Rachel Reeves was visiting a gardening club for the retired. ‘Do you come here every week?’ she simpered at some pensioners. No, but plenty of people wish you did. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was here to announce a U-turn on winter fuel allowance and so chose this almost comically soft-ball context to do so. It was frankly miraculous that nobody mistook her for a badly-pruned conifer and tried to bed her in.
Elsewhere, a man who gave off the aura that he really could bury you under a patio was giving a speech at Port Talbot. Nigel Farage was still all grins as he described the Chancellor’s humiliating climb-down, but there was a hint that, as the Psalmist puts it, some iron had entered into his soul. This was no more Mr Nice Nige.
‘The Labour government are in a state of absolute blind panic, and they’re not quite sure what to do!’ he beamed. I don’t know whether the Welsh have a word for schadenfreude, but this was it. Another change after last week’s trials was that this was no longer just the Nigel show – Mr Farage had brought in some supporting actors in the form of two defecting councillors. One of them, a sort of genial munchkin, provided an interlude whereby he told a very long and boring story about contract procurement. Mr Farage introduced him with a sort of garrulous menace; ‘Say hello to my little friend!’
The next part involved Nige doing whatever the opposite of a tourist brochure is; listing everything wrong with contemporary Wales. Healthcare, industry, agriculture: he even came dangerously close to thrashing out an actual coherent policy platform. It was when he began talking about speed limits outside schools between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. that things got really scary. This is actually the Nige of Kemi and Sir Keir’s nightmares; perhaps more so than Mr Farage’s usual bombastic end-of-the-pier schtick. Today it was tempered by what will be far more terrifying to his rivals – boring, substantive detail of what a Reform government might do. He even took care to fudge his answers and avoid promising too much.
One reporter wondered why Reform had yet to secure the defection of ‘a big household name in Wales’. What did he mean by this? An endorsement from Tom Jones? Some communication from beyond the grave of Richard Burton? No, apparently he meant ‘a sitting Senedd member’. If that’s your definition of a household name, then I would gently suggest that you really need to get out more.
Another journalist asked him to name his favourite figure from Welsh history. Mr Farage replied with someone conveniently only known to him – and presumably long dead. ‘One of my great uncles… but that’s a whole other story’. (‘You wouldn’t know my deceased relative; he goes to another school’). Even this cop-out shows the superiority of Mr Farage’s basic political instincts over his two primary opponents; one can imagine the Leader of the Opposition getting needlessly shirty at such a question. The PM, whose grasp of history does not extend beyond 1948, would have presumably answered ‘Nye Bevan’, or ‘Gareth Bale’, or constructed an elaborate fluff around his father’s infamous tool production.
For all the attempt to paint himself as leader of a government in waiting, there was a very distinctly Faragean Mafia-boss energy to his answers. ‘Was I annoyed with Zia on Thursday? Well, I wasn’t exactly chuffed with what he had to say’, said Nige, laughing for just a little longer than was comfortable for everybody in the room.
Was the falling-out yet another example of Mr Farage’s inability to get on with anyone, asked Tamara Cohen of Sky News? Again, we saw this new Nige – more serious and much scarier for it.
‘I maintain long term friendships’, he began. ‘But if anyone talks behind my back or betrays that trust then – yeah – I’ll never speak to them again.’ By this point he may as well have been speaking in a comedy New York Italian accent with a heavy overcoat slung over one shoulder and a Tommy gun in the other hand (‘You come to me, on the day of my councillor’s defection’). If I were Tamara I’d be checking my bed for horse heads tonight.
Comments