“So maybe, just maybe,” declared Nigel Farage dramatically yesterday, “I’m reaching the point of thinking that we should have a second referendum on EU membership.” “We understand more than anything what [the Tories] plan to do,” added his Brexit backer Arron Banks, “unfortunately.”
Oh man … you’ve seen this movie sequel a hundred times. The old gang, back together. A ragtag bunch of misfits having to reassemble for one last job. We open with our former fellowship scattered. Maybe Farage is working in some Chelsea chop shop, grafting halves of stolen vehicles together. (He’s already set this up with that amusingly elitist interview claiming he’s “skint”.)
Anyway, he’s just clocking a speedometer one day when the door is darkened by a familiar face: Arron Banks. They hold each other’s gaze for a long time – dammit, they went through so much together – before Banks tells him why he’s come. There’s a tantalising pause, then Farage gets back to fixing the speedo, muttering gruffly: “Maybe you didn’t hear – I don’t fight no referendums no more.”
Except he does, of course. It’s all he’s ever known. He’d be lost without it – indeed, as the past year has shown, Nigel Farage is absolutely lost. It’s been a long time since the gold lift picture. You can’t dine out for ever on dining out once with Trump.
By way of background, Farage has spent this year putting his shirt on Steve Bannon. (It’s why Bannon always wears two shirts.) He regarded the former White House chief strategist as the genius of the age, and consequently ended up not just backing the Republican Alabama senate candidate and slavery nostalgist Roy Moore, but sticking with his endorsement even when the allegations of underage sexual assault began to mount up. Nigel was hopelessly in thrall to Steve, and yearned to get some kind of American advancement out of it for himself.
And now? Not only has Bannon’s part in Michael Wolff’s book burned bridges with Farage’s beloved Trump, but on Tuesday his meteoric downfall forced him to resign from even Breitbart, the news website of which he was executive chairman. It will be zero coincidence that in the very week Bannon flames out, Farage suddenly pops back up over here, making the most naked of headline grabs.
Quite rightly, this self-interested manoeuvring will be beyond many ordinary Brexiters, to whom Nigel had until now remained an unimpeachable hero. Indeed, Farage’s deceptively sudden call has left them feeling betrayed, with furious leavers deluging the web and the airwaves (including his own LBC show) to denounce his inexplicable weakness. What’s Nigel come back from the deep south as? Cuckleberry Finn?
Alas, this latest development was always in the post. Farage has had more comebacks than Barbra Streisand’s done farewell tours. I’ve had tickets to most of his resignations, and the last one – July 2016, according to my collector’s partwork – was rowed back on even in real time. He started the press conference by saying he was quitting, and ended it saying, “Let’s see where we are in two and a half years’ time.”
Well, this is where we are 18 months on. Few people are more nostalgic than Nigel Farage. He used to get misty-eyed about the early days of Ukip – “Bomber Command ties” … “you look back and think, God, how did we get away with that?!” – and now he gets misty-eyed about the referendum.
I can’t help feeling Nigel would like to somehow recover a single elusive instant from the past and dwell in its perfect stasis for ever. For TS Eliot it was the moment in the rose garden; for Nigel Farage, it was the bit at his referendum night party between retracting his first concession of the night and reconceding the vote a second time. He was smoking cigars in a VIP room sealed off for the Brexit elite, and everything was simultaneously possible and impossible. The here and now is empty in comparison. He cannot bear very much reality.
As mentioned before, there is a lot of the seethingly bitchy “resting” actor about Farage (and in various other wingnut old hams who find themselves currently between jobs – your Katie Hopkinses, your Milos). Don’t get me wrong – Nigel’s been a massive hit at the Brexit conventions. There’s always a big queue for him to sign Breaking Point posters and pose for fan selfies next to the mannequin of the V-signing Bob Geldof. But it’s like there’s something … missing?
Thus he rocked up for his meeting with Michel Barnier this week wearing a look-at-me brown fedora, presumably designed to cast him as the Brussels Howard Hughes. Quick update, then, of people in public life who wear distinctive hats: George Galloway; live autopsy weirdo and plastinator Gunther von Hagens; that absolute scumbag who owns Blackpool; and now Farage. Case closed, I think.
Whether he mentioned his forthcoming Referendum II call to Barnier is unclear. But the EU’s chief negotiator has spent the week dealing with various stripes of UK nonsense. On Wednesday, he was formally presented with a hamper full of British products – some of them made by anti-Brexit or Anglo-European firms, but why bother checking? – by the likes of Digby Jones and ex-Ukipper Steven Woolfe.
Steven Woolfe! Perhaps you can send a serious message with a hamper. But the fact that this one was delivered by a man whose chief claim to fame in the EU parliament was being hospitalised after an alleged altercation with another member of his own party said so much more than the Marmite. No surprise that, when asked for a comment on a second referendum, one EU diplomat told the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent: “Do what the fuck you want but stop dicking around.”
But will we? You’ll note that David Cameron’s retroactively hilarious claim that an EU referendum would “settle the issue for a generation” has now evolved into Nigel Farage’s claim that we need another referendum to “settle the issue for a generation once and for all”. The third referendum – by which point we will be splintering into militias and distilling drinking water from our own urine – will be confidently predicted to “settle the issue for a generation once and for all and forever endov”.
Say what you like about the referendum, you have to admire its spirit. It just refuses to die. It’s the plebiscite equivalent of Glenn Close coming back out of the bath in Fatal Attraction, or Kathy Bates rearing up again in Misery. Eventually, we’re just going to have to shoot it in the chest and watch it slide down the bathroom wall, knowing that it’s still basically damaged our family for ever. Or bring the typewriter definitively down on its skull, knowing that it’s still going to have hobbled us for life.