Ukip is missing an amazing chance

There was a comedy programme about Nigel Farage on the BBC this week, entitled Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back. Purporting to be a Swiftian satire about how Ukip’s former leader would cope with life beyond the political fray, it was, as usual, a case of the corporation sneering at a man who has a decent claim to being the most successful British politician of the modern age and, by extension, sneering at the four million or so Ukip voters and indeed the 52 per cent of the population who voted Leave. In other words, a very large proportion of the BBC’s licence payers, whom the BBC resolutely despises.

All of this would have been fine, though, had the programme been even mildly amusing. But it wasn’t. It was predictable, lumpen drivel which managed to offend even the half-witted lefties of the Guardian. ‘The premise is obviously to recast Farage as a lovable buffoon, but why anybody would want to humanise the poster boy for one of the most heinous ideologies in living memory isn’t quite so clear,’ some shrill hag opined. A shrill hag who ought to check out a few more heinous ideologies before opening her idiotic trap, I would suggest.

The main point, though, is that Ukip, in its current state, doesn’t need anyone to satirise it. It can do that job all by itself. Presented with an open goal by Labour’s abdication from the task of representing anyone beyond Upper Street, London N1, and its own obvious success in the referendum, it has gleefully hoofed the ball clear of the stadium, with the net gaping, with the unbounded confidence of a village idiot. And it keeps doing so, over and over again.