Farage’s energetic return is Rishi Sunak’s worst nightmare

After a third change of heart, Nigel Farage has now actually become the leader of the party of which he is technically also the owner. And he really is going to stand for election

Take the steep stone steps down under London Bridge and you’re faced with a choice. Left to the London Dungeon, right to the haunted London tombs, or straight on to the newest scare attraction: Rishi Sunak’s Worst Nightmare.

There, on stage in a grand old room beneath a giant crystal chandelier, the prime minister’s innermost fears are being made flesh on an almost daily basis.

There’s a great big Union Jack backdrop, there’s a throng of hyped-up journalists and a rear platform packed with TV cameras. And there, with metronomic certainty, popping out of the darkness like a clockwork Jack the Ripper, comes that famous short-toothed, dimpled, demonic grin. Heeeere’s Nigel!

Here indeed was Nigel. Bounding up to the same stage for the second time in three working days. Giving the same speech to the same excitable crowd, but this time he’d brought the punchline as well as the joke. This time he had remembered to load the warhead into the weapon of mass Conservative destruction.

At the second time of asking, after a third change of heart, he’s now actually become the leader of the party of which he is technically also the owner. And he really is going to stand for election.

They say a week’s a long time in politics. A week ago he definitely wasn’t standing. Then he changed his mind, booked out the Glaziers Hall to announce he was, then re-changed his mind and turned up anyway to give a weird boilerplate speech about not very much at all. Now he was back again, having re-re-changed his mind. This may be what’s known as double glaziering, but it certainly wasn’t designed to keep the noise in. The reverberations from this one will certainly have been heard two miles away in Downing Street.

Holly Valance and an expressionless was in the audience. Picture: Henry Nicholls

For a while, the prime minister might have been hoping his nightmare wasn’t real. You tend to know things are just a dream when they take a turn for the odd. Could this maybe just be a dream? There, sitting next to each other in the audience, were Holly Valance and Rod Stewart. On closer inspection, Rod Stewart was in fact not the actual Rod Stewart but a Rod lookalike, the Pimlico Plumbers founder Charlie Mullins, affectionately known to some as Dyno-Rod.

Dyno-Rod’s face remained expressionless throughout. One suspects his face remains expressionless throughout everything these days. An expressionless face must have its uses in the plumbing game. If Charlie Mullins ever accidentally fell into a septic tank one doubts he would be capable of looking even mildly disgruntled.

So why had Nigel changed his mind again? “Well,” he explained, he’d “had time for a bit of a think”.

“I walked the dog, I did a bit of fishing, I went to the pub.” All of Farage’s mythical stories involve trips to the pub, even though there is almost certainly not a single boozer anywhere in the country where the most divisive politician of the past 30 years could possibly wander in for a quiet pint. If there is, it’s certainly not anywhere he’d dream of sticking around for any longer than it takes to have his picture taken pouring a pint behind the bar.

Popping out of the darkness like a clockwork Jack the Ripper, comes that famous short-toothed, dimpled, demonic grin. Heeeere’s Nigel! Picture: Henry Nicholls/AFP

Everywhere he went, on this somewhat imaginary-sounding day, Nigel heard voices. “Why aren’t you standing?” they all said to him. Nigel let out a little sigh. “Difficult though it is,” he said, “I can’t let down those millions of people. So I have decided, I’ve changed my mind. So I am going to stand.”

You have to think the Glaziers Hall is probably double glazed itself, so any sound heard of a head thudding into a desk with ferocious force from two miles away was probably imagined. But this was a moment that will haunt Rishi Sunak for four more weeks and after that, one suspects, the rest of his life.

At high noon today (Tuesday), Farage will be in Clacton, where he will no doubt receive the hero’s welcome he has done every time he’s been there before, with each different iteration of his Ukip reboot parties. Ukip have won there, and not just in a by-election but at the general election in 2015. You’d be extremely brave to bet on them not doing so again.

For anyone who might have been worried that in four weeks’ time, politics was going to get very boring indeed, well, worry ye not. The chaos years are back up and running. Quite literally running, first in Clacton and then all the way to the House of Commons.

The Times