Twelve weeks to go before the election and we're dropping all pretense of following the news. Instead here's a vituperative hatchet job on Farage's attitude to the EU, including long quotes from the ghost of a fictional English soldier.

For Nigel the channel tunnel may be the devil's umbilical cord, exposing once-impregnable Blighty to foreign licentiousness, a chink in Albion's armour allowing Continental contagions such as spangled, cheekless lederhosen to mingle unashamedly with national treasures like Barlow and Coe. And while Nigel may have vowed to block up the Eurostar tunnel with pristine English dung, happily for him he barely takes the special underwater train, UKIP having the lowest attendance record of any party in the European Parliament, though attending sufficiently to claim the £2 million in wages and expenses he's received from the institution he so despises.

One of the those who’s followed Nigel’s exploits in Brussels is Tommy Gurnstain, a common soldier, a Private in the British Army, who died in the 1920s after surviving the Battle of the Somme. We interviewed him in Skipton Nando's:

'I've been following Nigel around, haunting him really, since 1999 when he became a Member of the European Parliament. First time I saw him I knew he was wrongun, he reminded me of the officer who sent me over the top at the Somme, a right lunatic you know, all chipper and worldly and successful, but with a psychopath's heart when it came down to it.

'I followed Nigel to Brussels a few times, followed him into the European Parliament, listened to the speeches he made about wanting the UK to leave the EU, about going it alone, about reclaiming national borders. All that tub-thumping mince that spews from him, those spasms of rhetorical righteousness he summons about subsidies and the European superstate. It's drivel, based on some rip-roaring war comics he read when he was eleven and never got over: the swarthy foreigner making off with the righteous prefect's muffins, nanny being glimpsed in her bloomers by the sinister German POW, the God-given right to self-determination of the English-speaking peoples. It's kid's stuff. What a dipshit.

'What does he think the EU is really for? I mean deep down, what it really does. Because I know. In seventy years there were three massive, hideous land wars in Europe, culminating in World War Two. And in the 64 years since the EU started in the form of the European Steel and Coal Community, there's been nothing remotely comparable. Why does Farage think that is? Why does he think that the very first step taken towards the EU was six countries sharing their coal and steel production? Because if they shared it then they couldn't build guns with it and fire them at each other. That's worth all the subsidies in the world in my book, because you know what would be really expensive? World War Three. That would cost a bit. A few pennies. A few lives. A bit of a clear up afterwards. 

'I'd rather have some portly, technocratic pedants debating boringly about a boring subject in a boring parliament in Brussels, than loose cannon Farage sabre-rattling about nation states like some cretinous imperial throwback, sending me and other non-millionaire stockbrokers like me over the top because of some immature feeling he's still got about the purity of England or whatever cobblers he's said to himself to explain it all, some kiddy dream he's nurtured about playing Winston on the beaches. Balls to him and his emotional tribalism, his cheap, hoodwinking parochialism, because if these European bureaucrats he hates so much keep talking to each other in Brussels, then that means that people like me are not being sent over the top by people like him.'

Thanks

Craig