If public life contains a very high-profile, very vulnerable fantasist with an inexhaustible appetite for money and publicity, what is the duty of care that we all owe them? It’s a question that seems to arise repeatedly in the so-called post-truth era. Of course, anybody’s lies and delusions are, to a substantial extent, their own responsibility. But these situations always exist in a context.
The wheels of Reform’s clown car are sailing serenely past the driver’s-side window
If such delusions are sustained by zealots who put ideological conformity above the truth, by an excitable and partisan media that prefers not to dig too deeply into something that sounds like a good story, and even by so august an institution as Cambridge University, disaster cannot be far away.
Elevated to a prominence for which they are manifestly unqualified. Encouraged in damaging fantasies. Placed in the sort of spotlight that means humiliating exposure and a psychologically devastating unravelling are all but inevitable. I speak, of course, of the Reform Party leadership.
Even as they speechify about what they’re planning to do in their first 100 days of government, the wheels of Reform’s clown car are sailing serenely past the driver’s-side window. Just in the last couple of days, thanks to Channel Four, they’ve lost two senior apparatchiks and look to be heading for yet another formal investigation into their imaginative approach to party funding. The party’s former policy chief James Orr and Nigel Farage’s so-called “right-hand-man” Dan Jukes both stand accused of trying to circumvent electoral law in order to accept a large donation from a foreign donor. They deny the claims, it seems only proper to say.
