QUENTIN LETTS: Wham! Nigel provides our politicos a boot up the bahookie
Another moribund day was drifting by, our political class talking to itself.
Sir Keir Starmer, in that ridiculous sticky-up fringe, gave a stupendously wooden speech on defence.
He’s as interesting as a hard-tack biscuit. Rishi Sunak visited the riverside in Henley-on-Thames, wearing his artificial smile.
A pleasure cruiser of Lib Dem ancients went phutting past, shouting ‘coo-ee!’ as Lib Dems do. They were making some point about water purity and Sir Ed Davey was represented by Daisy Cooper. She is, if we can put it like this regarding a sewage protest, his number two.
On Radio 4 posh snoot clawed at posh snoot as Mishal Husain took on Kemi Badenoch on sex-definition laws. Ms Husain’s eyebrows arched.
Ms Badenoch bared that gap in her teeth and spoke the form of high Siamese with which technocrats communicate to one another.
Nigel Farage announces that he is the new leader of Reform – and the party’s candidate for Clacton – in Glaziers Hall in London
A nation yawned. TV news ratings chiefs stabbed themselves in the groin with their letter openers. Our cuckoo clock stayed inside its coop, having failed to wake itself.
Then: wham! At 4pm Nigel Farage’s froggy smile bounced into the ballroom of the Glaziers Hall in London and the election caught light. After saying for days that he would not stand in a constituency, Mr Farage had changed his mind. ‘It’s allowed, you know.’
He was going to be Reform’s candidate in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, and he was replacing hairdresser-manque Richard Tice as party leader.
The two had sorted it out between themselves, rather as V. Putin and Dmitry Medvedev used to divvy up the top jobs at the Kremlin. Mr Tice would now be the party’s chairman. You never saw a leader look happier to be ousted. Mr Tice practically skipped off the stage.
‘This election needs gingering up,’ cried the ‘baccy-tarred Farage larynx once he had been escorted to the podium by heavies.
‘People have zoned out. None-of-the-above is top by a country mile.’
Sir Keir Starmer dedicated his day of campaigning to outlining Labour’s defence pledges in Manchester
Mr Sunak was a ‘liar’ and Sir Keir was ‘a man who was a lawyer’. A low blow. Mr Farage added that lawyer Starmer was the sort who ‘fought very hard to get benefits’ for migrants.
And migration was the biggest policy in this election, though you would not know it from ‘the career political class’.
It was at 2pm on Sunday – a time that sounds suspiciously like third-pint-of-bitter o’clock – that he decided to quit his GB News job and his US political ambitions.
The change of heart came, he said, after talking to people in the streets. There was one particular conversation in Skegness, Lincs, that stuck in his mind.
A chap had been politely unimpressed when Mr Farage offered his reasons for not fighting a seat. ‘I realised I was just not feeling good about this,’ explained Mr Farage. ‘Better to fight than let people down.’
Rishi Sunak’s visit to a rowing club in Henley is interrupted by a Lib Dem pleasure cruiser sailing by
Above him a vast chandelier blazed. Although we were at Glaziers Hall, all the windows were curtained. A difference between this event and one Reform held in Dover last week was that eight, dark-suited gents lined a wall. They looked to me like the money.
The audience was mostly reporters but that Pimlico Plumbers tycoon with the Rod Stewart hairdo and poppy-outty eyes was there. A living caution against plastic surgery.
Mr Farage, a mere 60, was full of pep, bronzed like an old slapper in Magaluf and cheerfully scorning journalists who wondered if he and Mr Tice were still friends. ‘Yawn,’ he told a Guardian scribe. ‘Sorry, I almost nodded off there. Do apologise.’
Another was told off for ‘a very silly question’ and a third, who asked why he was doing this event in London and not Clacton, was told: ‘This is where you all are, happy in your bubble.’
Some of us had in fact slogged over 100 miles to get there. It was worth it. It may or may not prove to be the ‘political revolt’ he claimed, but Mr Farage has at least given our patronising, monochrome ink-monitors a boot up the bahookie.
