Andrea Rizzi, a journalist with Spain’s El Pais newspaper, put it best. The global right wing, he wrote as footage of thousands of migrants arriving in Ceuta from Morocco was being beamed around the world, are “hyperventilating with happiness”.

By the time Nigel Farage stood up on Monday to prove Rizzi’s point in characteristically unedifying fashion, the massive majority of the 60,000 people estimated to have made the crossing had been returned, most of their own accord after discovering that the online promises of what they would find on arrival had been blatant lies.

Farage, displaying a suntan so deep that his Reform UK colleague Sarah Pochin must be close to complaining about him appearing on her television, would have known this. But the facts don’t fit the sort of feelings he has always been so desperate to foment.

“What happened in Ceuta over the weekend shows you just how serious this situation is,” he claimed, while studiously ignoring what had happened in Ceuta over the weekend. It was an expansion on his even wilder claims from Friday that “Unless we get a Reform government, those scenes you are seeing in Spain today – many of those young men, lots of them dangerous, will be heading towards Calais and coming to our country.”

No matter that Ceuta, a Spanish city, is literally in North Africa, or that onward travel from there to........

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