For me, by far the most surprising revelation in Martin Durkin’s documentary Nigel Farage: Who Are You? (Channel 4, Monday) was just how astonishingly vast, unwieldy, authoritarian, interfering, undemocratic, sclerotic, and sinister the European Union actually is.
As a Eurosceptic, I suppose I ought to have known this already. But the secret of the European Union, as one of Durkin’s talking heads noted, is the way it uses boredom as a weapon. Even those of us predisposed towards thinking ill of the EU are unwilling to apprise ourselves of the full, tedious details because our brains would explode at the sheer, grinding dullness of it all.
So it was a good move of Durkin’s to insist on following Farage outside his comfort zone (pubs, TV appearances, pubs), under the Channel (he prefers to drive, even though it takes much longer) and into the belly of the Beast at the European Parliament (one of them) in Strasbourg.
This is when it all came home to me — and, I hope, to many other viewers too. Here was a stupendously vast glass monolith (the kind tyrants build to flaunt their power and reach), evidently built with absolutely no expense spared, housing many thousands of very well-paid apparatchiks swarming like ants down labyrinthine passageways, all of it at our expense, none of it to any useful purpose whatsoever.
There was a bit of comedy business as Farage and Durkin contrived to get thoroughly lost, before sneaking illicitly into the parliamentary chamber whence they were ejected for filming without permission. But the underlying point was well made and helped me to understand something about Farage I’d never properly appreciated before. He means it.
By which I don’t mean I ever doubted the sincerity of his political opinions.
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