Alternative titles: Hooray Henry for the Red, White and Blue, Old Bory embraces Old Glory, Old Toadface heads West, The USA: last refuge for the scoundrel.

To avoid his eight succesive defeat in a Parliamentary election, Reform Party majority share proprietor, and backseat leader emeritus from half way across the water Nigel Farage, has announced that the US election is more important than the UK election; so that’s what he’ll be concentrating on; though “believe you me”, he will be shooting his mouth off throughout; secure in the knowledge that the press here will magnify whatever he has to say well beyond its significance.

As willfully discarded masks go, this is quite something. Brexit, for the fraction of the UK ruling class that pushed for it, was always about aligning the UK with US regulatory standards, but was always covered by a grandiose assertion of deluded nationalist vainglory that, shorn of EU regulation, the UK would once more bestride the world like a collosus. But Farage, in one careless swoop, has exposed the real power relations in this process. If Tony Blair was George Bush’s poodle, Nigel Farage is Donald Trump’s Shitzu.

Reform is a Party of the old. In this, it mirrors the Conservatives. In the Economist’s election tracker poll, Reform support by age group is like a shrunken, even more bitter and twisted, version of that of the Tories.

The contrast with Labour and the Greens is stark, because the young don’t dance to the same tunes, and don’t particularly want to be “toughened up” by being conscripted into the Army for a year, are excluded from whats left of the “property owning democracy” and, in fact, are finding it hard even to find a substandard place to rent, can’t afford to have children and are nervous of doing so because they can see the climate crisis deepening around them and have little truck with fools who deny that its happening.

Among the under thirties in fact, according to the most recent YouGov MRP poll, the Greens are the second Party, ahead of the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Reform.

The danger in this situation is that an incoming Labour government is so stolid and defensive that the sheer relief that they are not the Tories, anyone but the Tories, gives way to a similar reaction against them (bearing in mind that public trust in Starmer’s team is lower than that enjoyed by Ed Miliband in 2015 and their strong polling is based primarily on the Tories being loathed even more). In this context, “stability” is not “change”.

After the election, which Farage has left to jaw jutting, golf club Man of Destiny Richard Tice to lead Reform’s Kamikazi attack on whats left of the Conservative Party; the aim appears to be to gather up the burning wreckage of both into a Reformed Conservatism; with a politics straight off the Republican Right’s peg and infusions of US dark money turbocharging its Zombie rise from electoral oblivion.

In the event of a Trump victory, they will be his direct agents in UK politics. Attempts by David Lammy and others to ingratiate themselves by suggesting that Trump has been “misunderstood” will cut little ice in a scenario determined by a war drive and climate denial, bend over backwards as far as they like.