Fake man-of-the-people Farage’s fake England pic

Nigel Farage is always keen to come across as a man of the people, so long as he doesn’t have to spend any time in his constituency of Clacton to do so.

The World Cup, then, provided him the perfect opportunity to show off his everyman credentials. Shortly after England’s stunning 4–2 victory over Croatia in their opening game of the tournament on Wednesday night, Farage posted a picture of himself in an England shirt, in a pub, sipping a pint. “Proper job. England,” he captioned the pic. PR mission accomplished.

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At this point, a cynic might note that at least some of the credit for England’s victory on Wednesday should go to its new manager, Thomas Tuchel, exactly the kind of recent immigrant taking a Brit’s job that Farage’s increasingly extreme party spends most of its time railing against.

But the Mirror’s deputy political editor Mikey Smith spotted a bigger problem with Farage’s football post: why, he wondered, was the Reform leader in exactly the same shirt, in exactly the same pub, and next to exactly the same people as he was in photographs taken during the Euros in 2024? Surely the Reform leader wasn’t so indifferent to England and the World Cup that he just reused an old photograph, was he?

Answers, sadly, came there none.