The Brex Factor: Boris is ticked off and hounded by controversy

Fresh from declaring that he could strange a badger with his bare hands, UKIP’s new leader has admitted that since the party is skint and his position is unpaid, he’ll probably have to sell his home to get by.

No worries, Henry – we’re sure Paul Nuttall will let you move into the luxurious Stoke flat he’s owned for so many years!

9 Leave.EU The lazy liars of the unofficial Leave campaign claimed in a tweet that while the Lord’s Prayer has just 66 words and the 10 Commandments 179 words, the official EU regulations on the sale of cabbages are 26,911 words long. A second’s Googling revealed this was completely untrue – a version of the list has been around since the 1950s and originally referred to French government rules about duck eggs. Many on Twitter pointed this out but, curiously, Arron Banks and co seem attached to this blatant falsehood and have yet to remove it.

8 David Davis The Brexit secretary told German newspaper Die Welt that he had ‘never killed anyone’ during his days in the Territorial SAS – a rather bizarre humblebrag since it’s not clear how much killing was actually on the territorials’ radar in DD’s era, when a far larger full-time armed forces meant their role was less significant than in recent years. That’s not to deride Davis’ service, however, or that he remains every bit as much a threat to mere mortals as Henry Bolton is to the badger community.

After comedian Simon Brodkin interrupted Theresa may’s conference speech, Davis is reported to have told friends, ‘He’s lucky I didn’t hit him, he’d have been down for a long time.’

The implicit menace here is only slightly dented by the fact that David was sitting just feet away at the time and failed to do anything at all.

7 News-Watch A Daily Telegraph story claiming ‘the BBC invited a third more pro-EU speakers than anti-EU speakers to appear during the election campaign’ was sourced to research ‘carried out by media analysts News-Watch’.

No doubt many readers concluded that this was the work of Newswatch, the respected Points of View-style show hosted by Samira Ahmed, on which members of the public criticise the work of BBC News. It was not.

Instead, the report was the work of ‘an independent organisation providing much needed scrutiny of the politically skewed BBC’ which just happens to have almost the same name as the show. A clue to how much the imposter’s claims can be trusted can be found on a website appealing for donations to keep it running, which tells those wanting to pay by cheque to ‘enclose a note stating that the donation is for News-Watch, make the cheque payable to Leave.EU and send to the following address: Leave.EU, Lysander House, Catbrain Lane, Bristol, BS10 7TQ’.

6 Paul Dacre After his hysterical Daily Mail revealed with evident disgust that chancellor Philip Hammond had been spotted having a meal with hardcore Remainer George Osborne, in a front-page piece studded with words like ‘plotting’, ‘conspired’ and ‘fishy’, what happened when Osborne was seen drinking and chatting with another high-ranking minister a couple of days later?

Did fearless Dacre give the Cabinet bigwig both barrels for consorting with the enemy and accused him of being a traitor to Brexit? No, he did not. Because this time the politician in question was Michael Gove, husband of Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine.

5 David Kurten The failed UKIP leadership candidate is in a sulk after claiming he has been stitched up by surprise winner Henry Bolton. ‘During the campaign he stated on a number of occasions that he would appoint me deputy leader of the party if he won,’ moaned ‘Curtains’. ‘It is of course disappointing that he has changed his mind.’

No clue as to why the big-boned London Assembly member was deemed surplus to requirements, but while Bolton is determined to return the ‘Kippers to the mainstream of politics, Kurten is obsessed with tilting at windmills, including, as he wrote this week, ‘the drive from the Conservative party… to push genderqueer ideology on the youngest of children in primary schools’.

That ‘drive’ is entirely imaginary but then, as Kurten wrote of political correctness in the same article, ‘Britain is such an unbelievably great and big-minded country that even people who espouse the most outlandish idiocy are free to share their ideas’. How very true!

4 Jacob Rees-Mogg The Victorian undertaker is at war with the business lobbyists at the Confederation of British Industry, calling them ‘the EU-funded CBI’ during a predictably smug appearance on LBC, refusing to retract the phrase even when a caller pointed out that only 0.6% of their total annual revenue – less than £150,000 – comes from Brussels.

Last month it was revealed that despite his opposition to abortion, Rees-Mogg companies owned shares in an Indonesian firm whose ulcer treatments are widely used in illegal terminations. Therefore, by his own logic, he should be referred to from now on as ‘the abortion pill-funded Jacob Rees-Mogg’.

3 Nigel Farage Authentic, no-frills man of the people Farage appeared on Good Morning Britain with heavily dyed chestnut hair, making him no longer resemble a nicotine-stained man-frog but instead a nicotine-stained man-frog wearing Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s old wig.

There is no suggestion this bold new look has anything to do with Nigel sharing a home with a woman 16 years his junior, but we fully expect the Human Freddo Bar to mark his 32nd appearance on Question Time by riding his new Harley-Davidson onto the stage before peeling off his leathers to reveal ‘Mr Brexit’ tattooed across his chest in gangsta script.

2 Bigots of Barnsley This week’s Bad Timing award goes to theatre director Toby Ealden, who brings his Brexit play What Once Was Ours to Barnsley next month, having developed it there last year by meeting local people. Toby told the local paper he was sick of seeing ‘so many of the towns we tour to portrayed in the media as somehow less intelligent, racist and small-minded. This portrayal didn’t do these communities justice’.

Alas, Toby’s staunch defence was published on the same day Channel 4 News visited the town and found one local woman claiming of immigrants ‘99% of them go to prison’, another saying ‘there are too many here anyway, but I’m a bit ‘like that” and a third demanding foreigners should be sent back to their own countries ‘but not in a bad way’.

1 Boris Johnson The foreign secretary is so bad at his job, claimed the Mail On Sunday, that senior EU figures reportedly call his deputy Alan Duncan ‘Monsieur Le Poop Scoop’, as he has to clean up his master’s little accidents.

One typically inept blunder came when Boris told the Times’ Rachel Sylvester that the post-Brexit UK economy would look like a ‘Nike tick’. As trainer wearers know, that means it will go down – actually backwards at one point – before taking a long, long time to get back to exactly where it started.