‘Nigel Farage was wooed, seduced, and dumped by a Christmas cad’

It would be hard for anyone not to have their head turned by the world’s richest man.

He’s all over your socials, he’s sliding into your DMs, then he asks you to dinner and it’s such a whirlwind that you tell your friends he’s The One, and let your enemies know you’re about to be rich enough to crush them into the dirt.

Then as soon as the ball drops on New Year’s Eve he drops you like you’re radioactive, and to add insult to injury he does it on TWITTER which he OWNS and now ALL THE GIRLS CAN SEE.

Nigel Farage is probably spending this week with a large tub of ice cream and Gloria Gaynor on repeat. Poor Nigel, wooed, seduced and dumped in under a month by a Christmas cad who just wanted a fling for the likes and the lolz: thoughts and prayers, Nigel. Thoughts and prayers.

Of course this particular break-up is not only because Elon Musk doesn’t like Nigel just the way he is. It’s because being in a committed relationship with Elon is a bit like wiping Saddam Hussein’s arse: full of existential peril.

Nigel met Elon through their mutual bestie Donald Trump, and all seemed to be going swimmingly. Rich white men who insist the world is against them, all agreeing with each other about how to run the world differently so that it was more tilted in favour of people who want to be rude or unkind and suffer no consequences for it.

Nigel was busy telling everyone Elon was going to write him a $100m cheque to help him win the next election, but all along his amour was having his head turned by racist jailbird and professional liar Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon with a string of convictions for drugs, assault, and contempt of court.

Newspapers were briefed over the weekend by a friend of Nigel’s they’d had a word with a friend of Donald’s to say that Elon shouldn’t say those things. Then like an episode of The Only Way Is Cause and Effects, Nigel was publicly dumped on by the billionaire who not only doesn’t like being told what to say, but now says the only person who can lead Reform is an MP he hasn’t met and everyone else had to Google.

Leaving aside the delightful schadenfreude, it says a lot about any politician that they’re prepared to commit to a man like Musk, who flits like a butterfly between Right and Left, between space and cars, between wives and girlfriends, and whose utterances have more holes than a bulletproof Tesla window.

If it were a romantic relationship on offer, the fact he’d fathered 12 children by four women and married the same woman twice might give any prospective lover a moment’s pause, even with the distractions of a massive chequebook and a skin tone usually found in deep-sea trenches.

But when it was a political alliance, between grown-ups marketed as the only sensible, brilliant, charismatic, long-sighted men in the room, it seems rather, well – off-brand. Or, their respective brands aren’t worth the over-sized panties they’ve been strutting around in.

The last thing any serious politician needs is to climb into bed with someone who doesn’t know what the situation in Ukraine is, and certainly not someone whose attention to legal details and fact-checking is limited to falling victim to his own algorithms and the fact he fired all the moderators. That’s the reason he’s been tweeting at Britain – in three months the Online Safety Act will leave him liable to fines of up to 10% of X’s global revenue if he doesn’t remove illegal content. He wants to disrupt power, not seriously engage with it.

Farage has sought to claw back some capital, saying Tommy Robinson is a red line and he sticks to his principles. Except he didn’t, when he said Labour shouldn’t send activists to help in the US election as it was “foreign interference”, and then happily bent over for a South African-born US resident to bankroll his party.

The problem was never that Musk might actually be able to buy a UK election, by funding a more efficient Reform machine to capitalise on polling that significantly over-estimates their actual electoral power.

It was that every party Farage has led has attracted the sort of people who don’t stand up to basic scrutiny – wife beaters, out-of-the-closet racists, dodgy dealers and others who can find no political home elsewhere. Even the well-intentioned become tainted by association, and it’s the fact they’re clearly fruitcakes that has made them electable only in narrow circumstances, by narrow demographics, who usually regret it.

You can give such people all the money in the world, but if they’re still going to include the likes of incompetent Neil Hamilton, misogynist Carl Benjamin or current Reform MP and convicted kicker of women James McMurdock then they’ll not be any better.

What Nigel didn’t realise is that you can get into bed with the world’s richest man, but all the problems you had will come with you. And in that bed are all HIS problems too. If you can’t change them, you have to live with them, and if you can’t do that then the only choice you have is cookie dough or chardonnay.

If Nigel had some common sense, he’d have kept Musk at arm’s length. But then if he was sensible, he’d admitted years ago that Brexit was always going to do what it has, and increase the number of migrants by switching short-term EU workers for long-term visitors from the rest of the world. He’d visit Clacton more often than the US, and at least pretend to listen.

And if he he had any sense, then when Nigel was spoken of as a potential Prime Minister people wouldn’t laugh like you were talking about about an ageing Joey Essex. It’s sweet that he’s so dim yet perpetually optimistic, and that he or anyone else thinks the unelected, unaccountable and frequently unintelligible Musk is the solution to anything except an empty news cycle.

It’s just not a quality anyone needs in a leader, and in that Musk was absolutely bang-on.