There is something delicious about a man, who has spent decades telling us to fear others, complaining that people are discriminating against him.
Last time I checked, being an out-and-out ar**hole was not a protected characteristic. In fact, the British courts spend a large amount of their time telling people to stop being one.
And it’s even better coming from an ex-City boy in yellow trousers who’s so oppressed that he’s got his own TV show. Poor, cancelled Nigel Farage – it must be awful dealing with the daily prejudice that comes with being white, rich, and owning a dog whistle. I don’t know how he copes with the multi-million pound fortune he’s built from it.
Having been so persecuted that he was allowed to bank alongside the King, pay off a mortgage early, and offered a “glide path” to find somewhere else to put his big pile of money, it’s a wonder he’s managed to survive so long without the same freedoms as, say, a sexually-abused and traumatised refugee who can’t swim and struggles across the Channel in the clutches of violent criminals, only to be met by some git in yellow trousers telling them to get off his lawn. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to struggle on without freedom of movement, an economic union, global relevance, or a pot to piss in. Lucky old us.
Nigel likes to think of himself as King Brexit, solely responsible for the world-beating brilliant idea for which he is consistently maligned by the forces of, if we’ve got this right: London, people with double-barrelled names, James O’Brien, people who voted differently 7 years ago, people who voted the same way 7 years ago and now wish they hadn’t, and “the elite”.
How “the elite” differs from prep school boys who became City traders and then spent 20 years on the taxpayer’s teats in the European Parliament is anybody’s guess, but I suspect when Nigel says “the elite” it roughly translates as “everyone who disagrees with Nigel”.
And if Brexit is his baby, then we have him to thank for the fact our taxes just got spent on a multi-million pound bribe for a battery gigafactory which, if we were in the EU, we’d have got for free because we also have a car industry. Oh, and we’re now having to bribe the car industry to stay, and the steel industry.
It’s thanks to Nigel that we will queue longer at passport control all summer. It’s thanks to Nigel that we spent millions on immigration hulks that are not allowed to dock in our ports. It’s thanks to Nigel that Chris Grayling spent millions on non-existent ferries, and we had a two-year catastropremiership led by a walking laundry hamper with all the moral certainty of a cheap sausage.
Because this man has been so maltreated that he’s been allowed to do his thing unhindered for decades, our economy and inflation and growth are all worse than our former bedmates in the EU. It is to him that we owe the mortgage increases, the lack of NHS staff, the food rotting in the fields and the billions of pounds spent annually housing migrants who aren’t allowed to work, because that would be doing them a favour.
You can say the above about many Prime Ministers. You could have said it, throughout history, of a lot of kings, too. That Nigel has managed to do it without being either, and while being so abused by all the forces arrayed against him, should rightly draw him a round of applause, even if it is sarcastic and the BBC helped him every step of the way.
Poor, cowed, helpless Nigel sought succour in the only door that remained open to him: the charitable foundation for tramps, losers and golf club bores known as Coutts’ private bank, a 17th century institution that will only help those destitute enough to have a minimum of £1million in cash. Despite the fact it was run by double-barrelled, Remainer elites, Nigel leant them his millions.
The Royals bank there; tyrants have graced its marbled floors; Harry Potter stars stash their gold in its vaults, and maybe there’s a dragon hoard too. But as of a few weeks ago, Nigel does not. He was ‘de-banked’, ‘exited’, ‘rolled off’, in terms that emerged from a dossier of why they didn’t fancy keeping hold of his money. And Nigel is cross about that.
He liked banking with millionaires he professes to hate and despise. Now the best he’s been offered is an account with NatWest. NatWest! With the plebs!
He was, Coutts decided, not in tune with their policies. They said, quite accurately, that he was regarded as xenophobic, that he had been accused of race hate crimes, and said by ex-teachers to have sung Nazi marching songs while a schoolboy, back in the day when you couldn’t Google such things and needed to listen to the LP, first.
None of the above have been proven to a criminal standard, nor particularly denied. And Nigel’s not alone – there are plenty of people who agree with him, and are allowed to keep their direct debits in place by a banking system which is, let’s face it, not renowned for its cleanliness.
But any business is allowed to bar an objectionable customer. You can be ejected from the chippy, however polite you are to the staff, if they think you’re keeping others away. And so it has been with Nigel, who foolishly boasted of his links to Coutts, and thereby exposed it to exactly the reputational damage that meant he needed an annual risk review which, eventually, kicked him from the financial upper echelons of society to the same, dingy high street as the rest of us.
Coutts handled it badly, as you’d expect from those who don’t have to deal with normal people. They lied, even having read the internal reports about the risk of him going nuclear. They’ve given him more air-time, more grist for his hateful mill, and turned something which was the fault of his own arrogance into a man-of-the-people, it-could-be-you-next showboating opportunity. And he’s proved them right, hasn’t he – his values really don’t align with theirs.
If Coutts had merely said “Nigel is an arse, and we don’t want to do business with him”, they’d be entirely within their rights and all Nigel could do is harrumph. As it is, the Prime Minister is riding his coattails and we’re looking at a crazy new law stopping businesses ejecting unwelcome customers, which will backfire with drunks and despots alike.
This is an issue of tolerance. We have been tolerant of Nigel, despite and since all the above. The most elite bank in the land has tolerated him. And now for our pains there are people accusing us of not being tolerant enough for their liking: for not letting them be in the House of Lords, not letting them bank at Coutts, not letting them do whatever they want. They’re toddlers playing at grown-ups, and we have tolerated their crapola for far too long.
Outside the SW1 postcode, young people who can’t buy a home, students who can’t rent a flat, families who can’t survive on two jobs and pensioners who can’t live more cheaply in Spain get abused by their banks all the time, not for their views but for not being able to expound on the airwaves about the unfairness with which they are being dealt. They’re the ones who don’t have enough freedom of speech, not the guy in the tailor-made suit and tie who’s had his credit card cut up. Nigel’s had too much freedom of speech, and we can only hope this episode is nothing but a belch of indigestion as the digestive system of history turns him into just another turd.
