What are we talking about?
Nigel Farage. Yes, again. He’s been on TV to remind us how much he loves free money and incredibly problematic online videos.
Wait … what?
The man who failed to win a byelection in seven attempts (in part, some unkind critics have suggested, because he’s a reactionary saloon bar bore who looks like a slightly melted Freddo chocolate bar) popped up on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning politics discussion to talk about why he thinks Donald Trump is a decent guy and that retweeting Britain First’s racist lies is just fine.
So ... why are we talking about it?
Well, for a start retweeting Islamophobically fraudulent videos is one of the vanishingly small number of things that we can all agree is definitively not fine. Also, even more contentiously, during the conversation with Marr, “Nige” strayed on to the topic of his £73,000 per annum pension from the EU.
Those protest votes that made the notoriously Europhobic Farage an MEP will, assuming the pub lunch enthusiast lives to the average age of a UK male, cost in the region of £1.4m.
What are we talking about?
Jeremy Corbyn on the cover of GQ magazine.
Wait … what?
Yes. The notoriously baggy-suited Labour leader is the cover star of one of the UK’s dwindling number of men’s fashion magazines. His apparently digitally optimised visage currently glares at potential voters from newsstands across the UK.
So ... why are we talking about it?
Because the somewhat improbable cover shoot happened on the watch of GQ editor Dylan Jones. The same Dylan Jones OBE who, in the course of his 18-year tenure at the magazine gave David Cameron his first magazine cover and Boris Johnson his first gig reviewing luxury cars.
Jones later appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and, neglecting to mention his authorship of Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones, described the Labour leader as having been “pushed around like a grandpa for the family Christmas photograph”.
It later emerged that Jones hadn’t actually attended the shoot, which he witheringly described as “tortuous” and revealing of the veteran leftwinger’s “lack of hinterland”.
Whether you conclude that Jones should have declared his partisan interest before commenting, or whether Corbyn should have been savvy enough to see the hatchet job coming, depends entirely on the prejudices you turned up with in the first place.
What are we talking about?
The “special relationship”. No, not the heart-warming romance between the “fun royal” Prince Harry and former Suits actress Meghan Markle. We mean the long-standing, often one-sided and, arguably, imaginary bond between Britain and the US.
Wait … what?
Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland pointed out that the “special relationship” is very much a one-way love affair: “The Americans never use the phrase unprompted. When they do, it’s only out of an embarrassed obligation to accommodate British neediness.”
And it’s more endangered now than ever. President Trump’s sudden cosiness with fringe crypto-Nazis Britain First makes his pencilled state visit at best uncertain and at worst the cue for the biggest outbreak of public mooning since Spencer Tunick was in town.
In fact, our fraternal bond with the Americans is in such a parlous state that there may be only one fix. A Harry-Meghan baby with dual citizenship, eligible (in a sort of King Ralph way) for both the US presidency and British throne.
Imagine, a golden child that could undo the damage of 1776. Say what you like about the royals, but they know how to play a long game.
Listen to Caroline Lucas MP, Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Jamali Maddix discuss these issues, in altogether less flippant style, with We Need To Talk About… host Jolyon Rubinstein on Spotify now.
