribly:
One answer is that, like Trump, he's an able performer and a relentless self-publicist who's really taken the "no publicity is bad publicity" ball and run with it. And he's still being talked about because the people who've succeeded to the Ukip crown just can't follow his act.
Not all of this is down to the personal failings of his successors. It was always going to be a tough gig to lead a single-issue party once that single issue had been won, was being delivered by somebody else and had turned out to be a lot more problematic than you'd been telling everybody. The same issues would have still been problems for Farage if he'd stayed on, rather than letting the poisoned chalice pass to Paul Nuttall, then to that other bloke.
But there's also blame aplenty. Farage was a plausible enough bullshitter to fool some of the people most of the time, but Paul Nuttall's easily disproved attempts to fool people about being a former professional footballer with a PhD who'd lost a host of imaginary friends in the Hillsborough disaster just made him look like a joke.
And as for the present guy, Henry Whatsisname... Well, he looks and sounds sort of professional-ish, almost respectable. Certainly less extreme and batty than some of his rivals for the leadership, like the fanatical anti-Islam crusader, Anne Marie Waters, or the "gay donkey raped my horse" bloke, or the guy who promised asteroid mining, flying aircraft carriers and interstellar colony ships. But if your brand is all about being edgy, anti-establishment and courting offence, along with the free publicity that comes with it, then "respectable" probably won't cut it. Farage likes to be known as one of the bad boys of Brexit. Henry Thingy is more like The Boring Bugger of Brexit.
Not that he hasn't tried, bless him. Because I'd not noticed him generating any headlines recently, I just googled Henry to see what he'd been up to. And, to be fair, he has been gamely trying to get that 'ol 'kipper mojo back with a classically bizarre boast about being able to kill a badger with his bare hands. But the thing is, I had to search for it. In Ukip's glory days, this would have been at the top of everybody's news feed. So far, even The Daily Mash can't be bothered to take the piss.* Nobody seems to care.
There's a vanishingly small intersection in the Ukip / Oscar Wilde Venn diagram, populated mostly by the phrase "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." And everybody seems to have more interesting things to talk about than Henry.
Poor Henry.
*Correct at the time of writing, (three days after the Badgergate story broke without trace).
You cannot hopeBut right now, there's a bigger question hanging over Nigel. Namely, how is he still a thing? He's just another relatively new ex-party leader, yet he still makes more headlines than David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Tim Farron put together.
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
One answer is that, like Trump, he's an able performer and a relentless self-publicist who's really taken the "no publicity is bad publicity" ball and run with it. And he's still being talked about because the people who've succeeded to the Ukip crown just can't follow his act.
Not all of this is down to the personal failings of his successors. It was always going to be a tough gig to lead a single-issue party once that single issue had been won, was being delivered by somebody else and had turned out to be a lot more problematic than you'd been telling everybody. The same issues would have still been problems for Farage if he'd stayed on, rather than letting the poisoned chalice pass to Paul Nuttall, then to that other bloke.
But there's also blame aplenty. Farage was a plausible enough bullshitter to fool some of the people most of the time, but Paul Nuttall's easily disproved attempts to fool people about being a former professional footballer with a PhD who'd lost a host of imaginary friends in the Hillsborough disaster just made him look like a joke.
And as for the present guy, Henry Whatsisname... Well, he looks and sounds sort of professional-ish, almost respectable. Certainly less extreme and batty than some of his rivals for the leadership, like the fanatical anti-Islam crusader, Anne Marie Waters, or the "gay donkey raped my horse" bloke, or the guy who promised asteroid mining, flying aircraft carriers and interstellar colony ships. But if your brand is all about being edgy, anti-establishment and courting offence, along with the free publicity that comes with it, then "respectable" probably won't cut it. Farage likes to be known as one of the bad boys of Brexit. Henry Thingy is more like The Boring Bugger of Brexit.
Not that he hasn't tried, bless him. Because I'd not noticed him generating any headlines recently, I just googled Henry to see what he'd been up to. And, to be fair, he has been gamely trying to get that 'ol 'kipper mojo back with a classically bizarre boast about being able to kill a badger with his bare hands. But the thing is, I had to search for it. In Ukip's glory days, this would have been at the top of everybody's news feed. So far, even The Daily Mash can't be bothered to take the piss.* Nobody seems to care.
There's a vanishingly small intersection in the Ukip / Oscar Wilde Venn diagram, populated mostly by the phrase "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." And everybody seems to have more interesting things to talk about than Henry.
Poor Henry.
 |
| Trying to put on a brave face. |
*Correct at the time of writing, (three days after the Badgergate story broke without trace).
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