Nigel Farage's Mirthless Punchline: GB News expects hours of programming from a man with one cheap act...
The Aristotwat's grotesque vaudeville act is dangerous and Andrew Neil & co know that but simply do not care.
The Aristocrats is one of the world’s longest and most legendary jokes. And it’s never funny. The set-up is a family vaudeville act presenting themselves before a talent agent and describing what they do on stage in the most grotesque and baroquely barf-induing manner. The challenge for the comedian is to invent the most unpleasant set of stage antics possible.
And then comes the punchline: “What do you call yourselves?”, asks the agent. “The Aristocrats,” the family reply.
Nigel Farage is ‘The Aristocrats’ of British politics and public discourse. While the grotesquery of his set-ups changes — from UKIP to the Brexit Party to LBC to acting as the hype man at Trump rallies to his new GB News show — the punchline stays the same: He is a race-baiting, immigrant-hating, populism-harnessing, conspiracy-theory propagating danger whose only true loyalty is to his own ego and to the grift.
When he trailed yesterday that he was set to make an “announcement about a big career change” at 5 pm, the news was as predictable as the vaudevillians announcing themselves as The Aristocrats. It was obvious to everyone that Farage was headed for GB News, where he will be presenting an hour-long show four times a week.
He talked exclusively to The Sunday Express about his plan to bring the ‘racist at the end of the flat-roof pub bar’ experience to literally handfuls of viewers:
My previous incarnations of shaking the country up — UKIP, Brexit Party. I am about being a disruptor. I am about seeing models that are broken and out of date and out of touch. I see as big a gap in the market for this as I saw for UKIP in 2010…
Farage is right, he is a ‘disruptor’ but only in the same way a laxative ‘disrupts’ your digestive system: His every utterance increases the amount of shit in the world. He goes on:
In 2010, I thought ‘Wow, we have got Cameron, we have got Clegg, we have got Miliband. I can’t put a cigarette paper between them on anything. There’s a massive opportunity here for UKIP.
I now see broadcasters all pushing the same kind of agenda, doing pretty much the same as they have done for decades. People are bored with it, they have had enough of it, they keep turning it off. They turn it back on like a drug. Then they can’t bear it and turn it back off again.
I think there’s a huge opportunity here to reshape broadcasting. I think there is a huge opportunity to reverse the Londonisation, metropolitanisation of our entire political argument where everything is looked at through that lens.
And who is more of a non-London, non-metropolitan, man-of-the-people than Dulwich College-educated, former commodities trader, and political and media insider for decades, Nigel Farage?
Like Boris Johnson, Farage lies with such ease that it’s like breathing — actually given his penchant for cigarettes and booze, it’s probably easier than breathing — and he continues that tendency in the Sunday Express piece. He claims, unchecked by the Express, that:
ITV Evening News in 1990 had 12 million people, it now never gets 1 million. That’s one stat that is absolutely stark and shows you want the change is.
It’s starkly bullshit. Farage is conflating the ITV Evening News and ITV News At Ten and even then the latter often breaks the 1 million viewer mark. In a week in late June when GB News could only haul in a maximum of 32,000 viewers — the figures have dropped further since — BBC News at Ten had 3.6 million viewers while ITV News at Ten had 1.5 million.
Comparing figures from 1990 — the year Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser — with the TV watching trends of 2021 is as bad faith as it’s possible to get. And GB News trying to get into a fight about viewing figures is like a bloke in a disintegrating Sierra trying to beat Lewis Hamilton at the lights.
That Farage is presenting a dubious bill of goods is in keeping with his tactics stretching back to the start of his political career. In 2000, as head of UKIP’s South-East office, he sold copies of a documentary made about his successful campaign in the 1999 European elections. It wasn’t broadcast so he requested a copy on video, had friends dub off copies, and sold them for £5 through the party’s in-house magazine.
The production company behind the documentary were livid and after Surrey Trading Standards were called in, Farage admitted the wrongdoing. He later told The Daily Telegraph that he believed the “Trading Standards official who investigated the complaint did so in an underhand way".
On Election Night 2020 in the US, Andrew Neil — now effectively Farage’s boss at GB News — interviewed him about Trump’s claims of ‘voter fraud’:
Neil: So, what is the evidence of voter fraud?
Farage: Oh the evidence of voter fraud with postal voting, of course, is there for all to see, we know ourselves it from our side of the pond…
Neil: But where is the evidence from the United States of fraud of postal votes?
Farage: Because it’s so new, it hasn’t come to light yet…/
Neil: … so there is no fraud?
Farage: No, there’s no evidence of fraud at this stage, but we know from countries…/
Neil: But the president has claimed that it’s a fraud on the American public so if there is no fraud, why is he claiming there’s a fraud?
Farage: We know from our own experience, our own miserable experience of over 20 years of massively extending postal voting that not only is there fraud, there’s intimidation too…
Neil responded to people tweeting him that clip by saying:
This was on US election night. I asked Nigel Farage for evidence of voter fraud. He couldn’t provide any. Nine months later — there still isn’t any.
