In January this year Dominic Cummings – once of this parish – warned The Spectator’s editor and assistant editor that Whitehall and the establishment parties would ‘stop at nothing’ to prevent Nigel Farage from becoming prime minister. As Cummings told the Quite right! podcast and as we summarise on p13: ‘The people around [Keir] Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Donald Trump. They’re looking across Europe, and they’re saying to themselves: “The lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in… Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage, and make sure that he doesn’t win, by fair means or foul.”’

Cummings may be right about that, but the two most obvious comparisons with the recent hosing of Farage demonstrate how this manoeuvre can just as easily backfire.

Farage is, like Trump, too different from other politicians to be brought down by the usual rules

Farage is, like Trump, too different from other politicians to be brought down by the usual rules

The ‘anti-Trump playbook’ – as Trump himself has referred to the treatment of Farage – quite obviously did not work with Trump. Nevertheless, there was a period in around 2023 when it looked as if it could do so. Mar-a-Lago had already been raided by the FBI, looking for classified documents that it turned out almost every former official had lying around. And it was the year in which Trump was dragged to court in New York to face 34 felony counts relating to alleged........

© The Spectator