Nigel farage

In verbal ding dongs Nigel Farage usually gives as good as he gets. But he has been oddly restrained in his response to the Tories ruling out any kind of electoral pact with him on the grounds that he is not a ‘fit and proper person’. On the Andrew Neil show last night, Farage was strikingly emollient. He said that he didn’t want any role in government in exchange for a pact and downplayed the criticism of him, saying it was just a ‘junior press officer’ sounding off. He argued that a pact was needed because if there was a Labour-led government ‘we’re not going to get a meaningful Brexit of any kind at all’. On this point, I think Farage is right.

Nigel Farage: whatever happened to him? You remember, the chap in the coat who used to go on about Europe and all that. Time was, you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing him. These days, not so much. Farage’s relative quiet in political circles says quite a lot about how easy a ride Boris Johnson is getting in his early days as PM. It is implicitly assumed by many commentators and editors that the advent of a Boris Johnson Government packed with ultra-committed Brexiters, directed by the Vote Leave team and seemingly hell-bent on No Deal will, in due course, render Farage and his Brexit Party irrelevant.

Why does the right hate Britain so much? That’s one of the questions arising from both the leaking of Kim Darroch’s diplomatic cables and, more pertinently, the reaction to the entirely unsurprising contents of those cables.  Sir Kim’s appraisal of Donald Trump’s administration are not very different from those made by other sentient beings. Suggesting Trump’s White House is chaotic and inept and all kinds of dysfunctional hardly counts as news. Everyone knows this because everyone can see it.  And yet, remarkably, it is the British Ambassador to Washington who finds himself subjected to an artillery barrage of humbug and absurdity.

We are all aware that Jo Brand saying battery acid would be a more appropriate liquid than milkshakes to throw at people was a joke. It was a bad joke, but it was a joke. We are all aware that the chances of a Radio 4 listener hearing the joke and being inspired to hurl battery acid at a right-wing politician are slim to none. It remains such a morbid and mean-spirited jest that it should not be made, let alone by people whose jokes are being funded by the taxpayer, but it is foolish to classify it as incitement. What rankles is the pungent hypocrisy of Brand's liberal and left-wing defenders. If the joke had been by a right-wing Twitter troll of Jess Phillips or Jeremy Corbyn the demands to deplatform them would have been ear-splitting.

I have celebrated John Bercow, eulogised Martin McGuinness and urged Spectator readers to vote Labour. So I appreciate I’m on thin ice with a defence of Jo Brand, and since the hefty lefty and I are of similar girth, that metaphor could end badly. Yet the news she is being investigated by police over a joke ought to bring even the most phlegmatic conservative to the barricades. Some things are just wrong, even if Brendan O’Neill is against them too.  Appearing as a guest on Radio 4 panel programme Heresy on Tuesday, Brand riffed on the phenomenon of ‘milkshaking’, in which progressives throw chilled beverages over people they disagree with because when they go low, we go high.

What a bunch of big babies the right can sometimes be. These people spend oodles of time mocking lefty snowflakes and touchy students for taking offence at every off-colour joke or un-PC point of view. And yet it turns out they’re just as susceptible as any moaning millennial to having a fit of the Victorian vapours when someone says something they find offensive. Exhibit A: the unhinged fury over Jo Brand’s joke about battery acid. Seriously, over the past 24 hours right-wingers have given the PC left a run for its money on the boo-hoo offence-taking front. You thought it was only purple-haired SJWs who try to get comedians sacked and even arrested for cracking dodgy jokes? Think again.