And yet Neil, who made big claims in the pre-launch publicity for GB News about its institutional disdain for “fake news”, is happy to hire Farage to front a programme four times a week that will lead into his own show when he returns from his current wine-based detox in France.
But that shouldn’t really come as a surprise if you look back at Andrew Neil’s record. On July 7, 1992, AP reported:
Revisionist historian David Irving’s key role in getting Joseph Goebbel’s diaries published has sparked protests by Jews and provoked debate over the accuracy of translations by a man who claims there was no Holocaust.
The Sunday Times, which paid Irving for transcribing previously unpublished extracts from the diaries as well as a ″finder’s fee″ for delivering them to the paper, has been attacked for dealing with the controversial historian.
The state archives in Moscow, where the diaries were discovered, has also become embroiled in the controversy because of its dealings with Irving. The cash-strapped archives, which allowed him to work free, now says it should be paid.
Sunday Times Editor Andrew Neil said the controversy over Irving has obscured the potential impact of the previously unpublished segments of the diaries, which Oxford historian Norman Stone says fill ″the largest outstanding gap in the documentation of the Third Reich.″
Since the rival Independent newspaper revealed details of the publishing deal last week, Irving’s house has been picketed by Jewish groups and the Anti-Nazi League. The protesters say Irving’s views make him unsuitable to translate the diaries of Hitler’s propaganda chief…
Irving, who has written many books about World War II and is preparing a biography of Goebbels, denied accusations that he was an ″apologist for Hitler,″ but stood by his contention that there was no Holocaust. In an article he wrote in Tuesday’s Guardian, he predicted that ″one year from now the Holocaust will be discredited.″
Sunday Times Editor Andrew Neil said it would have been more convenient if a non-controversial historian had offered the newspaper new extracts from the diaries, but Irving came up with ″a world scoop″ and he wasn’t about to turn it down.
Neil said Irving was one of the few people who could decipher Goebbels’ spidery handwriting and shorthand. Irving said it had taken him two years to learn how to read it…
Neil said The Sunday Times has done extensive checks against already published sections of Goebbels diaries and is convinced the new extracts are not fakes. In 1983, the newspaper bought purported Hitler diaries, which turned out to be forgeries.
″It’s not a mistake The Sunday Times could afford to make twice,″ Neil said.
26 years later, Owen Jones raised the incident in a Guardian column, writing:
As editor of the Sunday Times in 1992, he hired Britain’s foremost Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist David Irving, to work on the Goebbels diaries. To hire a sympathiser of Hitler and denier of the worst atrocity in history to do respectable work for a national newspaper – to offer a reputational lifeline to a man who should have been treated as a pariah – was a disgrace for which he has never apologised. As the Wiener Library, the oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, said at the time: “David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.”
Neil responded in Lady Bracknell high dudgeon, spluttering about ‘fake news’ and focused on the question of whether Irving had been paid rather than whether he was asked to undertake the work.
He also ignored another point in Jones’ piece, about the coverage of AIDS by The Sunday Times under Neil’s editorship. Jones wrote:
When he was Sunday Times editor, his newspaper ran a series of articles arguing that HIV did not cause AIDS.
In 1990, The Sunday Times serialised a book that claimed AIDS could not spread to heterosexuals. That publication was supported by a series of articles, comment pieces and editorials from the paper that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS and called HIV “a politically correct virus” supported by a “conspiracy of silence”.
It suggested that AIDS was not spreading in Africa, that HIV tests weren’t valid, called the World Health Organization an “Empire-building AIDS [organisation]” and claimed that the HIV/AIDS treatment azidothymidine was actually harmful.
When the scientific journal, Nature, which had been monitoring the dangerous pseudoscience being peddled by The Sunday Times, published letters rebutting the paper’s claims, it hit back. Under the headline ‘AIDS — why we won’t be silenced’ the paper accused Nature of having “sinister intent” and censorship.
In his 1996 biography, Full Disclosure, which covered his time at the paper, Neil claimed the denialism “deserved publication to encourage debate”. He also wrote an article for The Sunday Times in that same year under the headline The great Aids myth is finally laid to rest which read in part:
The Sunday Times was one of a handful of newspapers, perhaps the most prominent, which argued that heterosexual Aids was a myth. The figures are now in and this newspaper stands totally vindicated...
The history of AIDS is one of the great scandals of our time. I do not blame doctors and the AIDS lobby for warning that everybody might be at risk in the early days, when ignorance was rife and reliable evidence scant.
Neil went on to attack what he called “the AIDS establishment” and claimed, “AIDS had become an industry, a job-creation scheme for the caring classes.”
The notion that Brillo is a brilliant independent interviewer because he, on occasion, verbally beat up the odd right-winger — including Farage — is a marketing claim. Throughout his 25 year-stint at the BBC he was intimately involved in the business dealings of the Barclay Brothers and chairman of The Spectator, stepping over the imaginary BBC impartiality line time and time again.
