Nigel Farage, the Macavity of Brexit

Replace the name “Macavity” with “Nigel Farage” and you will get a pretty good idea of how the recent EU-UK Brexit reset debate played out, both in and out of the Commons. Apart from a few cross tweets about betrayal, Farage was conspicuous by his absence when he might have been laying into Keir Starmer in the chamber, raging to the faithful on his GB News show or visiting the poor fishermen and women who he says will go out of business because of the deal. 

Instead, he was trotters-up on holiday in France. He missed a huge moment in British politics, was mocked by Starmer in the Commons and received so much negative publicity for his absence that he was forced to issue an embarrassing statement defending it. 

Farage then had to embark on a media offensive from his grandes vacances, insisting that once he was back he would be making a major speech pledging that a Reform government would scrap the two-child benefit cap, as well as reinstating full winter fuel payments to all UK pensioners. This seemed to satisfy his media cheerleaders – the Sun appears to be edging closer to a Reform endorsement – but felt like a rare mis-step from a seasoned pro.

Farage’s take was that he was so tired after campaigning in the local elections that he had to take a foreign holiday immediately – it seems he couldn’t even wait for the Commons to go into Whitsun recess from May 22-June 2. He clearly did not feel sufficiently rested by all those all-expenses-paid trips to Trump’s America, travelling by private jet. 

So he went on a relaxing break in France, where his girlfriend Laure Ferrari comes from (in an echo of the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me? she was working as a waitress in a Strasbourg bar when they met). Doubtless Farage insisted on tucking into some bouillabaisse or soupe de poisson while on hols in order to show solidarity with the fishing industry.

Didn’t it seem extraordinary, though, that he wasn’t in the UK for Brexit betrayal day? He would have been on every news show, all over social media, starting the day on Radio 4’s Today and ending it on BBC Two’s Newsnight. It was his time to shine. 

But then like Macavity, Nigel never wants to be seen at the scene of the crime. He knows Brexit has failed and he doesn’t want to be associated with it any more – not when there is mileage in ranting about small boats instead. So like Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he bravely ran away.

Farage missed another crime – the swift skewering of his fellow Brexit travellers in the Commons by Sir Keir Starmer. When the hapless and doomed leader of the opposition attacks you for abandoning the fishing industry by merely extending exactly the same deal her party had negotiated, it is never going to be a tough day at the office. 

When your new policy means the bulldozing of a £25m post-Brexit border post because you have slashed red tape and pointless controls, you have little to fear from a party that used to pride itself on slashing red tape and pointless controls. 

“Selling out our sovereignty” by removing prohibitively expensive and unnecessary checks on pets before they can cross the channel, is likely to be popular in a country of dog owners, with second homes on the continent – even Kemi Badenoch knows that.

And that was before we heard from the ultras on the backbenches, some of whom have happily been forgotten since their leading roles in the Brexit wars. Mark Francois and Sir Bernard Jenkin spluttered away and were batted aside.

It might have been very different had Farage been in the chamber asking the questions instead of his smarmy and ineffective deputy Richard Tice. But Farage has already decided that he will not die with the likes of Francois and Jenkin in this particular ditch. The venom of Brexit is being slowly sucked from the UK body politic, and its most poisonous cheerleaders can feel it happening.

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Farage obviously no longer wants to be the face of Brexit, and who can blame him? Who would want to be a frontman for the queues, the red tape, the economic misery, the failure to cut net migration? He knows – unlike zealots like Francois and Jenkin – that “it was all worth it for the sovereignty” is not a vote-winner. 

Brexit is over, it was an embarrassment best forgotten and slowly unwound. It is not a battle for Nigel to fight any more, he is now above such things – he believes he is a PM in waiting with gravitas to maintain. His lackeys and useful idiots can go through the motions instead.

Francois, Jenkin and the tattered ranks of the Brexit ultras must have looked around the Commons waiting for their hero to raise his standard. 

But they have found out that when it comes to Brexit, “Macavity’s not there.”