In the last five years Nigel Farage, the far-right Reform MP in absentia for Clacton and next UK prime minister in waiting, has earned £374,893 by working for Cameo, which is an online greetings service and not the enduring American funk band. Although were Nigel Farage to perform the classic 1986 hit Word Up! alongside the group while wearing skin-tight black leather and a red codpiece, it would at least go some way to counter the allegations of racism that have unfairly dogged him since he used to hiss “Gas the Jews!” at fellow students at school in the 1980s (according to over three dozen witnesses). Bernard Manning! Bernard Manning!! Bernard Manning!!!
For the Cameo service, Farage reads out personal messages given to him by paying clients, many of which have been verifiably recorded while parliament is in session, giving you an idea of where the Clacton MP’s priorities lie. It must be hard having to choose between earning a minimum of £71.17 a time for wishing happy birthday to morons and racists, or representing morons and racists by sitting in on another boring session of the parliament the same morons and racists elected you to attend. Is this what they voted for?
Farage’s Cameo income represents about three-quarters of the amount, namely £469,520, that he would have earned in the same period as an MP. But soon Farage may have to fall back on his meagre MP salary to make ends meet. In January, one wily Cameo customer duped the Putin-admiring patriot into praising the dead rock-star paedophile Ian Watkins, whom Farage was happy to describe as “a good man, a really good guy … who loved his children”, even claiming that the late Lostprophets singer was “very much in touch with” him. Is Farage able to speak with the dead? And if so, will he be able to get them to give him cryptocurrency as well?
Although Farage was lying for money on Cameo, it isn’t implausible that he would befriend the dead Watkins. The Reform leader loves to boast that he is a great friend of his great friend the adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump, and Farage’s far-right co-conspirator Steve Bannon had taken advice on funding the pair’s joint European far-right “Movement” venture from the convicted paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. This doesn’t prove much. Farage is a great believer in the unsentimental realities of realpolitik, having praised the appointment of Peter Mandelson as American ambassador for that very reason, and funding secured with the advice of the American paedophile Epstein would have helped Farage expose British paedophiles of Pakistani origin, who are worse.
But what no one is calling Watkinsgate does tell us is that when Farage inevitably becomes prime minister in 2028 his carelessness in checking who he is dealing with will make him a massive security risk, and that Farage, like his now imprisoned Reform colleague MP Nathan Gill, who asked Russian questions for Russian paymasters for Russian cash in a French building, will say anything for money.
Indeed, Farage’s Cameo messages also saw him endorse a Canadian white nationalist event called The Road Rage Terror Tour (“the best thing that ever happened!”), parrot slogans associated with racist extremists (“If in doubt, keep them out!”), and profess support, commiserations and encouragement for Ben Tavener, a man convicted over his involvement in a far-right riot (“keep acting in the right way!”). Farage is a speaking Hallmark greeting card for racists and morons, the human equivalent of a tiny Clinton’s Cards fluffy birthday bear with a plush fabric heart on its chest that reads “Send Them Back!”
To be fair, even the supporters of the Canadian far-right event that commissioned Farage’s Cameo clip seem to find him ridiculous, saying: “We used him for a laugh and to cause him this trouble as a consequence for being lazy and stupid enough to say anything for a dollar.” But just because, in the global fascist pecking order, Nigel Farage appears to come lower than Canadian neo-Nazis, Canada being a country so benign it’s hard to imagine their Nazis mustering up the energy to do anything much more than be mildly disappointed by other races, we mustn’t underestimate the threat he poses.
The problem with the Cameo account wasn’t just the nature of the customers, it was the nature of the dog-whistle content
Though Farage has now closed his Cameo account due to “security concerns”, he nonetheless defended his innocence in his use of the money-spinning platform, saying: “If I have a shoe shop and I sell you a pair of shoes, and it turns out the person that bought the pair of shoes is a former convicted murderer, is that the fault of the person selling shoes?”, which was a nice try but makes fuck-all sense. Because the problem with Farage’s Cameo account wasn’t just the nature of the customers, it was the nature of the bespoke dog-whistle content he was prepared to knock up for them for money, often when he should have been in parliament.
If Farage’s shoe shop metaphor was accurate it would only work if a neo-Nazi went in to see the cobbler Farage, asked him to cobble together some shoes adorned with questionable content – perhaps some furry slippers with swastikas on them or a pair of espadrilles adorned with images of burning asylum-seeker accommodation – and then paid him for doing the cobbling, and then Farage the cobbler said the cobbling which he had himself cobbled was not his fault. Which is a load of cobblers.
And there’s no point Farage trying to wriggle out of this. It’s not just the customer that was the problem. It was the content Farage was happy to provide. Similarly, if Farage was running a cake shop, and a neo-Nazi came in and asked for a box of fairy cakes with pictures of Oswald Mosley attacking Jews in London’s East End in the 1930s decorated on to them in red and black icing, Farage would be at fault for doing the mixing, baking and finally the piping, not just for providing the racist cake to the racist.
Lemmy from Motörhead, who provincial theatre managers always tell me was the nicest celebrity they ever dealt with, sponsored a line of vibrators named after the band’s 1979 album Overkill. But if a cash-strapped Nigel Farage were to run a sex toy supplier, and was to agree to a customer’s request to fashion a massive rubber butt plug with an image of his own face on the end, and a speech bubble coming out of his mouth saying the joke he made in front of Rod Stewart when he was best man at his brother’s wedding, after a gay man had died in a celebrity’s swimming pool (“The good news for us who are smokers is that we are far better off here than if we had been at Michael Barrymore’s house. Because there they removed all the ashtrays on the basis that now they chuck all the fags in the pool”), then Farage would be at fault for fashioning the homophobic sex toy, irrespective of the sensibilities of the customer.
On Wednesday, at prime minister’s questions, Keir Starmer announced measures that will prevent political parties from receiving millions in cryptocurrency bungs from overseas donors, a decision which immediately saw Farage lead his MPs out of the house in protest. What with the shutting-off of this line of funding, and the closure of his Cameo account, perhaps the possibility of setting up Nigel Farage’s Bespoke Far-Right Sex Toy Emporium might not look like such a bad idea. Reform UK Rampant Rabbits Ahoy! Bernard Manning! Bernard Manning!! Bernard Manning!!!
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, and Stewart introduces a screening of the film The Memory Blocks, with the artists Andrew and Eden Kötting, at the Watershed in Bristol on Saturday 28 March