What’s the point of Nigel Farage?

Nigel Farage is in some ways a victim of his own success. It was the political threat he posed during the coalition era that more than anything else caused David Cameron to pledge to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership if he won a majority. It is safe to say that without his persistence, we would never have left the European Union. Yet Farage is now politically redundant and what’s so strange about that is that he did it all to himself.

When Farage declared that the Brexit ‘war is over’ after the government announced its trade deal with the EU on Christmas Eve, my first thought was that he must have decided to pack the whole Reform party project in. That he had figured enough of what he had been fighting for all those years had come to fruition and he was laying down his arms against the Conservatives.