Amid the multiple resignations and comebacks of Nigel Farage, it’s worth remembering something. Eight years ago, he got a tumultuous welcome to a packed house by Trinity College’s Historical Society, and next morning to RTÉ’s Marian Finucane show, before stepping up to rapturous applause at Freedom to Prosper, the Irexit conference organised by his own Ukip-led grouping then in the European Parliament – all of it excitedly reported by national journalists. Not bad for a right-winger who moaned incessantly about being silenced by a mainstream-media conspiracy.

In a Breitbart News interview that week with the headline, “If Ireland wants to be an independent state, it can’t stay part of the EU,” the great philosopher gave his analysis of the unfathomably sappy will of the Irish people: “You can’t measure the word ‘freedom’, you can’t measure the word ‘independence’, you can’t measure the word ‘democracy’, but there is an extreme irony of centuries of struggle against the British to get rid of them and now suddenly they’re being run by Brussels!”

Farage had no shame, then or now. Back then he was an 18-year member of the European Parliament – ranking 748 out of 751 for attendance while drawing more than €100,000 in salary plus a €300-a-day living allowance, and being investigated for misuse of public funds.

He had “absolutely no hesitation” in backing a US gun-flashing, homophobic religious zealot or defending Donald Trump’s retweets of racist Britain First hate posts or lauding France’s Marine Le Pen or the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, a young far-right German party at the........

© The Irish Times