Back to the future. Some of us can remember the days when the key to surviving a nuclear war was to kneel down under the kitchen table and keep your eyes closed till you were incinerated or died of radiation poisoning. Now the government wants you to hoard some baked beans and a few litres of water in the hope of getting through the next three days.
But when the apocalypse does come, you can bank on there being one survivor. The politician with seemingly limitless powers of regeneration. As one party of his dies, so another rises from the ashes. Fuelled not by water and tinned food, but by alcohol and grievance. Somehow, Nigel Farage is always the victim in his own story. The man who is forever misunderstood.
Nige must be the unluckiest politician alive. The man who has only ever wanted the best for everybody – deporting immigrants is clearly in their own best interests, even if it involves death or torture – keeps getting mired in scandal. There’s the money. Of course there is. Plenty of it from – how shall we put this? – unorthodox sources. But there’s also the racism. Why is it that so many who are close to Farage and his organisation turn out to be bigots? How can his message of love and peace to all men be so tainted? It’s happened so often now that you could forgive Nige for being a little grumpy.
Last week one of his closest friends was at it again. Raheem Kassam, touted as Reform’s next chief of staff, called Kemi Badenoch a “Nigerian scammer”. You and I know exactly what he meant. The leader of the opposition was like a West African phonejacker who rang you up and tried to scam your bank accounts. It was a fairly obvious racist slur. One designed to denigrate.
Only it wasn’t quite so obviously racist to Reform MPs themselves. Robert Jenrick called it a bit of forensic journalism. At least that’s what he implied by describing Kassam as a journalist. Danny Kruger was even more confused. There again, he often is. He’s meant to be the intellectual and moral compass of Reform, but just appears dim-witted and spinning helplessly in space. He thought “Nigerian scammer” couldn’t be racist because he couldn’t conceive of any of Nigel’s friends being racist. Try a little harder, Danny.
It was third time unlucky – that word again – as Nige took on his first proper morning media round in months. It didn’t end well for him. Car-crash TV. On BBC Breakfast, the presenter Sally Nugent quickly cut to the chase and it soon became clear that Nige doesn’t take it well when an intelligent woman asks him tricky questions. He likes to think of himself very much as a man’s man. Somehow being interviewed by a woman is a sign of disrespect. Or maybe he’s still tetchy about having given a press conference to a near-empty hall the day before.
First Nige tried to claim Kassam had not been a former chief of staff – he had in one of Farage’s previous lives – and was on the point of saying he wasn’t even a friend. But then he had a brainwave. “He’s Indian,” he said. “He’s of Indian heritage.” As if that somehow precluded all Indians – all black and brown people, for that matter – from being racist. A suggestion, dare one say it, that is racist in itself. Nige clearly believes in a hierarchy of racism. If he believes in racism at all. Maybe we’re just all stuck in a doom loop of cultural relativism. We just need to chill out a bit.
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Next Farage tried to play the word dissociation game. Just because Kassam had used the words “Nigerian scammer” in conjunction with one another, it didn’t necessarily mean the words were in any way connected to form a single image. All he had done was to state two truths. Kemi was of Nigerian descent, though for the purposes of this conversation he was prepared to concede that she might also be part British. And she was a scammer, because she had said things that were demonstrably untrue. Much the same could be said of Nige, mind. Maybe in his own mind he also longs to be outed as a scammer.
Back in the BBC studio, Nugent wasn’t having any of this and kept at him. Did he think it was racist? “No, I don’t,” said Nige. Perhaps a bit over the top, but definitely not intentionally racist. Farage had spoken, Schrödinger’s racism. Something could be racist and not racist at the same time. In any case, he couldn’t be held responsible for any of the social media posts his friends and supporters made. It was his curse that so many in Reform expressed themselves in racist language. He had no idea why he had become the last refuge for so many bigots.
Things took on a more surreal turn later that morning when Kassam emailed a Guardian journalist to give an update on the situation. In it, he said that Nige had given him a ticking off for a tweet that was neither “clever nor funny”. Just a shame Farage couldn’t have used his position as the leader of Reform to make that same point on the BBC hours earlier. Kassam went on to say that, in hindsight, his tweet could have been better phrased and timed. He also claimed Kemi was a con artist for turning the Tories into a version of the Lib Dems. That will come as news to both the Tories and the Lib Dems. The Tories have been shadowing Reform to the right for the last two years.
The real sorry-not-sorry moment came when Kassam suggested he had spent too much time in the US recently. Over there, out-and-out racism was an acceptable rite of political discourse. People could say what they want. The trouble is that we Brits had lost our sense of humour. It was now a thought crime even to make a racist joke. Time we all lightened up. What was needed was more politicians who called Kemi a “Nigerian scammer” not fewer.
This isn’t quite the end of it. Because Kassam’s new found contrition may not be all it seems. On Tuesday morning he was again posting about “Kemi Scammenoch” on X. A post that has been subsequently deleted. As has his pinned “Nigerian scammer” tweet. If this is remorse, it’s still in its early days. Maybe one should treat Kassam and Farage as one and the same. When they show you what they are, believe them.
