The Brex Factor: Hot air and hoovers in another lost week

‘Great to speak tonight at @UKIP Norfolk hustings,’ tweeted the favourite to become the Kippers’ next leader, after talking at an event last weekend. ‘This is a party with a strong beating heart.’

And who can doubt it when you see the attendance figure for the debate – a massive 80 people!

9 David Davis

The Brexit secretary broke off his duties as the Comical Ali of the EU negotiations – ‘it’s all going really well, honest!’ – to pen an article for The Sun attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s cycling break to Croatia.

Under the headline ‘Labour’s Dumber Holiday’, Davis ranted, ‘While Labour have taken the summer off, the government has been pushing on with delivering on the result of the referendum’.

Oddly, the piece did not find room to mention that while Corbyn spent a mere seven days in the saddle, Davis’ boss Theresa May went on her jollies for three long weeks.

8 Stoke ‘Kippers

Revenge is a dish best served cold in the Potteries, where a Hungarian immigrant has taken over the UKIP HQ used by Paul Nuttall in his gaffe-prone by-election campaign and turned it into an ice-cream parlour.

Of course, had UKIP opened their own ices shop it would only have served vanilla and toppings would have been banned, to prevent hundreds and thousands swarming in.

7 Philip Davies

The Tory MP for Shipley hit back at Owen Jones’ participation in a campaign to unseat him, calling the Guardian journalist a ‘metropolitan left-wing luvvie… coming up from London to a place he’s probably never been to before’.

Davies hails from Doncaster, which is 46 miles from Shipley. Out-of-touch elitist Jones, by contrast, is from Sheffield – a massive two miles further out.

6 Roger Helmer

His protests against an imaginary government crackdown on meat and cheese pizzas duly noted, the former UKIP MEP has a new target in his sights – an EU ban on inefficient high-wattage vacuum cleaners.

Scientists say that the best low-power appliances perform just as well as bigger versions, and that phasing the larger models out would save 20TWh of electricity per year by 2020 – equivalent to the annual household electricity consumption of Belgium.

But Helmer knows best and declared: ‘By all means let’s make pathetic under-powered vacuum cleaners for export to the EU. But we must retain the right to make and use sensible full-powered appliances in the UK.’

Does this signal a new lease of life for the noisy, outmoded, rubbish-filled sucker? And what about the vacuum cleaners?

5 Liam Fox

Admirers of the trade secretary – a select band which includes himself – have been hailing a daring move by his department which MP Daniel Kawczynski praised as ‘a great opportunity to park the tanks on the EU’s lawn’.

Has the fantastic Mr Fox managed to negotiate billion-dollar deals with member countries behind the back of Michel Barnier? Well, not quite. But he HAS signed a six-month agreement to put up a stand promoting UK trade at the Eurostar terminal in Brussels.

4 Young Independence

UKIP’s youth wing have cancelled a boat party planned to follow their upcoming conference after learning that left-wingers had hired their own craft for an aquatic protest. Young Independence claimed this would have put them at ‘serious risk’.

With wonderful irony, the protests only began because the young ‘Kippers wanted to welcome aboard Martin Sellner, co-leader of alt-right group The Identitarians. He was last seen among the shipmates on the C-Star boat, which tried but failed to disrupt migrant rescues in the Mediterranean, potentially putting innocent refugees at serious risk.

3 Britain’s EU negotiators

It’s been revealed that David Davis’ crack team often take minibuses from UKRep, our embassy in Brussels, to the Berlaymont, home of the European Commission HQ. The distance between the two is a daunting 300 metres, meaning it could be walked in around four minutes.

No surprise then that our negotiating tactics appear to be expending a lot of energy without getting very far.

2 Boris Johnson

Another week, another story of the foreign secretary’s legendary gift for tact and diplomacy. This one, courtesy of The Times diary, came during BoJo’s days as editor of The Spectator, when he was introduced to the Armenian ambassador at a lunch.

‘My great-grandfather worked for the last Ottoman Sultan,’ began Boris. ‘Did they have anything to do with Armenia?’

‘Yes,’ came the somewhat frosty reply. ‘They massacred thousands of my people.’

1 Nigel Farage

The nicotine-stained man-frog hailed the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy as ‘a happy piece of news’ which would make a change from ‘the whingeing of all these ghastly Remoaners’.

In case Wills and Kate can’t wait until March 2018 to hear a child screaming and wailing until it gets what it wants, the Nigel Farage show is on LBC every Sunday from 10am.