Now Farage turns his fire on... David Lloyd George

With Keir Starmer’s government on the verge of imploding, the man favourite to be prime minister after the next election was last night lambasting… the decision to sign the Armistice to end the first world war in 1918.

Nigel Farage devoted much of his GB News programme on Tuesday night to a monologue attacking David Lloyd George’s government for signing up to the agreement that ended fighting on the western front. With his finger on the pulse of the big political issues that really matter to ordinary people today, Reform’s leader declared that he would have fought on had he been prime minister 107 years ago.

“We understand why everybody wanted the war to end, but there was one man who thought we were making the most terrible mistake,” Farage told GB News viewers who, even considering their advanced average age, probably weren’t around for Lloyd George’s communiqué. “His name was Jack Pershing and he was the American general in charge of the American army.

“Here’s a quote from him from just a few weeks afterwards. He says ‘we shouldn’t have done it. If they’d given us another 10 days we would have rounded up the entire German army, captured it, humiliated it… the German troops are marching back into Germany announcing that they have never been defeated. What I dread is that Germany doesn’t know that she was licked.’”

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“We understand why they wanted an end to that,” Farage went on, before doing his trademark performative sigh. “But, you know, he was right, Pershing was right. We should have gone on, whether it was 10 days, whether it was four weeks, I don’t know.

“But just think about this,” he said, warming to his theme. “When Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists get going, they launched the Beer Hall Putsch, who is it that’s leading the procession?” Farage then displayed an image from 1924 of Hitler alongside Erich Ludendorff, the general. “He talks about the stab in the back, he talks about the undefeated army, and so I think that, actually, the Armistice was a mistake, we should have gone on and made the Germans unconditionally surrender rather than a sort of half-gentlemanly way out followed by a treaty that was somewhat vindictive.”

Farage has long been accused of being obsessed with the second world war, but now it appears his new hobby horse is the mistakes of the government at the time of the first. Perhaps by the next election Reform will be campaigning on the strategic failure of the Charge of the Light Brigade!

(David Lloyd George was unavailable for comment, having died in 1945.)