The Brex Factor: Man-frog Farage went a-courting in Brussels

‘I have been extremely naïve,’ said West Midlands MEP and failed UKIP leadership candidate Etheridge back in 2015, after he had repeated Enoch Powell’s warning that multiculturalism would lead to ‘rivers of blood’.

Happily Bill is a changed man and now acts as chairman of the Indigo Group, ‘a collective for like-minded individuals’ which ‘believes in promoting libertarian values in a world that is being increasingly shaped by the state’. On November 14 he launched their new policy initiative at the Burlington Hotel, Birmingham – exactly the same place in which Powell made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech nearly 50 years earlier!

9 JAMES DYSON

Proving his opinions suck even harder than his vacuums, the inventor’s mask slipped in a disastrous Andrew Marr interview, in which he praised Brexit for making it ‘easier to hire and fire’ staff and called for corporation tax to be ‘eliminated’.

Not quite the reasons many ordinary patriotic Britons would have given for voting to Leave, but then Dyson is no ordinary patriotic Briton. Between 2002-2003, he moved production of his cleaner and washing machines from the UK to Malaysia at a cost of 865 British jobs.

8 NICK TIMOTHY

‘The week before a Budget is always a fraught time inside government,’ began a piece by Theresa May’s Hard Brexiteer former chief of staff for the Sun. Helpfully, this turned out to be a 1,200-word discourse on the uselessness of chancellor Philip Hammond, who entirely coincidentally is a Hard Brexit sceptic.

Timothy urged Hammond to try ‘being bold’, bringing back memories of all the times the man Tory MPs called ‘Rasputin’ was bold in his former job. Timothy’s successes included creating the dementia tax, advising Theresa May to call an early election and masterminding a single-issue Hard Brexit campaign which lost the Tories 13 seats and an overall majority.

7 PRITI PATEL

The sacked international development secretary and big red bus liar left the Cabinet with all the dignity she brought to it in the first place. Not only did her ‘resignation’ letter carry a veiled threat to Theresa May (‘I will speak up for our country, our national interests and the great future that British has as a free, independent and sovereign nation’) but her supporters leaked that a vengeful Priti could do ‘hard damage’ to the government. Surely she’s already been there, done that?

6 DANIEL HANNAN

The perennially incorrect ‘Brain of Brexit’ told readers of his Telegraph column: ‘There is something almost demented about the way Continuity Remainers press any piece of news into their predetermined narrative of economic calamity. It’s no surprise that they are failing to move public opinion.’

Sadly for Desperate Dan, his accusation that Remainers are failing to move public opinion came just as the YouGov Brexit tracker put ‘wrong to leave’ in the lead for the third successive month. Leave has had a majority in only one of the last 14 opinion polls.

5 ANNE MARIE WATERS

Runner-up in both the 2017 UKIP leadership contest and the 2017 Richard ‘Hamster’ Hammond lookalike contest, Waters was secretly filmed by ITV espousing the conspiracy theory that the ‘EU agreed to turn Europe into an Arabian Islamic continent in return for trade’.

Waters also said she was sickened by ‘the idea that these f***ers can just come and take it all… stop all Muslim immigration now’, adding ‘we need to reduce their birth rates’. And she always seemed so nice!

4 DAVID DAVIS

‘I try and make decisions… based on the data,’ the Brexit secretary told Andrew Marr on June 17. ‘That data’s being gathered, we’ve got 50, nearly 60 sector analyses already done.’

And what happened when MPs ordered David to show them his workings, exactly five months on? ‘It is not the case that 58 sectoral impact assessments exist,’ Davis admitted, claiming it would take another three weeks to pull everything together. At which point, presumably, he’ll say that the dog ate half the assessments and he left the rest on the bus to Parliament.

3 JOHN REDWOOD

‘All they ever do is run the UK down,’ moaned the Vulcan about Labour in a Commons speech on November 6. Yet three days earlier, writing in his guise as chief global strategist for investment management group Charles Stanley, Redwood had told readers of the Financial Times it was ‘time to look further afield as the UK economy hits the brakes’.

The Hard Brexit headbanger even praised that monolithic EU institution the European Central Bank, saying ‘Mario Draghi, ECB president, is now doing whatever it takes, not just to rescue the euro but to promote a much-needed economic recovery.’ Fancy a subscription to TNE, John?

2 LEO McKINSTRY

There’s a basic rule of thumb for op-ed writers: If your piece can be read out in the voice of a Dalek, it’s time for a rewrite. Alas, former Labour councillor turned immigration-bashing Express columnist McKinstry continues to fly in the face of this wisdom.

‘The hour of freedom is fast approaching. We are just past the halfway point on our journey to independence,’ he wrote on November 13, twirling his plunger-arm and preparing his gun-stick. ‘The alliance of Remoaners and Eurocrats still refuses to accept this outcome… Intimidation, fearmongering and obstruction are their weapons, national surrender is their goal… it is the Remoaner-EU nexus which is the real menace.’ Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate the saboteurs!

1 NIGEL FARAGE

The nicotine-stained man-frog’s seduction techniques were revealed by his former mistress Annabelle Fuller, who told the Mail On Sunday that on their first night of passion Farage had slipped into bed ‘wearing a white T-shirt and white Y-fronts’ before whispering ‘that my arse had looked amazing in the moonlight’. Later he told her to say nothing of their affair ‘to save Brexit’.

Fuller also detailed a spring 2016 encounter with Farage in an MEP’s office in Brussels: ‘He was lying on the sofa, we were talking and he said he was horny. He asked me to give him a hand massage, which was always followed by me performing a sex act on him.’

Yet another example of Nigel heading to the EU Parliament and watching others do all the work…