This is the Andrew Neil who will step back onto a set at GB News — eventually, I assume — to do chummy handovers with Farage. That’s Nigel Farage formerly of not just Fox News — the channel Neil assured us GB News was not founded to emulate — but Alex Jones’ Infowars too.
In 2019, Farage defended his appearances on Infowars:
Since 2008, I’ve done a huge amount of global media. I’ve done national television in China. I’ve done stuff from all over the world. As far as the Infowars site’s concerned, I’ve done it very infrequently, perhaps once every couple of years I’ve appeared on those programmes. Because you appear on programmes doesn’t mean you support the editorial line, necessarily, of those podcasts, broadcasts, newspapers or whatever they may be.
In the interview above, Farage talks about “globalists… [who] hate Christianity” and want to replace the nation-state with “the new world order”.
The comments from 2010, resurfaced by The Guardian in 2019, were condemned by both the Board of Deputies of British Jews…
It is vital that our politicians distance themselves from conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, including those who trade in antisemitic tropes… We would call on Nigel Farage to repudiate these ideas and to commit not to dignify oddball nasties like Alex Jones with his presence again.
… and the Muslim Council of Britain, which said Farage’s links to Jones and Infowars demonstrated:
… a serious lack of judgement by Mr Farage and a willingness to tolerate Islamophobia.
The mistake both those groups made is to accept Farage as a serious person who argues in good faith for things he believes in rather than a man who is always searching for the next grift and who is one of those “oddball nasties”, however expensive his suits and education may be.
In 2014, the academic Alan Sked — who founded UKIP — claimed in The Guardian that Farage had made blatantly racist comments to him back in 1997 while arguing about who should be allowed to stand for the party:
He wanted ex-National Front candidates to run and I said, “I’m not sure about that,” and he said, “There’s no need to worry about the n——r vote. The n—n—gs will never vote for us.”
Farage denied and continues to deny that he ever said the words. He is, however, on record saying he would be “uncomfortable” if Romanians moved in next door to him. Asked about the difference between Romanians and Germans — at the time he was married to a German woman and has bilingual children — Farage replied: “You know what the difference is.” Dogs across Britain started barking in unison.
In 2019, taking another leaf out of the Infowars big book of batshit, Farage called George Soros “the biggest danger to the entire western world” and claimed that Soros seeks to “undermine democracy and to fundamentally change the makeup, demographically, of the whole European continent.” This time dogs across Europe started barking in scenes not witnessed since Disney filmed the extremely accurate documentary 101 Dalmatians.
His words were widely criticised, including by the Jewish Security Trust, which said in a statement:
Nigel Farage should ensure his language does not help antisemitic conspiracy theories to spread in British politics.
Again, this fundamentally misses the point and lets Farage off the hook. The division, distrust, doubt and conspiratorial thinking isn’t a mistake or a bug in the system, it’s a feature of the Farage strategy. He doesn’t just keep bumbling Mr Bean-style into racist talking points — he’s doing it on purpose. It’s maddening to have to spell that out but here we are.
Recently, Farage has spent much of his time lurking around on the coast of Kent trying to catch refugees, the self-appointed Misery Finder General. Now he will no longer have to rely on his own shoddily-made and produced mobile phone clips. He’ll have a shoddily-made and produced GB News show instead.
The timing of Farage’s announcement, just a day after news broke that GB News’ director of programming, John McAndrew, quit in a wider exodus of executives, is no coincidence. It’s clear that McAndrew’s resignation was inspired not only by the suspension of Guto Harri after taking the knee but an awareness of the coming Farage fuckstorm.
As I noted yesterday, McAndrew — who spent 14 years at Sky News along with stints at ITN — described his vision for GB News in an interview with Press Gazette before the channel went live:
My view of our channel, and certainly how it’s going to be, is that it will be a very warm, inclusive channel where disagreements will be had, tough subjects will absolutely be taken on, but they’ll be taken on in a classy and courteous fashion. What this won’t be is a hate-filled divisive shout-fest that some people seem to have characterised it as, which is 180 degrees away from where we want to be.
A broadcaster that hires Nigel Farage is not remotely interested in being “classy and courteous” nor of avoiding “hate-filled divisive shout-fests”. Bringing on Farage to enhance your channel’s classiness is like asking Fred West to do your patio or Gary Glitter to sing at a children’s birthday party. Farage’s entire reason for being is to stoke division and to personally and politically profit from it.
Remember, Farage was the man who claimed, a week after Jo Cox was shot and killed in the street by a far-right terrorist, that Brexit had been won:
… without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired…
There is not remotely enough space in this newsletter to list every racist remark, every sexist jibe, every antisemitic allusion, every lie and distortion uttered by Nigel Farage in his decades-long vaudevillian vamp through British public life. But GB News knows what he is and it has made him its new figurehead.
The joke was never funny.