Twenty minutes before Nigel Farage was saying he hadn’t done anything wrong, he must have felt, really, like there was little wrong he could ever do. The whole crowd was up. Farage had just signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with Marine Le Pen’s ally Jordan Bardella to stop the boats. The two parties would ‘end the invasion of Britain and France together 🤝’, so the tweet went. A lone roar came from somewhere near the front of the Reform conference hall, and then the whole hall made a noise more like a last-minute winner than a bilateral agreement. ‘It’s quite heavy!’, Farage said as Bardella held up the placard. For a few seconds, this morning didn’t matter. Nigel Farage was having a good time.

And then........

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