Nigel Farage has had a long night of the where-the-soul-should-be. In seclusion from the media for the past 48 hours, the Brexit party leader has been contemplating the best way to wimp out like a boss from his promise to field 600 candidates in the forthcoming election.

Those weren’t the exact words Farage used in Hartlepool to describe the move, which will see his party contest none of the 317 seats the Conservatives won in 2017, and target only Labour instead. “After 25 years of battling, it’s not been easy,” Nigel explained solemnly to a crowd of his supporters he’d charged £2.50 each to attend. He’d “genuinely tried for months” to put together a leave alliance between his party, Tory leavers and pro-Brexit Labour MPs, he lamented – but it could not be done.

Farage is the homeopathic politician: he has a memory of an idea but no trace | John Crace Read more

“So in a sense,” he concluded, gearing up for a vintage Farage reverse ferret, “we now HAVE a leave alliance. It’s just that we’ve done it unilaterally.” Funny sort of alliance. Maybe spend some of the £2.50s on a dictionary.

As for what had prompted this change of heart, was it a high-level personal meeting with Boris Johnson? Written undertakings? Formal assurances? None of these, actually. “Last night I saw Boris Johnson on a video,” conceded Farage, “saying we won’t extend the transition period beyond the end of 2020.” Aha. The ultimate guarantee – a Boris Johnson tweet.

If this was supposed to be a rally, you’d have to call it Triumph of the Willy. Here was a guy who’d spent 10 days bullishly making Johnson an offer he couldn’t refuse. And yet, it seems the PM does not negotiate with Faragists. The Brexit party leader is one of those hapless movie villains who tells a millionaire he’s kidnapped his wife, and the millionaire goes: “Great, you can keep her.”

You knew Nigel was deeply subdued because he completely forgot to mention Armistice Day, a date out of which he’d normally have wrung at least two minutes of material, despite having once appeared to a standing ovation at a rally for a German far-right party. The Hartlepool Grand hotel ballroom contained the sort of audience which regards standard paper poppies as tantamount to war grave urination. The minimum standard of poppy here was large enamel, rising through XXL enamel, to luxury jewelled, all the way up to six-inch crocheted.

The Brexit party will still be contesting Hartlepool, fielding its party chairman, Richard Tice – a sort of radicalised knitting pattern model, who’d be as at home showing off the shawl collar of an Aran cardigan as he would be finding out in real time what WTO laws actually mean. The best thing I heard about Tice was that, another lifetime ago, he shared a flat in Paris with the supermodel Kate Moss. He didn’t mention that here. Mind you, Mossy probably doesn’t lead with it when she’s nailing down a Dior campaign. “No comment,” was the Tice verdict on this worlds-colliding tidbit; while Moss’s agency also opted not to discuss the matter when I inquired. So we may never know on the record whether Richard Tice is a man who shared a flat with Kate Moss, or simply the sort of man who tells friends he once shared a flat with Kate Moss.

Either way, it’s notable that a constituency formerly represented by a figure with the intellect of Peter Mandelson is now contemplating being represented by a figure with the intellect of property developer Richard Tice. This feels like an indictment of various forms of politics, including those shaped by Mr Mandelson. Who may himself be a property developer now; one can’t keep track of the many business interests of his lordship.

Ditto those of the erstwhile MP in the neighbouring constituency of Sedgefield, a certain Tony Blair. Sedgefield is now being targeted by the Brexit party’s David Bull, a former telly doctor. Dr David used to present Most Haunted Live! – one of the rare noughties atrocities in which Mr Blair wasn’t actually involved.

As for Farage’s U-turn here, perhaps the writing was on the wall. Or rather in the Mail on Sunday, where his former backer Arron Banks hinted that a certain froideur had developed between various Bad Boys of Brexit. “If Brexit is lost because the vote is split,” Banks warned, “Nigel will have destroyed what he has spent years working to achieve.” An objectively hilarious outcome – but a shame, of course, to see these two reduced to communicating via the pages of newspapers, like Prince William and Prince Harry. It’s not what Diana would have wanted. Neither the William and Harry froideur nor the Arron and Nigel froideur. Incidentally – it wasn’t so long ago that that the princess’s former spiritual adviser revealed Diana had been in touch to say she’d have voted Brexit. Quite where she’d have stood on Nigel’s humiliating climbdown is unclear – but if the Brexit party needs a boost with Express readers, perhaps we’ll find out soon enough.