The greatest challenge Farage has ever faced – convincing the world he was never besties with Donald Trump | Marina Hyde

AFinally, the culture itself has caused a split more nauseating than that of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. This is Nigel Farage’s attempt to consciously dissociate himself from Donald Trump, a man to whose butt he has spent the last decade most firmly entrenched. Nigel has made such a massive and self-satisfied display of his presidential large intestine real estate for 10 years now that I don’t think non-surgical extraction is possible at this point. He can’t just walk away whistling. The only way out is a complete faragectomy. I’ll give the president a piece of drone fuselage to bite off.

Either way: conscious uncoupling. Back in the day, you’ll recall, Gwyneth and the Coldplay singer used this particular phrase when announcing their marital breakup. Did the audience love it? They didn’t do it. The general mood – as with much of Her Vajesty’s output – was that she would make even a failed marriage more smug and impractical than mere plebs ever could. The shift from gushing about her perfect marriage to gushing about her perfect divorce seemed like just a few days.

There is much of this absurdly compressed timeline in Farage’s attempt to distance himself from Trump, as Operation Epic Facepalm quickly unfolds. He is of course not alone. As we discussed here at the time, a whole section of the British political class and experts welcomed Keir Starmer’s failure to jump with both feet into the Israeli and American operation in Iran as a truly calamitous error. Yet these days you can’t move for the spectacle of early cheerleaders snooping around in reverse. “I don’t like seeing our prime minister being berated by foreign leaders,” Robert Jenrick of Reform UK, who just over two weeks ago loved to see it, said on Wednesday. Starmer, Jenrick explained as early as the first week of March 2026, was handling the Iran crisis “about as poorly as possible”.

Most of these defectors now seem to be giving Josey Wales a thousand-yard stare and hoping everyone forgets how any of us lived before the damn war, let alone what any of us said. The problem is, it was ONLY THREE WEEKS AGO. I’ve had health care kicks that have lasted longer than their foreign policy positions. In about a month, when we’re down to trading screenshots for fuel, I’ll have enough social media receipts to open a gas station.

But let’s focus on Farage, both because he’s constantly being treated as Britain’s future prime minister, and because no one in British politics has caved in as long and as hard to Donald Trump as Nigel. He was still there two weeks ago. At the end of the first week of war, Farage announced that he was flying out to dinner at Mar-a-Lago and would make various foreign policy points to Trump, who we were led to believe would be at Nigel’s disposal in the common areas of his Palm Beach home. (I’ll never really get over the fact that the US president voluntarily lives in a golf club.) Hilariously, Trump decided not to go to Mar-a-Lago that evening, preferring to hole up at one of his alternative resorts in Florida.

So how did Farage play the embarrassment? Fascinatingly, if ridiculously, he seems to have decided to use this moment as a pivot point. Close collaborators of the reformist leader immediately informed the Financial Times that “relations between the two populist politicians had cooled since 2024”. And look, I always fly to Florida with the opportunity to have dinner with someone with whom my relationship has cooled. In fact, from the perspective of the transatlantic visit, Farage’s trip to Mar-a-Lago was accompanied by the most false excuse since Mister Andrew flew to New York to “break up” his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Today, Farage seems to have understood, very, very belatedly, what the polls have been indicating for a long time: that most Britons really don’t like Donald Trump. And that was before he ruined their energy, food and mortgage bills and threatened to start World War III. Yet we are now being asked to forget that Farage really, really loved Donald Trump. In fact, he hero-worshipped him. What a hostage he has made of a very predictable fortune.

But Farage is, and always will be, absolutely ignorant of all this. Only a month ago, he made a big play by naming his “shadow cabinet”. Incredibly, this shadow cabinet didn’t even bother to have anyone on defense or foreign affairs. I guess that kind of thing never happens, or something. Even more unbelievably, now that this has become a big deal, Farage still hasn’t bothered to announce any “shadow” Defense or Foreign Secretaries. Come on man – Lee Anderson is right there. Actually, wait, Lee is only partly there, spending some of his time in the parliamentary office filming Cameo videos.

The reality is that this group is totally lucky and you can smell it unless you recklessly hold your nose and play with them. In fact, Nigel would make a perfect Strait of Hormuz guy, my social type of 2026. Who is the Strait of Hormuz guy? Be honest, we all know one. This is the guy who couldn’t find it on a map a month ago, who has since broadcast 12 hours of political podcasts, and who can now be seen honking: “I don’t think anyone understands what’s going to happen if oil hits 190 a barrel!” Make sure you don’t get stuck with him at a party this weekend.

But also, and this is probably most important, make sure you don’t find yourself with him as Prime Minister in three years.