Nearly a quarter of would-be Reform voters cite Nigel Farage’s support of, and admiration for, “the bravest man” he knows, his friend the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump, as the main reason they may not vote for the party. It looks like even morons and racists have some standards.
Perhaps Nigel Farage has been learning the lesson of how to create political toxicity by personal proximity the hard way. Because on Tuesday he declared his support for Keir Starmer’s handling of the doctors’ strike. “Unusually, Keir Starmer has taken a strong position. There’s a first time for anything, I suppose,” the opportunistic Playmobil authoritarian declared on LBC, as oily as an oil crisis. Was Farage trying to take the prime minister down with him, like Moriarty clasping on to Sherlock Holmes as they tumble off the Reichenbach Falls?
Look. I’m as disappointed by Keir Starmer as the next fiftysomething fan of the Scottish indie band Orange Juice (“I love the lyrics” – K Starmer, age 63), but it’s not fair to say he never acts decisively. Why, in the last month alone Starmer decisively declined to assist Farage’s friend the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump in the illegal war in Iran that Farage himself initially said we should do all we could to support, “gloves off”. Perhaps that slipped Farage’s mind. He’s got a lot to concentrate on, what with mistakenly recording best-wishes messages for dead convicted paedophiles for money on his Cameo account too.
And only last week, in response to the Rycroft report, Starmer decisively helped end malign foreign influence on British democracy by banning overseas donations, like the £9m Reform has received from the Thailand-domiciled cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne. Maybe those decisive decisions didn’t register on Nigel Farage’s Decisive Decision Monitor, which may be as unreliable as whatever he uses to screen out messages of support for dead convicted paedophiles from the lucrative Cameo commissions he records instead of sitting in parliament. Perhaps Farage needs to turn his Decisive Decision Monitor off and on again. Or bang the side of it with a shoe like Grandad did with the Radio Rentals telly in the 70s.
But Farage’s dishonest comments about Keir Starmer were only the closing salvo in a typically dishonest mini-interview, in which he cynically tried to lay the ground for a general distrust of the electoral system. This will allow Farage to cry foul should he not win the next election, just as his friend and hero, the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump, did in the run-up to the retroactively whitewashed January 6 insurrection. Because, as the old saying goes, when Donald Trump sneezes, Nigel Farage scoops the snot up off the filthy ground and licks it off his fingers, while rubbing his tummy and saying: “Yum yum yum! Donald Trump’s snot is delicious!! Mummy!!! I wish I could have it for my tea every day!!!!”
In the recent Gorton and Denton byelection, a Green female plumber decisively defeated Nigel Farage’s Reform. But did that victory prove that loads of people, including Muslims and Britons of Pakistani heritage, really prefer Green female plumbers to foreign-crypto-funded climate-denying friends of the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump, or were there more sinister forces at work that denied Farage’s party the victory that was their right?
Maybe it’s time for Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Ferrari, and the phalanxes of Farage’s other supine news media enablers, to start calling him out
A report by the charity Democracy Volunteers claimed that four observers, who spent 30 to 45 minutes in each polling station, saw 32 cases of “family voting” (collusion between two voters) in the 545 votes they observed being cast, a staggering 12% of the vote. But the subsequent Greater Manchester police investigation saw Democracy Volunteers admit that, although on occasion they saw people go into voting booths together (and there could be all sorts of reasons for why this might happen), the group’s observers themselves did “not allege any verbal instruction or physical conduct that indicated one person was directing or coercing another regarding how to vote”. It’s a shame they didn’t clarify that before releasing their report after the polls closed, because that’s the key part, really. Who are Democracy Volunteers anyway? Next time I at least want my faith in democracy to be shattered by Democracy Professionals!
And where polling stations visited by Democracy Volunteers had CCTV, as a small minority did, the footage did “not show any evidence of anyone directing or coercing another regarding how to vote”. Case closed. But Nigel Farage amplified Democracy Volunteers’ unclear report as soon as the polls closed. Oh well. At least he’s inferring the conclusions he wants from the report of a registered charity. At the time of the Southport killings, the Reform leader was still taking his lead on news stories from the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, whom the Crown Prosecution Service has since charged with rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking (Tate denies all the charges). I prefer to listen to news professionals. Like Huw Edwards. Oh.
