Nige and Zia set out plan to send ‘Boriswave’ traitors to the gulag

The Reform UK press conference began a little behind schedule. Time in which Nigel Farage had gathered Zia Yusuf and a few others into a circle for a two-minute silence. A moment to reflect on the sad news from Hungary that Viktor Orbán’s 16 years as prime minister had come to a premature end. Orbán had had so much more to give the world. There would be no one left in the EU to block the €90bn loan to Ukraine. Will there be no one to think of Russia’s brave struggles against the west? It was a tragedy. The end of an era. Nige would now have to go it alone.

There’s a law of diminishing returns to these Reform press conferences. We now get two or three of them a week, each one promising to be of national importance. The reality is that they are no more than a chance for Farage to indulge his narcissism and get himself on camera once more. It’s the only time he feels truly alive. But the audiences are dwindling. They are no longer “must-screen” events for the main news channels. Reform’s idea of importance is the broadcasters’ idea of eminently missable. You can see the desperation in Nige’s eyes. He is in danger of becoming last year’s news.

This time, Farage wanted to talk about immigration. The Boriswave. It was 10 years since the Brexit referendum and the country had voted to leave by a huge margin, he said. The rest of us may remember that the country had been almost evenly split, 52% to 48%. But for Nige, it had all been downhill ever since. Brexit had been perfect in its conception only to be betrayed by Tory governments who had never believed in it. And the worst offender had been Boris Johnson, whom Farage had temporarily forgotten had led the Vote Leave campaign.

For reasons Nige didn’t quite understand, hundreds of thousands of EU citizens who had been working in the UK had left to be replaced with hundreds of thousands of people from outside the EU – in order to work in the UK. And many of them had wanted to bring their families. Selfish foreigners. Always thinking of themselves and their own needs. Ideally they should come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do and then fly home at the weekend. That had always been the true meaning of Brexit. Immigrants were now costing every household £20,000 per year and pensioners were out of pocket, subsidising foreigners.

Next up was Yusuf. He is the sidekick Nige lets out when he wants his audience to feel angry. Because no one does snippy better than Zia. He wakes up ready to pick a fight and gets steadily more furious throughout the day. It’s him against the world. Everything is a battle. One man fighting the injustice of having made enough money to do nothing but indulge his fantasy of being an important unelected politician.

Zia took to the stage, waving a copy of his latest pamphlet called “Stop the Boriswave”. On the front cover was a picture of a grinning Kemi Badenoch next to Boris, with thousands of what appeared to be Muslim men standing behind them. Some, seemingly, were more than 7ft tall.

What Yusuf really wanted was for there to be a national inquiry. One where Boris, Priti Patel and Kemi were all put in the dock and forced to tell the truth. A show trial. Though Boris has never told “nothing but the truth” in his life, so it felt a little unrealistic to start now. And once they had all been found guilty of betraying the British people on immigration, they would be thrown in jail. Or in the gulags.

Several reporters pointed out that Suella Braverman had been the home secretary and Robert Jenrick the immigration minister during the relevant years. And before they had both defected to Reform, no one had been more critical of them than Zia himself. Somehow, though it sticks in his throat, Yusuf had found it within himself to forgive them. Besides which, Suella and Honest Bob would be delighted to appear before a public inquiry. Not least because they have both already been found totally innocent by Reform’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

There were more questions about the alleged failure of Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, to pay the right amount of tax in the right way and at the right time. Now it was Farage’s turn to get snippy. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Sophisticated tax avoidance schemes were necessarily very complicated, he said. And never forget that Dicky is actually quite dim. His wealth has been inherited. That’s why he has a small fortune, because he started with a large one. The tax form had too many pages and Dicky had lost concentration. If anything, he had ended up paying too much. And what’s a minor mistake with HMRC between friends.

We ended with Nige claiming total amnesia. He appears to have forgotten that at the beginning of the war with Iran he was all in favour of the UK joining forces with the US. Nige would have ridden a nuke down on to the presidential palace in Tehran. Now, he tries to play the wise elder statesman, keeping the war at arm’s length. “I don’t know how this war ends,” he said. “There doesn’t appear to be an exit strategy.” Keir Starmer got to this point six weeks ago.

With that, the presser was wrapped up. Nige had bitcoin to buy from Kwasi Kwarteng, the greatest chancellor in British history. What could possibly go wrong? After all, what was the point of being in politics, if not to cash in?