Nigel Farage Demands Labour In Power

While some pundits are criticising aspects of the Government response to the Coronavirus pandemic, one of those who cannot even qualify as a has-been, because he never was, has been shooting off his North And South demanding that his view should prevail. And to no surprise at all, that individual is Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, still Oberscheissenführer of the not-really-a-party-at-all Brexit Party, now with no MEPs at all.

Nige has decided that health secretary Matt Hancock should be removed, because he is a “managerial career politician”, unlike the career politician managing what is left of the Brexit Party, which is a completely different proposition. “Health Secretary Matt Hancock says we are going to build diagnostic capability never before seen in this country. We hear this every week and no longer believe him”. So what’s your solution, Nige?

Ah well. That, invariably, involves More And Bigger Paycheques For Himself Personally Now, which means he has written a monumentally tedious op-ed for the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, a paper that is rapidly positioning itself as a beacon of total irrelevance, pumping out article after article telling readers how the lockdown is rubbish, and the Government’s measures are worse than the virus.

Under the heading “It's time to remove Matt Hancock and call in a no-nonsense outsider to win the coronavirus war”, Mr Thirsty tells readers not yet asleep “‘Action this day’ was stamped by Winston Churchill on every crucial government document during our country’s greatest test in the Second World War, and he meant it”. And who would have been taking that action, Nige? A “no-nonsense outsider”, or a “managerial career politician”?

The answer is that, invariably, it would be the latter, and most likely the decision as to who took that action would have been down to Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who was Churchill’s de facto deputy from 1940, a position formalised in 1942. And it seems that Farage is, perhaps accidentally, suggesting a very similar arrangement today.

Because this is what he says next: “It is now vital that Boris Johnson assumes his great hero’s style of leadership and acts quickly. If he does not, his reputation will collapse and so will the public’s respect for the lockdown”. What Churchill did was to appoint a number of opposition figures to his War Cabinet. Not only Attlee, but also Arthur Greenwood (Labour’s deputy leader), Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison served thus.

So, with voting in Labour’s leadership election having concluded, and a result imminent, what Farage appears to be saying is that whoever wins the leader and deputy leader contests should be invited to join a coalition Government. After all, the only “no-nonsense outsider” who served in Churchill’s war cabinet was Max Beaverbrook, and he had significant previous political experience. No-one else fits Farage’s template.

Unless he is trying to wangle a role for Himself Personally Now, which would be an act of Governmental suicide by Johnson if it happened. Farage knows all about standing on the outside pissing in, but nothing about standing on the inside, pissing or not.

But good of him to recommend the new Labour leader and deputy leader as part of a coalition Government to save the country from Tory ineptitude. What a trouper.

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