Despite the report’s inconclusiveness, Nigel Farage wasted no time in telling the Mail on Sunday that “foreign-born voters” stole the byelection, which presumably means, if he knows this for sure, he somehow has access to the passports and voting preferences of voters. Has Farage (a) done a deal with our government’s trusted security data partner Palantir? Or (b) installed secret cameras in the booths, used facial recognition techniques to identify the voters, and then somehow hacked into their personal files to find out where they were born? Or (c) is what he has said just the obvious racist dog-whistle bollocks that is obviously and undeniably is? (The answer is c.)
Maybe it’s time for Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Ferrari, and the phalanxes of Farage’s other supine news media enablers, to start calling him out on this sort of shit, instead of just tickling his tummy while he lolls about with his legs in the air and his bits flapping around with all excited dog wee coming out of them. On LBC on Tuesday, Farage elaborated on his theory. Here’s his statement in full, because the cadences of it have a unique Faragey-ness that would disappear were I to tidy it up.
“True to form, true to form, the northern police force says ‘nothing to see here, let’s move on’. It’s fear of doing anything because they might offend a ‘certain community’. It’s a bloomin’ disgrace, and I promise you that our democracy is not in a healthy state. Greater Manchester police are turning a blind eye. Turning a blind eye. Nothing to see here. Everyone move on. They’re wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. They’re not doing their job. And you know we’ve actually had the Secrecy of the Ballot Act going back 150 years and it’s not being enforced. It’s wrong. I’ve heard [people say that it’s sour grapes] since 2015. I’ve heard that since 2015. At the upcoming local elections there’ll be areas, there’ll be parts, where this undoubtedly goes on. And this is a particular problem with elements in this country from the subcontinent who are not integrated into our culture and our way of life and who carry on practices that are considered acceptable in Pakistan. Well I tell you what. They are not here.”
It’s funny how Farage begins by alluding to people of Pakistani origin as “a certain community”, as if he were cautiously advancing some kind of controversial argument with the calculated rhetorical delicacy of Jonathan Swift or Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, and then just gets overexcited and starts talking about unintegrated people from Pakistan. Doh! Dad!! I got it wrong again!!! Ladies and gentlemen! Please welcome your next prime minister!!
Like Trump innocently inciting January 6, Farage will be able to turn the ire of his most thuggish followers on brown people
But make no mistake. Farage might yet be defeated in the next election, despite his positive polling and the unquestioning support of most of the press. He may be defeated as a result of his toxic friendship with the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump; as a result of a member his party having taken Russian cash for Russian questions from the Russian politician Farage “admires the most”, Vladimir Putin; as a result of his increasingly untenable climate-change scepticism; as a result of Reform’s demonstrable incompetence at local government level; as a result of his underlings’ frequent and indefinable racist outbursts; or as a result of his own well-documented tendency to make racist and homophobic comments. Even if they were just meant as jokes. Bernard Manning! Bernard Manning!! Bernard Manning!!!
But if Farage is defeated, it won’t be because of any of these factors, will it? It will be as a result of “family voting” by British citizens of Pakistani origin, who currently comprise only 2.5% of the UK population, not all of whom will even be old enough to vote in 2028. And then, like Trump innocently inciting the January 6 insurrection, Nigel Farage will be able to turn the ire of his most thuggish followers on the streets, on American-owned social media and in the British press, on brown people and on the police that refuse to do his bidding.
And what even is “family voting”? An old auntie of mine used to vote for Ukip. And when I asked her to explain why, she would look nervously to her decision-making husband, who then explained their joint position for her, with the usual mix of half-truths, ignorance and prejudices. Was my auntie’s obedient vote, then, a result of “family voting”, or do accusations of coercion only matter if you are brown and voting against Nigel Farage in a polling booth, despite his association with the Epstein-adjacent adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump? I wonder if my auntie still votes for Farage? I expect so. Sadly. Perhaps our democracy is doomed and no Green female plumbers can save it.
Meanwhile, the Gorton and Denton returning officer welcomed the police report, saying the integrity of the byelection won by the Greens was not affected. I’m not saying the existence of “family voting” is impossible, but you won’t read an unbiased story about that anywhere in the British press. Green female plumber MPs! Whatever next?
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year. He is co-hosting a screening of the rockumentary King Rocker, and launching his new podcast Joking Apart, at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival on Saturday 2 May