Funny How Quiet Nigel Farage Has Become

The bear has been busy, Reform has been embarrassing itself again, and Nigel Farage appears to be experiencing a rare and mysterious outbreak of discretion.

Morning, all,

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been a little quieter over the past week or so, and I’ve had a few messages of concern (which I find both deeply touching and slightly worrying, in that it suggests I may, in fact, have been online far too much in recent years).

I just wanted to give a quick update that all is okay here. Very, very busy, with a minor wobble happening in the family, but there is truly nothing catastrophic.

I am, of course, still keeping one eye on politics, as would be expected, and I have watched the Robert Kenyon saga in the Makerfield by-election unfold with a mixture of disgust and a complete lack of surprise.

Kenyon strikes me as the sort of man who mistakes being offensive for being brave and mistakes being controversial for being interesting. There are thousands of men like him online. Men who seem to believe that the entire purpose of public discourse is to see how many people they can upset before lunch. The political equivalent of a teenager discovering South Park for the first time and deciding they are now a fearless warrior against political correctness.

The problem is that Parliament is not, despite what so many people believe these days, an internet comments section.

The issue here isn’t just that he’s an edgelord bordering on incellious - it’s that his record reveals a pattern of misogyny, homophobia and the sort of politics that seems driven less by principle than by a desperate need for attention.

Is it any wonder really that he found himself a home in Reform UK?

Not really.

Reform has repeatedly presented itself as the party of common sense, standards and patriotism, yet, every few weeks another candidate emerges who appears to have been recruited from a Facebook group called Divorced Dads Against Human Decency.

At some point you have to stop calling these incidents mistakes and start asking whether they are simply reflections of the culture being cultivated inside the party, because if these people keep getting through the front door, it becomes reasonable to ask whether anyone is actually guarding it.

The other thing I have found genuinely fascinating over the past few weeks is Nigel Farage’s sudden absence from my television.

For years the man has operated on the assumption that no camera should ever be forced to endure more than forty-eight hours without his face appearing in front of it. Whether it was migration, net zero, Brussels, woke sandwiches, low-flow showerheads or whatever fresh horror had been manufactured for the outrage economy that week, Farage was always there.

Waiting. Planning. Lurking, really..

Materialising in front of a microphone like a particularly well-dressed sleep paralysis demon - and then suddenly, silence.

No grand pronouncements. No dramatic press conferences. No declarations that Britain is moments away from collapse because a council somewhere changed the wording on a leaflet.

Nothing. Now, perhaps that’s coincidence.

Or perhaps the £5 million donation from Christopher Harborne has proven rather more awkward than even he expected.

What started as a straightforward question about money has evolved into a rather stranger story involving claims that information was obtained through a Russian hack of Farage’s phone.

Which raises a fairly obvious question.

If a hostile foreign power hacked the phone of the leader of one of Britain’s largest political parties, why wasn’t that the story from day one? Why weren’t the police immediately involved? Why wasn’t there an urgent national security conversation? Why wasn’t Farage on every television channel demanding answers?

Because if that allegation is true, it would represent an extraordinarily serious matter - and if it isn’t, people are entitled to ask why the explanation appears to keep changing every time another uncomfortable question is asked.

What has struck me most over the past few weeks is how unusual it is to see Farage on the defensive - his entire political career has been built around asking questions rather than answering them. Around being the man holding the microphone, not the man standing in front of it.

For perhaps the first time in a very long while, he appears to be discovering that scrutiny is considerably less enjoyable when it is pointed in your direction.

Good.

Politicians who demand accountability from everyone else should be willing to accept it themselves.

Anyway, apologies for the brevity of this post. Life, as mentioned, has been a little fuller than usual recently and my attention has been pulled in a few different directions. I mainly wanted to let everyone know that I am alive, well, and still lurking around the edges of British politics with the same mixture of fascination, annoyance and concern as ever.

Thank you to everyone who has checked in, sent messages, or simply wondered where the bear had wandered off to. It has genuinely meant a lot.

I’ll be back properly towards the end of the week.

Best,
Bear