Oh lord, here I am, sticking up for Rishi Sunak, a politician I despise, because the odious and manipulative Nigel Farage is using the PM’s D-Day debacle to enrage and excite his rage-filled base.

On Friday, he added his voice to the swelling chorus of condemnation of Sunak’s decision to leave Normandy early. Fair enough, you might think, just electoral opportunism. But then the Reform leader injected virulence into the righteous anger. It’s what he does. He averred that Sunak’s departure from the D-day commemorations showed “he doesn’t understand our culture”, and therefore, by implication, can’t be an authentic patriot.

His comments took me back to a BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview way back in September 2000, when Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher’s snarling patriotic bulldogs, suggested to me on air that having a British passport didn’t make me a true Brit.

Farage is a master of dog-whistle messaging, defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an expression or statement that has a secondary meaning intended to be understood only by a particular group of people”. It’s all about intimations and implications. Farage’s growing fanbase........

© iNews