Farage will make Boris regret his panicky second lockdown

During the 2015 general election campaign, when I was directing operations at the London HQ for Ukip, I had an ‘absolutely brilliant’ idea. The next day Nigel Farage would be campaigning on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, where he was standing for election. On our grid, it was earmarked to be Small Business Day – designed to showcase the party’s manifesto focus on the self-employed and SMEs, aka ‘the backbone of the British economy’.

My plan? During his campaigning, Nigel should visit a butcher, a baker and a candlestick-maker (as mentioned in the nursery rhyme ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub’). A suitable butcher’s shop and a bakery near to his route were swiftly identified. But the scheme collapsed because, try as we might, we could not find a candlestick-maker anywhere in the vicinity of North Kent.

It turned out that my plan had a slight flaw – the frankly unhelpful advent of the National Grid many decades earlier had all but wiped out the candlestick-making trade.