Nigel Farage, the Macavity of Brexit

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw –
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime – Macavity’s not there!

TS Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, 1939

Replace the name “Macavity” with “Nigel Farage and you will get a pretty good idea of debate on Monday’s EU/UK Brexit reset deal – both in and out of the Commons. Apart from a few cross tweets about betrayal, Farage has been conspicuous by his absence when he might have been laying into Keir Starmer in the chamber, raging to the faithful on his GB News show or visiting the poor fishermen and women who he says will go out on business because of the deal.

Instead, he is trotters-up on holiday in France. He’s missed a huge moment in British politics. Why?

Farage’s take is that he is so tired after campaigning in the local elections that he has had to take a foreign holiday immediately – it seems he couldn’t even wait for the Commons to go into Whitsun recess from May 22-June 2. He does not feel sufficiently rested by all those all-expenses-paid trips to Trump’s America, travelling by private jet.

So he’s on a relaxing break in France, where his girlfriend Laure Ferrari comes from (she was working as a waitress in Strasbourg when they met). Hopefully, they are somewhere nice and Farage is tucking into some bouillabaisse or soupe de poisson in order to show solidarity with the fishing industry.

Doesn’t it seem extraordinary, though, that he’s not in the UK right now? He would have been on every news show, all over social media, starting the day on Radio 4’s Today and ending it on BBC Two’s Newsnight. It was his time to shine. He could have been screaming about surrender, calling the PM a gimp like Boris Johnson did, denouncing our vassal status, our enslavement by Brussels and our becoming a “rule taker”.

But then like Macavity, Nigel never wants to be seen at the scene of the crime. He knows Brexit has failed and he doesn’t want to be associated with it any more – not when there is mileage in ranting about small boats instead. So like Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he bravely ran away.

Farage missed another crime – the swift skewering of his Brexit fellow travellers in the Commons by Sir Keir Starmer.

Tuesday’s debate on the deal was, to be fair, not a difficult day for the PM. When the hapless and doomed leader of the opposition attacks you for abandoning the fishing industry by merely extending exactly the same deal her party had negotiated, it is never going to be a difficult day in the office.

When your new policy may mean the bulldozing of a post-Brexit border post that cost £25 million because you have slashed red tape and pointless controls, you have little to fear from a party that used to pride itself on slashing red tape and pointless controls.

“Selling out our sovereignty” by removing the farcical, prohibitively expensive and totally unnecessary checks on pets before they can cross the channel, is likely to be quite popular in a country of dog owners, with second homes on the continent – even Kemi Badenoch knows that.

And that was before we heard from the ultras on the back benches, some of whom have happily been forgotten since their leading roles in the Brexit wars. Mark Francois spluttered away and was batted aside with the simple prime ministerial line “I’d forgotten some of the nonsense he spouted”. Sir Bernard Jenkin claimed that the UK had been dragged back screaming into the EU despite the fact, “that 17 and a half million people voted Leave”. But Britain is not back in the EU – a fact that many of us deeply regret. Starmer brushed him off by reminding him of this.

It might have been very different had Farage been in the chamber asking the questions instead of his smarmy and ineffective deputy Richard Tice. But Farage has already decided that he will not die with the likes of Francois and Jenkin in this particular ditch. The venom of Brexit is being slowly sucked from the UK body politic, and its most poisonous cheerleaders can feel it happening.

Farage obviously no longer wants to be the face of Brexit, and who can blame him? Who would want to be a front man for the queues, the red tape, the economic misery, the failure to cut net migration? He knows – unlike zealots like Francois and Jenkin – that “it was all worth it for the sovereignty” is not a vote-winner.

Brexit is over, it was an embarrassment best forgotten and slowly unwound. It is not a battle for Nigel to fight anymore, he is now above such things- he believes he is a PM in waiting with gravitas to maintain. His lackeys and useful idiots can go through the motions instead.

Francois, Jenkin and the tattered ranks of the Brexit ultra must have looked around the Commons waiting for their hero to raise his standard. But they have not found out that when it comes to Brexit, “Macavity’s not there”.