Farage at 60: there’s more to come

Were I to tell you that the most significant political figure of his age celebrates a landmark birthday this week, you’d probably work out that I could not be referring to Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer.

There would be an argument for suspecting I might be talking about Boris Johnson, given that he was born in 1964 and presided over the departure of the UK from the EU. But no, his 60th birthday does not fall until June – beaten to it by more than two months by Nigel Farage, who chalks up the big six-o on Wednesday.

Though we could say that Brexit is a child with two fathers, there really can be no contest as to which was in loco parentis from the earliest days. As the primal force behind Ukip, Farage campaigned remorselessly and often brilliantly for two decades to take Britain out of the nascent European superstate. With Johnson such a commitment was only forthcoming after a game of eeny-meeny-miny-moe between two competing columns he had written at the start of the referendum campaign.