Opinion

Claire Simpson: America is welcome to Nigel Farage and his particular views

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage admitted to chanting English football songs about the Second World War at his now estranged German wife
Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage admitted to chanting English football songs about the Second World War at his now estranged German wife Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage admitted to chanting English football songs about the Second World War at his now estranged German wife

It’s a bad sign when politicians are forced to discuss “mood music”. As talks aimed at restoring power-sharing trundled on last week with all the urgency of a sloth in a post office queue, it fell to the Republic’s foreign affairs minister Simon Coveney to make vaguely hopeful pronouncements.

The Fine Gael minister claimed that Sinn Féin and the DUP were “genuinely trying to make progress on some difficult issues for both parties”. Stormont could be up and running again “within weeks”, he said, sounding like he was desperately searching for a silver lining.

Even the DUP machine seemed to be in need of a recharge. The best former finance minister Simon Hamilton could do was welcome Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’s “change of tone” over the talks, then make a half-hearted reference to the ongoing row over an Irish language act. "We will not accept cultural supremacy for one section of our community," he added, like a Dalek who was growing increasing bored of saying “exterminate”.

With hopes of a deal looking ever more remote, only the murky waters of foreign politics could provide some light relief. I say light relief but it did involve the unlikely figure of ex-UKIP leader and beer aficionado Nigel Farage. Not content with scaring the Tories so much that they made the disastrous mistake of holding last year’s EU referendum, self-proclaimed ‘Brexit hero’ Farage has kindly taken his very particular set of skills to the US.

The 53-year-old father-of-four could be called a political opportunist, if you’re being charitable. Last week the man who comedian Russell Brand called the “pound shop Enoch Powell” appeared at a campaign rally in Alabama for Roy Moore, a Republican who even US president Donald Trump didn’t even want as his senate candidate. It was an odd spectacle. You had Farage, a self-confessed “lapsed” Anglican, proudly supporting an arch-conservative who has likened homosexuality to bestiality, rejected evolution, and claimed Islam is a threat to US laws.

I’m not sure how well Moore’s decision to brandish a gun at a campaign rally fits with UKIP’s political agenda but for Farage that agenda has always been somewhat fluid. In a speech purportedly in support of Moore but really about himself, Farage, who tried and failed to get elected to Westminster seven times, railed against “career politicians dominated by what is in their own interests”.

"I have absolutely no hesitation in putting my support and my backing behind a man like judge Roy Moore, who has shown in his career that he will always put principle before his own career advancement,” Farage claimed. If only he could confidently say the same about himself.

Not content with backing one extremist in the US, Farage also endorsed France’s National Front president Marine Le Pen and gave his special seal of approval to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who described Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame” and suggested German border guards should be allowed to fire at illegal immigrants.

Quite why Farage, who admitted to chanting English football songs about the Second World War at his now estranged German wife, felt he could support the German far-right is beyond me. Yet when it comes to extremists in his own party he isn’t quite so forgiving.

Farage has set himself against UKIP’s Anne Marie Waters, confusingly a Dublin woman who describes herself as “passionately, loyally, resolutely and proudly British", for her anti-Islam views. After leaving Labour in 2013 over fears the party was moving too far to the left, Waters launched anti-Islam organisation, Pegida UK, with former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson last year. But her rise through UKIP was too much for Farage, who claimed: “If UKIP goes down the route of being a party that is anti the religion of Islam, then frankly it’s finished… The party would be finished”.

Of course in Farage’s world endorsing a US Republican candidate who is anti the religion of Islam is fine. The UKIP MEP seems to see no contradiction in becoming a kind of roving rent-a-quote for far-right or extremist groups abroad, while criticising them at home. No wonder Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby once accused Farage of “inexcusable pandering to people’s worries and prejudices”. For someone who positions himself as a salt-of-the-earth, plain-speaking, man-of-the-people, Farage doesn’t half speak with a forked tongue. Forget about light relief, the best he can do is fully embrace his new-found celebrity in the US and stay there.