Nigel Farage has left the jungle. For a brief moment it looked as if the original Brexiteer might pull off yet another electoral upset. Instead, he finished a creditable third on I’m a Celebrity… one of the biggest popularity contests on TV.
Throughout the series, left-leaning commentators have accused ITV of deliberately ‘fun-washing’ (a depressingly 2023 phrase) Farage’s reputation. The comedian Stewart Lee wrote an especially humourless piece for the Guardian, which included a passage implying that because of Farage’s appearance in the jungle, Ant and Dec were somehow sympathisers of the Norwegian white supremacist Anders Breivik (yes, really). I have little doubt that alongside an army of GB News viewers and hardcore Brexit supporters, there will also have been those who voted for Farage simply to enjoy the crescendo of hysteria from left-wing social media every time he survived a vote-off.
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