If nothing else, journalism provides a means of having Brief Encounters with Hideous Men. As a reporter, I came close enough to throw a milkshake at not only Nigel Farage, but also Ian Watkins, though not at the same time of course. In fact, before this week I’d have struggled to have found a way to incorporate these two individuals in the same spoken sentence, though each is infamous in his own way I suppose, one for his stage presence and a narcissistic self-regard matched only by the arrogant assumption that he can get away with whatever he so pleases, the other—well, you have probably already guessed where I was going with that.
It’s funny the places life takes you. As I’ve written about before, I went from being a “teenage mosher” to a twenty-something court reporter watching Watkins, the then-alive pedophile ex-frontman of Welsh nu-metal act Lostprophets, being jailed for child sex offenses. These were two very different identities for me to inhabit, yet in my memories there are clear tracks running between them. There I am as a teen, bunking off school to protest the Iraq war outside the library of my sleepy hometown; there I am some years later, dressed as a giant chicken to confront Farage about his refusal to participate in a local by-election. I’ve found this world finds a way of pulling you back into its orbit, and this week I was yanked back to earth once more, this time by Farage’s accidental “video tribute” to Watkins, who died in prison last year—a near-perfect Venn diagram of my journalism war stories that frankly has me questioning whether these morning microdose capsules are stronger than initially advertised.
After you’ve watched enough videos of obese women throwing giant boulders through glass bridges and Martin Luther King Jr. celebrating becoming champion of the WWE, your first instinct is to question whether this Farage thing is real. In a “Is this actually just AI?” sense, it seems to be legit, unless a number of major newspapers have been fooled (it wouldn’t be the first time); I mean Kunt and the Gang has shared it on their Facebook page, which is good enough for me.
Farage appears to have filmed the clip for Cameo (who sell “personalized videos feat. your favorite stars” to those seeking to add a sprinkle of stardust to friends and family birthday parties), providing yet more evidence, if any was needed, that nothing worthwhile has ever been recorded through front-facing phone camera. By churning out these videos for around £98-a-pop, Farage brings in the kind of income that sustains entire families. His steadfast commitment to this fairly embarrassing side hustle, which he balances alongside more lucrative speaking engagements, strikes me as a fairly good argument for lowering the cost of cigarettes.
Keen UK politics endurers might remember that this kind of thing has happened before. A few years ago, Farage filmed a birthday message scripted for him by a mischievous customer, with the immortal sign off: “I hope you enjoy a few pints with the lads tonight. Up the ’Ra!” If anything, that error was far more egregious. While it’s hard to imagine Farage moshing around his living room to nu-metal back in its early 2000s heyday, surely you’d expect him to be more up-to-speed on the heated tribal intricacies of 20th century Anglo-Irish relations.
“Nothing worthwhile has ever been recorded through a front-facing phone camera”
That said, it would be surprising to me if this man of the people was so detached from the everyday Volk that he’s not seen Watkins’ mugshot staring back at him from a newspaper page at some point. His awful crimes have been pushing him into the public eye for well over a decade, and surely Farage is the political leader most likely to bring back actual capital punishment for criminals like Watkins (as opposed to, say, a de facto death penalty which might be administered by convicted criminals in unlocked jail cells). Perhaps working on Cameo videos for up to 28 hours a month means Farage is dealing with such a vast quantity of requests that any semblance of reason simply dissolves as he enters the kind of trance state that would see him pledge allegiance to the Communist Party of Britain if it were written on a scrap of paper in front of him. This is the man, after all, who once sleep-walked into reading the line, “We all promise to hawk tuah on your bussy as it claps.”
“We all promise to hawk tuah on your bussy as it claps”
Maybe there’s an element of double bluff going on. Maybe there’s a world in which recording a video about Watkins, who was very much what Farage’s sometime-friend Elon Musk would describe as a “pedo guy,” provides the Reform UK leader with a little more of the noise and outrage that fuels his political career—while also distracting from the ongoing parliamentary row over Grok deepfakes (with Farage maintaining that a ban on X would infringe on free speech). It would be irresponsible to speculate on this, so I will refrain from doing so.
The darkest moment of the video arrives toward the end, when Farage says that Watkins “loved his children and will be sorely missed by them forever.” It’s also the part that makes me question the intentions of the piss-taker who ordered the clip; perhaps this is not so much about making a political statement as it is an expression of the abiding ambient presence of a Sickipedia-level relationship with reality in British society, where it becomes more comfortable to make bad-taste jokes than to consider the suffering of Watkins’ very real victims.
Taken together, the list of pranks that Farage has been the butt of feels like one long experiment designed to prove that there’s no blunder so ghastly that it puts off his fanbase. For many, the Reform leader will continue to show up just great when set against the web-moderator vibes emitted by Keir Starmer. Every day, I try to remind myself that politics functions differently from the forums I haunted as a teenage emo fan; they were far more civilized, in real life, it’s not possible to just boot the trolls when they start flaming the message board.
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