Nigel Farage has redoubled his efforts to become irritant-in-chief to British ministers in the wake of Donald Trump’s election by suggesting their earlier criticisms of the president-elect could have meant he delayed speaking to Theresa May.
A day after joking in a radio interview about the idea of Trump sexually assaulting May, Farage said disparaging words from Boris Johnson during the election campaign could have played a part in the delay.
Trump and May spoke by phone on Thursday afternoon, but not before the winner of the US presidential election had talked to 10 other world leaders.
Asked whether this was a worry for the UK, Farage told the Press Association: “Well, you have to face the facts that there are some very senior members of this administration who have said some very rude things about him.”
Pressed if the delayed call was connected to this, Farage said: “You’d have to draw your own conclusions on that. But this president is instinctively Anglophile.”
Farage criticised the earlier attacks on Trump by the foreign secretary, PA said. When he was still mayor of London, Johnson had condemned Trump for saying parts of the city were “no-go areas” for police, calling him “clearly out of his mind”.
Farage is currently in Florida on a private visit. While some reports have said he hopes to see Trump, for whom he was a warm-up speaker at one campaign event, Farage said he has no plans for the two to meet.
Speaking to to TalkRadio from Spain on Thursday before flying to the US, Farage joked about the idea of the US president-elect sexually assaulting May when he met her, saying, “don’t touch her for goodness sake”, before laughing. Asked about the likely behaviour of Trump, who has been accused of a series of sexual assaults, which he denies, Farage added: “If it comes to it, I could be there as the responsible adult role, to make sure everything’s OK.”
He also claimed to be “the catalyst” for the rise of Trump and referred to Barack Obama as a “creature” and a “loathsome individual”.
