Nigel Farage made his most recent exit from public life with the waving of a tiny plastic flag, which is all the man ever was.
He and his Brexit Party colleagues couldn’t quite make it to the end of the EU parliament’s debate on the EU withdrawal agreement, choosing instead to rise to their feet and oscillate three square inches of polyester Union Jack in front of their noses, knowing it would lead to what they and they alone will forever imagine to be their heroic defenestration.
The words Farage chose to mark the occasion are telling enough.
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“There is a battle going on, in the west and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism. And you may loathe populism, but I’ll tell you a funny thing, it’s becoming very popular,” he told them.
He spoke to the parliament scarcely more than an hour after it had sat in harrowed silence, listening to the life story of 89-year-old Auschwitz survivor, Liliana Segre.
The gathered members of the European parliament will have had to think very hard about whose words on the subject should most be heeded.
That, of course, is the measure of the man. Classless to the last. Compassionless to the core.
It was, in his way, generous to make so abundantly clear which side of history he and his gang are on.
“No more being bullied!” he told them. “No more being talked down to!”
Well, of course, in the rarefied moment of this little paroxysm that feels like it may be true. For upwards of an hour or two come Friday night, Farage and the like may feel like they have slain their imaginary foe. The question is whether it lasts. Having ranted about the EU’s “power that can’t be held to account”, these are promises that are worth holding onto.
If the success of Brexit is to be measured on whether Britain, in the future, finds itself being talked down to, not being taken seriously, well we now know that, on Farage’s own terms, it has been a failure.
His very final words were sadly lost to history. When he and his friends rose to their feet to wave their flags, his words stopped being transmitted over the loudspeakers.
“You break the rules, you get cut off,” the chair told him, an Irishwoman, as it happens, Mairead McGuinness. Too late, of course.
There is scarcely a rule that wasn’t broken, too late though it may be to change the result. It will be, in all likelihood, a very short few years before Farage and his ilk find themselves getting cut off for breaking the rules.
Which is to say, the power to reap a social media tornado of nonsense will soon come to a regulated end.
It is the only way democracies can survive, even if the UK will be saddled with the consequences of the wild west years for considerably longer than most.
They all took to their feet at the end, to join hands and sing “Auld Lang Syne”, as the parliament voted its approval for Britain to up and leave.
Britain, in this case, or more accurately the portion of Britain that actually wants to, didn’t notice. It was already in the bar, tweeting pictures of itself, in its Union Jack ties, waving its Union Jack flags, downing little glasses of Belgian lager.
Always the idiot, from beginning to end.
