Nigel Farage didn’t know. He wasn’t told.

Sure, he was right there at the table when the undercover reporter he believed to be a rich American’s son spelled out very clearly how he hoped to channel his father’s money to Reform, in ways that certainly don’t sound too lawful.

But he wasn’t listening, you understand. God forbid that the man who insists his party takes compliance very seriously, and who never stops warning that the establishment is out to get him by any means possible, should actually pay attention to the details of a donation offered bang in the middle of a byelection that was fought over – of all the luck, eh? – some other questionable donations.

Farage’s defence is essentially that he was present but not involved, as Jeremy Corbyn once famously said of attending an event where someone laid a commemorative wreath for members of the terrorist group behind the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity.

It didn’t work for Corbyn, any more than claiming to have tried cannabis but never inhaling worked an age ago for Bill Clinton, in part because some people just didn’t believe it. But mostly, perhaps, because critics found it revealing even that Corbyn would be at the kind of gathering where such things might happen. Most aspirant prime ministers take good care to avoid moving in circles where someone might end up venerating terrorists, or explaining exactly how they intend to get around the law. For good reason, it turns out.

What we are being asked to accept, in the instance caught on camera, is that at best Farage has been astonishingly sloppy; that he just turned up, tuned out, thanked the guy without even really knowing what for, and then went happily on his way. Take Farage at his own word and he is describing someone curiously semi-detached. Someone........

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