In 2014, when he was asked whether he still stood by Ukip’s notoriously daft 2010 general election manifesto—every bit as crude and cavalier as the Trump platform—Nigel Farage said he was prepared to ditch pretty much all of it. No more insisting on uniforms for taxi drivers; no more legislating to ban schools from showing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (really!) The world waits to see which promises President-Elect Trump will dump, but insofar as his friend Farage was concerned there turned out to be only two red lines: quitting the EU and bringing back grammar schools.
Now here we are in 2016 and one of the two core Ukip policies is on the verge of becoming reality and the other is official government policy. Yet at the same time, Ukip is more of a laughing stock than ever. The party is on its hunt for its third leader in as many months, having got rid of one chief after 19 days, seen another candidate laid out on the floor of the European parliament before he defected to the Tories, and briefly flirting with a third who happily modelled himself on Trump, only without the charm or the political experience. It all illustrates that timeless political adage: be careful what you wish for.