Nigel Farage had better hurry up and settle for a peerage

Last week, an angry Telegraph reader asked me why I had got through a whole column on Brexit without mentioning Nigel Farage. My exact answer is that the column was about MPs in relation to Brexit and Mr Farage and his Brexit party have no MPs. But there is a more general answer too. It is that the Brexit party’s irreducible core is now clearly shown to be small. The rest of its vote is entirely dependent on the behaviour of whoever is the Conservative leader. Mrs May’s behaviour swelled its ranks; Boris Johnson’s has reduced them. It really is as simple as that. Now that Boris has actually got a deal — which critics said was impossible — and got it approved in principle by parliament — which critics also said was impossible — we can see that the supporters of no deal at all costs are quite few. Most Brexiteers regard no deal as their backstop, not their goal, and so they are positively pleased with Boris, even though his deal is highly imperfect. It sounds odd to say this of someone seen by many as a scoundrel, but the Prime Minister has acquired some moral prestige in office by clearly maintaining his declared aim. Therefore one can more safely write a whole article about Brexit without mentioning Mr Farage. He’d better hurry up and settle for the peerage I mentioned here last week. Soon he may have no cards to play. Like everyone, I have predicted many things wrong in this saga, but I stick by this column’s claim that Boris is no good at any job except the top one.

Charles Powell, the longest-lasting of Mrs Thatcher’s private secretaries, makes the interesting point that my life of Margaret Thatcher will be ‘the last political biography to be written from such an abundance of records and documents, given the onset of the email age’.