The Reform leader has been in the US, bemoaning Britain’s ‘awful authoritarian situation’. It’s a shame about his party’s own anti-media huff back home
Pop quiz. Of whom did Donald Trump say admiringly: “I also learned that he loves his country very much”? And: “He wrote me beautiful letters. And they are great letters. We fell in love”?
If you answered “Nigel Farage”, then I’m sorry. The Reform UK leader might have spent this pre-party conference week in his happy place – lodged several feet up the US presidential colon – and rhetorically demanding of US lawmakers: “At what point did [the UK] become North Korea?” But those Trump compliments were in fact previously made about Kim Jong-un, the dictator of … well, you know the rest.
We always want what we can’t have, of course, which is why Trump this week had to settle for Farage grinning gormlessly next to his Oval Office desk like a competition winner, while Kim laughed it up with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a vast military parade in Beijing which featured, among other deranged martial curiosities, robot wolves. Good times. If you regard China as the US’s chief rival, then you can definitely see putative prime minister Nigel casting the UK as North Korea in the equivalent western pecking order. In a few short years, Farage might well be honking with laughter as the US’s robot coyotes slink past at Washington’s biannual Big Beautiful Ballistic Parade.
