So Nigel Farage chanted “Two world wars and one world cup” to his German wife, when England played her country at football. Not surprising perhaps. Also not surprising that soon after last night’s interview was recorded for Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV it emerged that Nigel and Kirsten were living separate lives.
Oi, and don’t you look so shocked about the singing, Piers – you, who once put the headline “Achtung! Surrender! For you Fritz ze Euro Championship is Over” as the headline on the front of your newspaper.
It was never going to be the easiest one to stomach – Morgan’n’Farage, in similar blue suits, chewing the fat, guffawing at each other, in front of a very sympathetic audience. Not many of the 48% in there, by the sound of it.
And it got less palatable still when Piers asked about a tryst Nigel had with a Latvian TV reporter. Were there, as was reported, ice cubes involved? Nooooo, don’t go there, no one needs to have that image.
He – Morgan, usually so self-effacing – had uncharacteristically been tweeting this one up for days. It was going to be a “huge, huge TV event” he said. And “I confidently predict 52% of viewers will declare my show ‘best TV ever’ & 48% ‘worst TV ever’.” Because we live in age of extremes and polarisation, where everything has to be right over here or right over there, and there’s nothing in between.
But actually it was somewhere in between. Quite good television, if you had the constitution for it. The timing was odd, the day after the failure of the current Ukip leader to win himself a seat, but recorded long before, so the old leader couldn’t talk about that. Or about whether Ukip has any relevance now that it’s achieved its goal. You’d think Morgan, being a news man, would have been concerned about its newsworthyness.
But then these aren’t political interviews. And, however odious you find both of them, you can’t deny Farage’s impact, and it’s hard to argue that Morgan isn’t a good interviewer. It wasn’t all an easy ride; he pressed Farage on the vilest controversies and the racism in the party, held him to account, riled him (I think these were the promised “fireworks”). He asked if he thought he was a good father and good husband, about his testicular cancer and what it was like to nearly die in a plane crash, as well as about Donald Trump and whether he could ever envisage himself in No 10. He asked him if he thought politics had made him an unlikely sex symbol … Stop it! About the sex. No one, none of the 52% even, want to see Nigel Farage and sex in the same sentence. Or him talking about sex with Piers Morgan.
And at the end of the hour, though I didn’t like him any more than before, I did feel like I knew Nigel Farage a little better. Which must have been the idea. Oh, and he doesn’t 100% rule out No 10. Brilliant…
