A few weekends ago, if one had the misfortune of timing it so, it was possible to be reading a front-page story on how Nigel Farage feared for his life while listening to him on his two-hour weekly LBC radio show as he spoke about how he feared for his life, and watching a TV news bulletin reporting on how Nigel Farage feared for his life.

It is sinister how ever-present Farage has become in the public domain. His constant appearances are uncorrelated to incident or relevance. Impervious to plane crashes, seven failed attempts at election to parliament, and even his own resignations, Farage bellows from every medium about how Britain is intolerant of his views and how he receives so little airtime compared with mainstream politicians who are constantly muzzling him and muscling him off his podium.

And then there are his appearances on Question Time. Over the past decade, Farage has appeared on the show 31 times, placing him just out of its top 10 most frequent guests. His most recent appearance only last week was a testament to how Farage is now television’s default resident troll. The EU referendum is concluded, his party has elected a new leader, and his MEP role, never one he took that seriously in the first place, is now reduced to trolling Brussels with British flag gimmicks, metaphorically sticking two fingers up to the parliament, and securing about £85,000 a year for the privilege.

In his grand capacity as ex-Ukip leader and current MEP, Farage appeared on Question Time under a new guise, Trumpsplainer to the British. Just when we thought Farage had reached the end of the line, Donald Trump gets elected and Nigel, as the panel of relevance swings shut, wedges his foot behind the door and forces it wide open, basking in the golden light of the Trump Tower lift. Opportunism abhors a vacuum and Farage will fill it. And the media will not only indulge him, they will confect and contort to position him in the spotlight. From the BBC to LBC, the future is Farage for ever, irrespective of his achievements or tangible relation to events.

Farage’s inevitability is now as wearying as the excuses by those who give him a platform. His views need to be challenged; we need “balance”; he represents six million people who voted with legitimate concerns about immigration. And there’s also freedom of speech, as if Farage were some political dissident who dare not speak out for fear of imprisonment and torture. These justifications are now wearing thin under the footsteps of Farage stomping in and out of interviews. I am hoping that, one day, someone will give up the pretence, simply sigh and admit: “He’s just really good value.”

And that he is. He has utility. He is accused of being racist without being an ethnic-cleansing eugenicist; he is belligerent and provocative without being particularly bad-tempered. He is a bigot whose edges are softened by his buffoonery and golf-club-bore bluster. If life were a comic, Farage would be the enthusiastic but inept right-hand man to the actual villain, never the main man. The mainstream’s tolerance of him is because his prejudice is leavened with an air of incompetence and lack of polish.

Remember when Nick Griffin made his debut on Question Time? (And also, nostalgically, how scandalised we all were at the time, before fascism was a street style.) It didn’t quite work. He was too grotesque, too untelegenic, his views so unpalatable that he was banished, never to be seen again. He failed the dinner-party test.

These people are not “controversial”; they are not “enlivening the debate”. They are people who have made extreme views mainstream, views that have contributed to the toxicity of public discourse. The false equivalence of the Farages of this world has inflicted a mortal wound on the concept of a public debate. They are the progenitors of Milo Yiannopoulos and Tomi Lahren. The point is now not to further public understanding of an issue by contrasting two different opinions that are still in the same dimension, but to inspire hate-watching, listening and reading.

Since Brexit and the election of Trump, journalists have been trying to trace the origin of fake news, trying to figure out how we got here. But it is not the Breitbarts or Facebook feeds of the world that got us here. It is the respectable channels that have provided a platform and dictated the terms, all the while polishing a gloss of respectability over the lies, cants and manipulations of Farage and his ilk.

Next time you see him on TV or hear him on the radio, don’t roll your eyes and switch the channel. Understand that, in the UK, Farage is the godfather of falsity and bigotry – and that the media appointed him.