If Nigel Farage is worried about anti-Semitism, he shouldn’t be teaming up with Beppe Grillo

Nigel Farage turned down an alliance with Marine Le Pen in the European Parliament not because her ‘far right’ Front National party is in fact — unlike his Ukip — ‘far left’ on most economic and social issues, but because it has ‘anti-Semitism in its DNA’.

Instead, Nigel Farage, the ex-commodity broker from Sevenoaks, has formed an alliance with the ex-comedian from Genoa, Beppe Grillo, leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle, which is an internet copy-and-paste version of Mussolini’s Fascist movement. Grillo, like his muse Il Duce before him, used to be a communist before he saw the light. Now he aims to replace parliament and the courts — as dictators do — with plebiscites and people’s tribunals on his website.

So the decision by Farage to joinforces with this ranting demagogue, a convicted manslaughterer to boot — whose slogan Vaffa! (Fuck Off!) is aimed not just at commodity brokers and their ilk but everything pretty much, except wind farms, ayatollahs and conspiracy theories — beggars belief.

Perhaps it was the European Parliament bounty – reported to be up to €4 million a year — that clouded his judgment. To secure the dosh requires 25 MEPs (he has 24, Grillo 17) from seven member states. Or perhaps his motive was more straightforward: he simply decided that he could get away with it as the world has yet to get its head round Beppe Grillo in the same way that it thinks it has got its head round Marine Le Pen.

But Signor Grillo says anti-Semitic things, unlike Madame Le Pen. I am not aware of a single remark of this nature made by Le Pen, and she is determined to get rid of the anti-Semitic elements which had placed the Front National beyond the pale when it was led by her father, Jean-Marie. A couple of weeks ago she rowed very publicly with him after his latest sick joke about the Jews and said: ‘The Front National most firmly condemns every form of anti-Semitism, in whatever form it takes.’