Rod Liddle

Just received this update from the Brexit Party: 'Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage threw down a challenge to Tory leader-elect Boris Johnson: “Boris says he wants to put me back in my box. If he wants a fight – hold my jacket!"’ To which Boris will undoubtedly reply: 'Jog on, you mug. I’ll rip you a new arsehole.' And then Nigel can come back with: 'Not after you’ve met my friend Mr Stanley, you albino gimp. After that, you’ll be smiling from ear to ear. Literally.' Who says the standard of political debate these days is parlous? Boris and Nigel will of course need to make some sort of accommodation. After they’ve given each other a slap.

I had never heard of Mark Field until he was suspended for removing, in a commendably vigorous manner, the Greenpeace protester Janet Barker from a black tie event in London, where guests had gathered to listen to a speech from the man who is still Chancellor for a bit, Philip Hammond. I wondered immediately if Field could be shoehorned into the leadership contest somehow, given his decisiveness and admirable restraint. Faced with Ms Barker, I might have acted with less restraint, even if I agree with most of the stuff she’s protesting about. She posed a possible danger to guests and for feminists to say that she didn’t, because she’s a lady, seems to be having one’s cake and eating it. But it is not that that enrages.

How do you feel about the standard of political debate in this country? I ask this question at the very moment two blimps are flying over London. The first attempts to depict President Donald Trump as a giant baby in a nappy and is the property of people who do not like Donald Trump; the other attempts to depict the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, as a kind of transvestite dwarf and is the property of people who do not like Sadiq Khan. Both groups habitually call each other fascists, doing a passable impression of Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager. Both groups, I would venture, are irredeemable narcissists with the collective IQ of a block of Cathedral City cheddar cheese.

The echo chamber is the defining characteristic of this berserk and entertaining political age: squadrons of foam-flecked absolutists ranting to people who agree with them about everything and thus come to believe that their ludicrous view of the world is shared by everybody. It is true, for example, of the Stalinist liberal Remainers — that tranche of about one third of the remain vote who will tell you proudly that they have never met anyone who voted leave and that therefore either nobody did vote leave — or they voted leave but we shouldn’t take any notice of them because they are worthless.

I see that the Lib Dems were also involved in trying to put up a joint candidate with the Greens, Renew and the ludicrous Change UK for the Peterborough by-election. This really is the tail wagging the dog. Leave the Greens aside for one moment, Change and Renew are not parties in the accepted sense of the word. Change want to change nothing and its (arriviste) members – as Rachel Johnson brilliantly demonstrated – disagree with nothing in the Lib Dem manifesto. Renew, meanwhile, scarcely exist at all. A more muscular party than the Lib Dems would have told these vaulting, arrogant dilettantes to get stuffed and hammered them at the polls.