Initially, the Reform party leader and antisemitic schoolboy banter specialist Nigel Farage claimed, in an ever-shifting magic-eye tapestry of smeared-toilet-tissue excuses, that the £5m he received from a cryptobillionaire whose political and financial interests he then appeared to represent was for his own personal safety.
Then Farage ditched this excuse, as it began to dissolve on contact with sunlight, and said the money was in fact a reward for Brexit, making the absentee MP for Clacton one of the few people, apart from the banned hedge-fund manager Crispin Odey, to benefit financially from the catastrophic decision to leave the EU that Farage conned a terminally disappointed core of nostalgic bendy-banana enthusiasts into voting for.
In the end, Farage more or less gave up trying to justify the purpose of the £5m, and finally had an undignified hissy-fit live on radio in which he said could spend the money on Ferraris if he wished. He was talking to the LBC guff-huffer Nick Ferrari at the time, so maybe that’s why he thought of spending the money on Ferraris. It’s lucky Farage wasn’t talking to the Philadelphia-based radiologist Doctor Ross Wank, or his shopping list may have been less luxurious. (I do appreciate that I have done a version of this joke before, but I hadn’t thought to try using Google to find out if there was someone called Wank, which is funnier than the names I chose last time, so I reserve the right to have another go at it. I might do it again next week if I can find someone with an even funnier surname than Wank.)
Then, as if part of some terrible evil plan – Farage having decided to stand against a bin from space in an unnecessary local election as a litmus test on public approval for his dodgy finances – the horrifying murder of Ann Widdecombe substantiated the idea that politicians were in ongoing mortal danger. And so Farage would be able, after all, to say the £5m was justified as a slush fund for his personal security, and wouldn’t be spent on Ferraris. (Or wanks.)
Immediately after the murder, the police said there was “no evidence” it was politically motivated. But Reform’s sun-dried deputy leader Richard Tice, who represents the results of an experiment to show what would happen if you drip-fed Richard Madeley rightwing Facebook propaganda and baked him in an HP sauce marinade on a Dubai hotel roof, continued to speculate on the killer’s motives. And in a scene sure to live in the collective memory as vividly as the image of the young princes walking behind Princess Diana’s coffin, Nigel Farage arrived at a vigil on Dartmoor in brown trousers and slip-ons and was photographed laying a floral tribute on some grass at the nearby tramp-juice factory Buckfast Abbey.
The police are realising that Dixon Of Dock Green now has to operate as if he were Dixon Of The Explosive Unregulated Social Media Town Square Where Extreme Content And Uninformed Speculation Is Deliberately Monetised
As it happened, the police then changed their story to say that a second suspect may have been politically motivated after all – a massively mismanaged own goal. But they are learning. The police’s disorder containment strategies now include making the skin colour and nationality of crime suspects public immediately in order to head off any riot-inducing Farage-fuelled Andrew Tate-inspired inaccuracies. Well done. The police are realising that Dixon Of Dock Green now has to operate as if he were Dixon Of The Explosive Unregulated Social Media Town Square Where Extreme Content And Uninformed Speculation Is Deliberately Monetised And Accelerated By A White Supremacist Billionaire And By Russian Bot Farms Who All Mean Our Democracy Active Harm. Evening all!
But the initial police statement should have been phrased in such a way as to explain they didn’t know what the killer’s motive was, rather than suggesting the motive specifically wasn’t political. Who is doing the police’s comms? Because whoever has been managing the Iranian government’s social media presence throughout the current Trump clown-car car crash has been great. Maybe they are for hire?
Of course, when it then turned out the killer was politically motivated, the climate of violence politicians face was decried by Nigel Farage, who had previously called for “pure cold rage” before the pogrom that burned children out of their homes in Belfast, and whose party conference platformed a celebration of my ex-fiancee’s cousin Lucy Connolly, who had urged people to set fire to migrants’ accommodation. (In 2008, Farage also refused to stand a Ukip candidate after David Davies stood down, and then stood up again, in a local byelection stunt, similar to Farage’s own battle with the bin, that Farage himself considered pointless. So don’t expect any consistency from Farage, whose strongly held opinions turn to suit his own interests on a sixpence. There are old plastic bags blowing around on the central reservation of the M4 which are more likely to occupy a consistent position.)
It is terrifying to feel stalked and threatened. Ann Widdecombe emerged from an age where hatred and threats were not, at least, accelerated and fomented by social media. Would she have put her own name in the name of her house, Widdecombe’s Rest, and identified it unambiguously as her home, if she had grown up in an age where female politicians are routinely wrangled into degrading images by AI programs platformed by Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X)?
A few years ago, contributors who were complaining about me on a poorly moderated forum on the website Mumsnet, which was created in 2000 by Justine Roberts to help parents pool information and advice following a disastrous family holiday with her one-year-old twins, published information narrowing the location of my family home down to a stretch of about four houses, with one Mumsnetter commenting, unnecessarily in my opinion, “I’ve walked past that house, and it isn’t very nice”. But, had there been a murderous fanatic lurking amongst the Mumsnetters, at least I hadn’t put my own surname on a sign outside the house, like Lee’s Leat or Stewey’s Shithole.
I met Ann Widdecombe once. Years ago, before JK Rowling became a politically divisive figure, I was in a BBC radio guests’ green room discussing with another writer how surprised I had been, encountering my kids’ Harry Potter books, at just how poor the actual quality of Rowling’s writing was, and cautiously wondered whether it was beneficial for young readers to be advised to read books by a writer so unapologetically committed to the discredited storytelling trope of Tell Not Show. Widdecombe, who was alone on the other side of the room but listening in, stormed over unbidden and took me to task for this opinion in the most aggressive, dismissive and patronising way possible. It was hilarious.
And that is my tribute to Ann Widdecombe. And I think it’s better than Nigel Farage’s bouquet.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October