The attack happened while Farage was in Newcastle Upon Tyne, as part of a whistlestop tour which is taking him to all corners of England for his final campaign push before Thursday’s European election.
Farage was unharmed, though his suit most definitely wasn’t. You can well understand why he was so very peeved – not least at the failure of his tight security to prevent what could have been an assault by something far worse than milkshake.
1. Lucy Noble, artistic director of the Royal Albert Hall, thinks ‘white male titans’ such as Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are putting the young off classical music. Is she:
a) Quite right! My kids would be gagging to go to the Royal Albert Hall if only its programmes included more black female/transgender composers they’d never heard of.
b) Strangling yet another great institution. Audiences are drawn by artistic excellence, not diversity box-ticking.
2. Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service says: ‘There is a historical need to diversify our workforce. The number of women operational staff has been under 5 per cent and black and ethnic minority people are under-represented in all parts of the service. The proportion of staff who identify as gay is also negligible.’ Is your response:
a) Any organisation that serves the community must represent that community on proportionate gender/race/sexuality lines.
b) I don’t care who drags me out of a burning building so long as he’s strong, fit and brave.
If your answers are both As, many congrats! You are fully culture-compliant.
If your answers are both Bs — basically you’re stuffed. But it might help you to understand what’s going on if you read Ben Cobley’s The Tribe.
“Boris Johnson’s a friend of mine. He’s been very, very nice to me, very supportive. And I maybe well speak to him when I get over there. I like Boris Johnson, I’ve always liked him.”
This is what diplomats would call a “gaffe.” May, after all, is the leader of the nation to which Trump will shortly be making his first official visit. Johnson, meanwhile, is May’s new public enemy number one. Having just resigned as her Foreign Secretary (in protest at her watered down Brexit plans), he no longer has any status within her government. Yet here is President Trump, publicly proposing to humiliate her by promising face time to a nobody she considers persona non grata.
Sure, Trump found time for some kind words about May too.
“I get along with her very well, I have very good relationship.”
But that’s just polite formula. It’s the Johnson comments that will be noticed – as of course, Trump intended them to be.
Brexit is dead – strangled at the weekend by Prime Minister Theresa May and her cabal of Remainer cronies.
It was a brilliant coup, masterfully conducted with a sadist’s attention to detail.
All the ministers in the Cabinet were hauled up to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence, where their phones were confiscated, as though they were naughty children. Then the stubbornly pro-Brexit ones who were rightly disgusted by the shaming sell-out deal May had cobbled together with her virulently Remainer civil servants were given the same choice Rommel was in 1944: cyanide pill or slow career death.
The cyanide pill option would have involved resigning immediately on principle: but then being ritually humiliated by having their official car confiscated and having to walk to the train station via the mile-long drive, or catch a cab, with a £67,000 pay cut.
A letter to each minister, leaked to the press, warned them of this beforehand. Petty, but given how vain ministers are, very effective.
